§ Chris Butcher visits Japan 2009: Tezuka World Installation, Kyoto JR Station and sees many many wondrous things that make is drool.

§ In a Cup o’ Joe installment, Mark Waid recounts a classic tale of a store signing that….wasn’t what it seemed:

Several years ago, I had done an over-the-phone college radio interview with a couple of guys in Vermont. Chat went fine, I remembered to mention what a genius Alex Ross is the requisite nine times, and we probably moved some trade paperbacks in the process. So once the interview was done, one of them explained that they ran a store in one of Vermont’s largish towns and asked if I’d be interested in doing an in-person signing. “Sure,” I said. At the time, I was living in Brooklyn, so it would be a short flight, and I’d never been to Vermont before. Fly up late on a Saturday morning, home on Sunday morning, see the sights, meet some fans. “Great,” I said. Set me up.”

That is not what happened.

§ Tucker Stone interviews Dirk Deppey, something you don’t see enough of.

Deppey: …On the one hand, I love writing and can’t seem to keep from knocking out long essays when a short note would often do just as well. (Maybe you’ve noticed.) On the other hand, there’s always the danger of turning into a Keith Olbermann-style blowhard – or worse, a Dave Sim-style crank – if you feel obliged to keep churning out 14,000-word essays three or four times a week. This became clear to me through the course of that Mary Jane Statue fiasco a while back; the more I wrote, the more I found myself circling around to points that I’d already made. Now, in a certain sense this is inevitable in blogging. Since almost everything I write is a mildly edited first draft, I find myself narrowing in on cogent points over the course of several days, refining my arguments as I read responses and get the chance to think more about a given subject. Still, it’s a gateway to intellectual stratification as well, since the further you go in defending a point, the more you feel in your bones that You Are Inarguably Correct in whatever it is you’re talking about. The longer I do this, the less I trust in such positions.

§ In this Czech link from the Prague Writers’ Festival, you will find video of Robert Crumb, Aline Kominsky Crumb and Gilbert Shelton attending said festival.

§ Rick Veitch reveals the Secret Origin Of The Sentry Part 1

Paul and I were old buds, having met while he was at Mirage Studios. We worked closely together on BRAT PACK and THE MAXIMORTAL at Tundra. Paul was focused mostly on production and editing back in those days but clearly had potential as a writer. He and I had often discussed a story he wanted to develop concerning an over-the-hill guy, struggling with addiction, who had a tight relationship with his dog. Paul was trying to come up with a way to show the character’s addiction problem as a manifestation of the unconscious. At one point, if I remember correctly, Paul pitched a horror version of this plot to Steve Bissette for TABOO, although nothing came of it.

§ What is Dylan Horrocks reading this summer, anyway?

§ Jim Salicrup recalls Michael Jackson’s discussion to purchase Marvel, including much else of those heady days. [Via Comics Alliance]

§ Rich Johnston has a useful essay on How To Be A Celebrity At The San Diego Comic Con

How do I get the Comic Con clique to love me? This is the easiest thing of all. Go to the small press comic publisher booths. Walk along and buy something from every table you see. Might cost you $200 to $300 in total. The publishers and creators will twitter this instantly. Go to a panel for your movie, get there early, put your feet up and start reading from a stack of thse comics next to you. The word will spread. And you’ll be a Con God. could be worth an extra fifty grand on your next contract. And if you really really don’t like comics, there are recycle bins around the centre.

§ Cinematical chats with writer Justin Gray:

More people than ever dream about writing for Marvel and DC. What is it REALLY like to be a successful comic book writer? And what does it take?

JG: It is humbling, not everyone gets to make money doing what they love, which in my case is writing comics, film, TV, short stories and so on. I’ve been lucky, I have a great friend and writing partner who believed in me after I left the industry in ‘98 and fought to have me work with him when people just wanted his name on their products. I’ve had varying degrees of success over the last eight years, but it has all been an invaluable learning experience that has helped me grow creatively. As far as what it takes to get into and survive in the industry I can only speak for myself. Joe and Jimmy opened a door after I spent a number of years being relentless and dedicated to proving it wasn’t impossible for a writer to break in. After that I feel I’ve had to continue to prove myself on every project. Sometimes the industry can be frustrating, but this frustration is much sweeter than many others I’ve faced. At the end of the day I know I keep pushing myself to do what I love.

§ Chris Butcher and his macro lens are having a great time in Japan!

§ Chris Mautner looks back at the majesty of David Mazzucchelli’s RUBBER BLANKET (above) and wonders why it hasn’t been collected. YEAH, David? WHY HASN’T IT?

§ Newbies ahoy: here’s A guide to comic books throughout the decades by Brendan Kachel, Wichita Comic Books Examiner, right from the Yellow Kid to The Dark Age.

§ Steven Spielberg and Will Smith are still planning a US version of OLDBOY. Crazy! But the Japanese publisher, Futabasha, is pulling out all the stops to prevent this. CRAZIER.

§ Frank Santoro digs deeper into the history of comics coloring with an investigation of Pacific Comics and the grayline coloring system. BTW, if you’ve read comics prior to the advent of cheap scanners, they have some pretty strange and sometimes amazing coloring. This piece will give you some idea of the tortuous and inaccurate processes that were used, and it’s pretty wild.

§ Robot 6 suggests Six comic book action figures that need to be made right now, and we can’t disagree with any of the choices, even if finding space for them would be a pain.

§ We may have to buy this.

§ Did you know that the well-respected DC/Vertigo editor Joan Hilty is also a syndicated cartoonist?

You lived in San Francisco in the ‘90s and became involved with a lot of publications including “Gay Comix” and “Wimmin’s Comix.” Who were the people who played a major role in your life, both in terms of growing as an artist and working as an editor, but also in more practical terms of living as a cartoonist?

Well, I definitely wasn’t making a living off it. Right after graduation I shopped “Jitterbug Waltz,” a campus paper strip I’d been doing, around to syndicates, and I got some very kind, individualized attention from editors and cartoonists — Jay Kennedy, Lee Salem, Kathryn LeMieux, Cathy Guisewite — but there was no question I wasn’t ready yet. And I started drifting sideways into indie comics, because I was drawn to telling longer stories, and I’d gotten involved with various political and social groups.

§ Craig Fischer looks at the legendary Ditko Hands!

Just a few while we get our wits together.

§ Frank Santoro continues his explorations into little known eddies of comics history with an interview with comics color pioneer Steve Oliff.

§ Matt Madden took his students to MoCCA for a guided tour of the David Mazzucchelli exhibit with the man himself.

§ Kristy Valenti explains why San Diego is like high school:

What table you sit at actually matters.

Professionally, obviously, it marks you — your clique, your place in the food chain, etc. If someone knows nothing about you, they will judge you by where you sit in the Exhibit Hall before they judge your work. What table you sit at matters socially, too. Not only can it help or hinder how enjoyable whatever you’re doing is, it can honestly affect your career, whether you’re pestering a group of professionals who are just trying to eat dinner or make a little extra room for someone who later on offers you a business opportunity.

§ Speaking of Comixology, Tucker Stone has another video review up and…let’s just say he’s at it again.

§ Are cons really a hotbed (hee hee) of hookups? David Pepose replies to the Penthouse article, and Laura Hudson does a fact-check: Comic-Con Hookups: True or False?

§ Johanna’s crew discusses Should Press Get in Free to Conventions? after Otakon asks some press to pay for badges. Frankly, we can totally see why cons would want to limit the number of free badges given to fledgling bloggers.

§ Meanwhile, Neil Gaiman faces danger from a bear in the woods.

§ Do Anything, the new Warren Ellis column for Bleeding Cool, connects some dots:

Jack Kirby didn’t get to be an intellectual. That’s a label others stick on you. When Jack told Will Eisner, as recorded in Eisner’s book SHOP TALK, of the time in his career when he “began to intellectualise,” you can almost literally hear Eisner’s condescension come off the page. Art Spiegelman, struggling to say anything of import about Kirby in a conversation with Gary Groth, calls his work “dimwitted.”

When Jack Kirby’s army superiors, during his World War II service, discovered he was an artist, they put Private Kirby to drawing maps on scrap paper while in the field of combat. Will Eisner was illustrating manuals from his Pentagon posting as Chief Warrant Officer.

In 1997, Eisner tells an interviewer that when someone showed Kirby Eisner’s THE DREAMER, a book about the early comics industry and therefore depicting a young Jack Kirby, Kirby’s comment was “I didn’t think Will liked me that much.”

§ We neglected to mention that The Toronto Star has named Chester Brown’s LOUIS RIEL as one of the best books of “The Century So Far”.

§ Matt Thorn went to a party for Moto Hagio, one of the Forty Niners, and perhaps “the most important cartoonist in the history of shojo.”

§ Is Kiminori Wakasugi’s DETROIT METAL CITY the latest manga must-have? We think so, and so do David Welsh and Johanna Draper Carlson. Basically, it’s Spinal Tap/Metalocalypse in manga format. We hear both the anime and live action adaptations are aces, too.

§ Boston University is adding a Religion & Comics Collection courtesy of doctoral student A. David Lewis.

§ Dave Howlett’s Living Between Wednesdays column brings up some storytelling tropes like the “first page little head recap.” Maybe it’s our own mentally-challenged reasoning ability, but we LOVE the “first page little head recap.” What do the rest of you think?

§ We’re not that eager to go see TRANSFORMERS 2. A robot with a gold tooth, really?

§ Jill Thompson’s superpower, revealed.

§ Jeff Smith as Colleen Doran’s life coach:

But Jeff urged me to get A Distant Soil done as soon as possible. The challenge? Shave my head and keep it shaved until the book is finished.

Whew. I may have to come up with some other sacrifice. May I crop it boyishly short instead? Live with my natural color for awhile?

§ Another remembrance of Dave Simons, this time by the Hero Initiative, via a script he wrote before his death.

§ The Source reveals that James Robinson and Mark Bagley will be taking over JLA. The title has recently undergone some creative changes.

§ Speaking of The Source, it also has a nice preview of the third STARMAN OMNIBUS. STARMAN wasn’t just good superhero comics, it was good comics, period.

The third Omnibus collection of writer James Robinson and artist Tony Harris’ STARMAN series hit today, continuing the adventures of the modern day Starman, Jack Knight. In this installment, featuring work from Robinson, Harris, Gene Ha, Dusty Abell, Phil Jimenez and J.H. Williams III, Opal City is terrorized by Dr. Pip, an eccentric bomber. Also, Starman teams up with a certain Dark Knight to save the life of Solomon Grundy. Collecting STARMAN #30-38, STARMAN ANNUAL #2, STARMAN SECRET FILES #1 and THE SHADE #1-4, the STARMAN OMNIBUS v.3 is the height of layered, engaging and powerful storytelling. I still have fond memories of sitting in my grandparents’ house reading the first batch of issues, and being excited an intrigued by not only the stellar work within the pages, but also sensing the care and thought both Robinson and Harris put into the creation of these stories.

§ Meanwhile, Vertigo: Graphic Contenthas a preview of the next Vertigo Crime book, THE CHILL, by Jason Starr and artist Mick Bertilorenzi.

(PS: The Graphic Content blog seems to be having a hard time with thumbnails….may we recommend Ecto?)

§ Dan Nadel recommends some good history books about comics.

§ The SF Examiner profiles Julia Wertz, who continues to have namer’s remorse:

What Fartparty.org visitors do find are simple, candid and very funny four-panel comics in which Wertz lampoons her own life. The artist, a former San Francisco resident now living in Brooklyn, first drew her autobiographical Web comic just to entertain friends and named it on the spur of the moment.

“It really is an unfortunate title though. I had no idea it’d stick when I made it, it was a split-second decision. Had I waited another minute, I might have an entirely different career,” she says.

§ Top Story: Brigid Alverson read comics on an iPod Touch. TRAITOR!!!!

It may never replace print, but the iPod Touch is starting to emerge as a pretty good platform for comics, at least in the short term. It has several advantages over the Kindle—it has color, the graphics are nice and sharp, and a lot of people have iPods anyway for other reasons. For readers who value portability, it’s a handy alternative to carrying around a stack of books, and even purchased chapter by chapter, comics are generally cheaper in the iTunes store than in print form. A handful, such as Yoshitoshi ABe’s Pochiyama, are only available that way.

§ Sean Rogers writes about the joy of ligne clair master Joost Swarte in The Walrus. Above, a portion of Swarte’s charming cover for that issue.

§ The Sydney Morning Herald profiles Aussie cartoonist Nicola Scott.

§ Brian Cronin has been spotlighting “Art Stars” as chosen by other artists all month and it’s a fine list.

§ Jim Burns remembers the late Dave Simons at Robot 6.

§ Former NY Daily News editor Jere Hester wonders if tough times mean that folks like the old timey heroes, like the Lone Ranger, will return. Hm, what a tough question.

§ The Miramichi Leader looks at the strange history of CrossGen .

The comic book industry grave yard is filled with the bodies of once proud comic book companies that for one reason or another went belly up.

Some had a long illustrious history, such as Charlton Comics, while others were popular for a while, but eventually faded away, such as Chaos Comics.

But one company stands out from the crowd for it’s rise to prominence in the comic book industry, only to suffer a most humiliating fall.

§ Jason Little has wrapped up his MOTEL ART IMPROVEMENT SERVICE webcomic. Congrats!

§ The rags are full of previews of Comic-Con, none of which have anything to do with comics. Oh well.

§ The new Vertigo: Graphic Content blog previews LUNA PARK, a new graphic novel by Kevin Baker and Daniel Zezelj.

LUNA PARK, written by novelist Kevin Baker, drawn by Danijel Zezelj, and colored by Dave Stewart, is an epic, sprawling historical crime thriller that spans a century and is reminiscent of Kevin Baker’s acclaimed novel DREAMLAND and David Cronenberg’s film Eastern Promises.

§ Todd Allen connects some dots and comes up with an interesting hypothesis re: Wizard World Chicago.

§ At Robot 6, JK Parkin points out what seems to be a historical moment that took way too long: not one but two African-American women writing mainstream comics. UPDATE: David Brothers also covers this topic.

§ Val interviews Rich, but don’t expect a tell-all:

OS: Is there any story that you ran in “Lying In The Gutters” that in retrospect you wish you hadn’t or had handled differently? RJ: I wish I’d run the Rick Olney story a week early. I wish I’d trusted my gut and run the Dreamwave stories earlier. Running the X-Statix/Princess Diana story and getting the Daily Mail newspaper onto it seemed to kill the storyline and the book, after Elton John gave Avi Arad an earful. Yeah, that one was a big regret. Who knew that Marvel would get so tabloid-sensitive so suddenly?

§ David Welsh examines this year’s Manga Eisner nominees, all of which deserve your consumer dollar.

§ Abhay Khosla reviews GUS AND HIS GANG as only Abhay Khosla can. Whatever he says, we give GUS AND HIS GANG our highest recommendation — if you like Jason you will like this book.

Just like the guy in the horror movie who does not heed the dire warnings of the gnarly old groundskeeper, Brian Heater did not listen to us, and went to this weekend’s Big Apple Con 2009 and paid the price:

The registration woman’s second obligatory question was the more bizarre—and perhaps revealing—of the two. “If Big Apple Con added a casino, would you stay and gamble?” I’m not really much of a gambler, and as such, this was far and away the easier of the two questions. Neither, it seems, are the organizers of Big Apple Con. Both of whose questions are clearly geared at shaping future iterations of the show based on this small bit of mandatory audience participation.

Actually, we have been to many a Big Apple Con and had some fun, but if hot sweatiness alone was grounds for ending a show, BAC would have been finished years ago.

ALTHOUGH, looking at Brian’s photos, it appear that they moved the show upstairs, instead of the tarp-draped, often leaked on pavillion area? Can anyone report?

§ Top Shel’fs Brett Warnock reports on notable new artists and comics he’s picked up over the last few weeks.

§ Chris Pitzer of AdHouse does likewise.

§ Tom Spurgeon interviews erotic cartoonist Dale Lazarov.

LAZAROV: Bruno Gmunder Verlag, my German gay art book publisher, says that most of their books sell online; given that I can go to online booksellers in Argentina, Italy, Poland, India and Japan and see Manly and Sticky listed, I would say they certainly do their homework with online booksellers. They are distributed to bookstores internationally, though, since they’re marketed as art books and not comics. Here in North America, high-end, erotica-friendly comic stores like Chicago Comics, or big city independent bookstores like Books, Inc in San Francisco (which has a long-standing end cap with my books! Yay!), plus still-vital gay bookstore chains like Lambda Rising, carry my books. I helped Gmunder get Manly carried by Borders and InsightOut (the LGBT division of Quality Paperback Book Club) so there’s room to grow, too.

§ Vince Moore at Comics Waiting Room asked: Why are there no great black supervillains?

Where are all the “cool” black supervillains? Where is the black Lex Luthor? Or the black Dr. Doom? Where are those black bad guys that comics readers can love to hate? Those black bad guys made from the same stuff of myth and legend as the Joker and the Green Goblin. The brilliant yet disturbed mind. That one obsession which drives the need to conquer or create mayhem. The hero’s opposite number. The capacity to make the hero suffer, to even defeat the hero if not for that one fatal flaw that thwarts all the mad schemes. Where are those black bad guys?

§ Steven Grant responds with a sharp description of “otherness”:

The difference between white characters and other characters in American comics is that non-white characters of any story magnitude are almost always defined by their race. A white supervillain, well, he’s just an evil bastard, or wants money, or whatever. A black supervillain? His motivation has to at some level be racial; he suffered the indignity of racism in the ghetto as a child, or went to an otherwise all-white rich kids’ school where he was never allowed to forget he was different, or whatever other rubbish backstory someone comes up with. Otherwise why make him black, right? Same with Asian, Native American, etc. If they’re motivationally indistinguishable from white male supervillains, why risk offending an entire race? The difference being that white supervillains enhance the middle class white American viewpoint of a Caucasian status quo. Even female characters are often seen to require “special” motivation that almost no one would think to look for in a white male supervillain. Or superhero. (In the ’70s-early ’80s, rape or some variant of sexual abuse was a way too common motivation for both heroines and villainesses, and I’m glad that one pretty much subsided.)

§ Sometimes Splash Page gets a little TOO immersed in its own universe for its own good, such as this look at Mickey Rourke as Whiplash, that ventures the hypothesis that comic book movies that mash-up two characters into one are a dangerous sign a movie will suck.

§ First Second’s Mark Siegel reviews David Mazzucchelli’s ASTERIOS POLYP.

§ A new author reenters the comics shop after some time away and finds it a strange landscape, especially where comics for her kids are concerned. Go help her out with some suggestions.

§ Valerie D’Orazio and her respondents discuss where comics news ends and gossip ends and what is appropriate.

§ With TRINITY wrapped up, Tom Bondurant interviews author Kurt Busiek.

§ Must listen! Audio of the Santoro/Panter/Sohn panel at MoCCA.

§ ZDARSKY — THE EVIDENCE FOR: Recently, a wiki-fight broke out on the Wikipedia page of Toronto-based cartoonist Chip Zdarsky, suggesting that he did not exist. While it is technically true that Zdarsky is a pseudonym for natural-born Steven Murray, Zdarsky’s long, antic-filled run on message boards and blogs around the world, as well as frequent sightings and interactions at comic book conventions and karaoke bars would seem to be persuasive evidence that he does, indeed, exist. Laura HudsonChris Sims digs even deeper, into the heart of this wiki storm with “Ten Things Wikipedia Considers More Notable Than Chip Zdarsky”, like…a list of guest appearances on a John Cena rap record. Truly, the ways of the internerd are strange.

§ If you think Marvel is bad now, you may enjoy this stroll down Memory Alley with Hart Fisher. Fisher, a colorful character and the one-time publisher of Boneyard Press, (he was sued for publishing a comic about Jeffrey Dahmer, once accidentally faked his own suicide, and recently carried on a one-sided feud with Gerard Way) got Marvel’s ire by creating a T-shirt with a rather colorful slogan on it. In fact, we still have ours, but we’re way too peaceful these days to ever wear it out.

§ Beth Harnett looks at Smith Magazine’s ‘Next-Door Neighbor,’ anthology.

§ Two-new-books-wielding Kevin Cannon is interviewed at CBR.

§ Signs of the comics takeover: Graphic novels (and songwriting) have been added as topics at a writing seminar.

§ Kai-Ming Cha on Tatsumi and the history of gekiga.

§ Dept. of Follow-up: Has the mystery of the Montauk Monster…been solved?

§ Robot 6 asks Yow! What have they done to Little Lulu? Apparently, in Brazil, they’ve made her and her gang manga-style skaters, videogamers and fashionistas. In all honesty, this doesn’t bother us much…The original Lulus are still there, sitting right on my shelf, so nothing has been hurt in the making of this comic. Plus…the originals were of their time — kids lived a simple suburban life without electronic stimulation, aside from the radio and an occasional movie. That life is nonexistent, and the kids of today are just as funny and poignant as ever. So…sure, give it a whirl. The PTB would probably be better off thinking of something original, but that might be too hard.

§ Shaenon K. Garrity looks at the Top Five Cartoonists/Children’s Book Illustrators. One is Crockett Johnson — who are the OTHERS?

§ Colleen Doran alerts us to a convention con artist who has everyone from Edward James Olmos to Robert Piccardo on the rampage against him for unpaid fees. Not cool.

MoCCA Section:

§ We’ll have a longer overview of MoCCA along in a bit, but the happy posts where people show off their treasures from the show are in abundance. Here’s one from Ricky Purdin. Geekanerd has another. And Alex Robinson a third. Since we didn’t get as many comics as we would have liked, we’ll try to link to a few more tomorrow.

§ Gary Tyrell summed up the webcomics contingent.

§ Metabunker looks at the Mazzucchelli contingent.

§ Finally, here is the MUST READ post of the day, with Gary Panter’s list of fine artists who should influence comics. Amazing, amazing stuff.

§ El Santo responds to Brigid Alverson’s 8-page rule:

But most webcomics aren’t limited by Zuda’s hard-coded (and unwieldy) Flash-based Zuda browser. Hence, more often than not readers are introduced to elements that happen further on down the story. I personally was introduced to my favorites, — Gunnerkrigg Court, Scary Go Round, and Octopus Pie — in medias res. Later chapters were posted by enthusiasts, I was hooked onto the worlds and characters, and then later I would skip back to the early, more primitive chapters. In a sense, the hook itself didn’t need to be at the beginning.

Establishing the hook far better applies to, say, book stores and comic book shops. We naturally skim through the first pages to see if that’s what we want to read, and then, in those short moments, decide whether or not we want to go forward. But is that the case with long-form webcomics? With the browser environment, we are far more at liberty to jump around to see if the story gets any better in later chapters.

§ Over in the NY Times, Douglas Wolk reviews Carol Tyler’s You’ll Never Know:

“ ‘You’ll Never Know’ ” unfolds like a rambling reminiscence, except without the boring parts. It skitters around in time, every observation setting off another memory or meditation or visual flourish. Tyler’s artwork flutters between representation, fantasy and symbolism, sometimes even in the same panel, but her stylistic virtuosity is a steadfast guide through her chronology’s loops and pivots. On one page, she shows us an imagined scene in her family’s backyard in the early ’50s — kids playing in buckets of water, her mother hanging up a towel reading “Always Do Your Best,” a TV set and a pair of pedal pushers floating in midair — then carefully annotates the anachronisms. She draws her father as a sturdy young man in an Army helmet and as a grouchy retiree in a trucker’s cap, but also as a little boy in church with a halo floating over his horns, as a fox seeking out a peach labeled “Mom,” and as a tree trying to teach fortitude to its fragile sapling of a daughter.

Tom Spurgeon interviews Sethand it’s hard to pick just one pull-quote. Is it this kind of stuff?

I had an excellent working relationship with the Times and it was a very valuable experience doing the strip — I learned a lot about editing my own work while doing Sprott. But I cannot say I received a great deal of response to the work while it was running. Since it finished I have received a smattering of remarks here and there, nothing much worth commenting on. As an artist you like feedback but I have learned not to expect it. That’s one sure way to be disappointed. I must say, though, that the high profile venue was a “feather in my cap” and I have “felt” some vague effect from having serialized a strip there. Hard to explain what I mean by this, though. The lack of direct feedback may simply be the nature of newspaper and magazine publication — I mean, George Sprott (the book) has only been out a couple of days and I have received significantly more feedback than during the entire run of the strip.

Or this:

Thoreau MacDonald is always up there in my mind as a potent life example — along with Glenn Gould and Robert Crumb. People I admire enormously and think about almost every day. He was modest and hard working and had a profound connection to the world — specifically the fields and farms of Thornhill, Ontario (now a depressing Toronto suburb). He was smart and had exquisite, austere sensibilities and I wish I were more like him.

Oh, just go read the whole thing.

§ A story has been going around about how a potential planted viral marketer may have slipped up on 4chan, the great floating therapy session of the internet, but according to Bleeding Cool, it was just another 4chan hoaxer.

§ T Campbell is twittering a rereading of CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS.
§ This profile of the original Chaka, Phillip Paley, was of great interest to us since we were with Paley on the memorable night we met “Naked John” and we always wondered what happened to him. Paley, that is, not NJ.

§ In movie news, Kickstart, the producers of WANTED, have optioned DEAR DRACULA, a children’s comics published by Shadowline’s Silver Books/Image:

“Dear Dracula” rounds out a more kid-friendly niche in Kickstart’s current lineup of properties, according to a report on ICv2. The 48-page graphic novel, written by Joshua Williamson and illustrated by Vincente “Vinny” Navarrete, tells the story of a boy whose love for horror movies drives him to write a letter to Dracula on Halloween in same the way children write to Santa Claus at Christmas.

Other comic book properties currently housed at Kickstart include Garth Ennis‘ classic, extremely mature Vertigo series “Preacher,” as well as his current Dynamite series “The Boys.” They also have the rights to “The Red Star,” “Monster Attack Network,” and “The Couriers.”

§ Warren Ellis’s new column at Bleeding Cool has debuted, Do Anything.

The head of Jack Kirby only grudgingly tolerates me because I give him proper Cuban cigars and because I work in a way he recognises.

§ Guillermo Del Toro’s “No Geek Left Behind” Policy

§ Lanky ginger comic Conan O’Brien boned up for his historic debut on the Tonight Show the other night by praising the comics of Michael Kupperman in the pages of EW, saying Kupperman has “one of the best comedy brains on the planet.”

§ Canada.com explains why Doug Wright’s classic cartoons matter, and the new D&Q collection is good:

Nipper was an imp – a small, hairless boy continually running around getting himself into all sorts of mischief. In the 1950s, Doug Wright and his wife, Phyllis, began raising a family in a modest, brand-new suburban home on 54th Ave. in Lachine. The neighbourhood could have been in any suburb, really, partly explaining the comic strip’s popularity. Apparently, all Doug Wright had to do to get inspiration for Nipper was to watch the shenanigans of the local kids through his front window.

Drawn & Quarterly has published a lavish tribute to Wright that has been lovingly assembled by celebrated illustrator and cartoonist Gregory Gallant (a.k.a. Seth) and Ottawa-based journalist Brad MacKay. The text is not only an interesting record of Wright’s life and experiences as a professional cartoonist, but also a record of the thriving Montreal publishing industry in the 1940s and 1950s, when Wright worked here.

§ Tobey Maguirehopes to star in a film about the glamour- and romance-soaked life of the graphic novelist, with Anne Hathaway as the girl! The film is called TOKYO SUCKERPUNCH.

The story revolves around Billy Chake (Maguire) who is an author of his own graphic novels that set himself in Tokyo.

Writer Ed Solomon (“Men in Black”, “Charlie’s Angels”) explains “He goes there with his editor, to be played by Anne Hathaway, and it ends up it’s a love story about him and Anne, basically, and it’s really about a guy figuring out what matters to him.”

§ Geoff Johns adds comics shop owner to his portfolio with Earth-2 Comics Northridge.

“When Earth-2 Comics first opened their doors and I stepped in, I knew this store was something special,” said Johns. “Since then, I’ve been amazed by what Carr and Jud have built. I’ve wanted to get into the retailing side of the industry for years, to learn about and support the backbone of comics. And there are no better partners I can do that with than Carr, Jud and Earth-2. Plus, now I can harass Bob Wayne. A lot.”

Well, he’s identified one key component of the retailing equation right off the bat!

§ Chaos Mackenzie looks at Batwoman’s journey for Xtra:

From the beginning Batwoman was planned as queer. “With Kate,” says Rucka, “that was an administrative decision from on high, there was a choice made: You know, the time has come. We’re gonna take arguably the most recognizable symbol that we have — that’s the bat — and we’re going to associate it with a character that from the start is going to be known as gay. It’s not going to be an after-school special story, we’re not going to do a pull back the curtain and duh-duh-duh, it’s from the word go. What we want is a new member of the bat family: We want this character to be female, viable and strong and among all those things she is also gay. And that is part of the character-making, right, as opposed to an evolving self-discovery story.”

§ The Comics on Handhelds: Taking Webcomics Mobile panel from SXSW is now online.

§ Chris Butcher blogs Previews. He’s a professional Previews reader, so don’t try this at home. Part 1, and Part 2…so many observant nuggets we can’t even catalog them all.

8:37pm: So I guess I officially don’t understand Dan Brereton. After pulling his NOCTURNALS books from Oni (…and I think Dark Horse too? No?), then self-publishing a nice omnibus collection of some of his older work, he is now at Image with the second collection of his work, meaning that there’s an orphan self-pub’d vol-1 HC floating around out there… and about 75% of all comics retailers are seeing this omnibus collection NOCTURNALS VOLUME 2 (p150) for the first time, cuz now it’s in the Image section. With no accompanying relist of volume 1. Which means 75% of retailers are just gonna skip this, because they “can’t get the first volume”. It’s tough out there for creator-owned work, I know that. I’ve got ENORMOUS sympathy for Mr. Brereton, and I really like NOCTURNALS too. But I look at something like this and just shake my head. I don’t get these decisions at all.

(PS: We have always thoroughly enjoyed Brereton’s work, so this was just an excuse to post the cover.)
(more…)

§ Dan Nadel uncovers the Real Deal from 1989 at Comics Comics.

One of the rare contemporary African-American created and published comics, Real Deal depicts L.A. underworld life with visceral, bone-dry humor and gross out violence rendered in Hubbard’s uniquely gnarly line. Anyhow, I was also happy to discover that Hubbard still has some back issues of Real Deal, so PictureBox will be representing with the original printings of issues 1 and 3-6 at MoCCA and, shortly, online at pictureboxinc.com. Prices at the festival will be $10 for issue 1 and $6 each for the rest.

• Two from Comixology:

§ Kristy Valenti compares two collections covering first-time sexual experiences.

§ Tucker Stone scores an interview with Queen of All She Surveys, Kate Beaton.

• Two from the sales vault of John Jackson Miller:

§ April was the first month in recorded comics history that Detective Comics topped the charts.

§ In addition, JJM compares a chart from 1994 to what is known now to see that the Top 300 occupied a very similar share of the DM when there were 600 comic book periodicals a month as opposed to today’s lessened output as opposed to today’s lessened output. (For periodicals — GNs probably add up to more comics on a monthly basis.)

So we see that in a year with likely a longer tail than we have in 2009, Capital’s Top 300 accounted for more than 95.35% of the comics it sold — or, put another way, only about 1 in 21 copies preordered were outside the Top 300. Capital itself observed that half the comics sold were represented by the Top 67.

§ Jog too has been digging into obscure US editions of Euro-comix of days past and comes up with a political horror comic by Juan Sasturain and Alberto Breccia.

§ Susan King in the LA Times writes of a large, sometimes NSFW Anime exhibit on display at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills.

§ Reporters kvetch over crap access at the opening of the new Hergé Museum.

§ Best-selling author Janet Evanovich will write a graphic novel for Dark Horse, the NY Times reports. Along with daughter, Alex, will pen a GN based on her novels Metro Girl and Motor Mouth which feature a racecar driver named Sam Hooker and a NASCAR mechanic named Alexandra Barnaby. The move allows Evanovich to combine two of her loves:

“We’re comic book fans; we’re huge Nascar fans,” Ms. Evanovich said in a telephone interview. “It allows me to feed my Nascar addiction and comic book addiction all at the same time.”

Best known for her Stephanie Plum mystery books, perhaps this author will be the one to bridge the NASCAR/comics gap?

§ Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing spotlights a graphic novel we’ve never even heard of. Aimed at readers 9-12, NO GIRLS ALLOWED by Susan Hughes and Willow Dawson tells true-life stories of women who dressed as men to follow their dreams.

§ Cartoonist Joey Weiser (The Way Home) shows how he creates a page.

§ GraphicNYC talks to Becky Cloonan.

§ Josh Neufeld is saving us all. He brings up a very good point — Lambiek is definitely getting out of date.

§ Evan Dorkin finds a remarkable resemblance between two cultural icons.

§The Comics Reporter talks to science graphic novel guru Jim Ottaviani on the occasion of the release of T-MINUS: THE RACE TO THE MOON:

I don’t know that it has special significance, other than this is a book I was ready to do myself and publish via GT Labs. When the opportunity came along to do it with Simon & Schuster, I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see how it would work in that context. And you’re right about it being a packaging situation — I can’t recall the exact sequence of events, but it was something like this: My agent asked me for a story to pitch, I gave him a proposal for what became T-Minus, he liked it and asked who I’d like to work with on it, I said Big Time Attic, and he was able to sell it rather easily by saying something like “Here’s Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder Lizards. Give these three guys a contract and they can deliver a complete book, cover-to-cover, that you can send straight to the printer.” It wasn’t as easy as that — it never is, either in the contract stage or the making-the-book stage — but that’s pretty close.

§ Robot 6 talks to Dustin Harbin about Heroes Con and difficult times:

But, and please imagine me knocking on wood like crazy, so far the economy has been pretty kind to us this year, and advance tickets sales are, if anything, UP over last year at this time. I think our sales numbers are marginally lower, but our store manager Shawn Reynolds had already tightened her orders around last fall, so we’re running leaner and more profitably than we might have been otherwise, and Shelton is selling comics at pretty much any convention within a day’s drive of Charlotte, so having revenue from that angle is great too.

§ In an interview with CBR, Top Shelf publisher Chris Staros reveals that a new book by Alan Moore may just be a big seller:

Further comparing this first Top Shelf “League” release with earlier editions, Staros said, “I actually think initial orders for ‘League,’ for first day of sale, were actually better than DC Comics’ numbers because of all of the ‘Watchmen’ [film] hoopla that’s been going on lately, pushing interest in Alan Moore stuff even greater. The first print run of ‘League’ — which was rather large, 100,000 copies — is actually almost sold out.”

Staros noted that unlike the first two DC volumes, which were released in single-issue format before being collected as trade paperbacks, hardcovers and an Absolute edition, the “Century 1910’s” larger perfect-bound format and ISBN coding allowed it to gain sales from the bookstore and library markets, as well.

§ The LA Times wonders if Tintin might be the next Harry Potter for Hollywood, while discussing a few other candidates, like THE LAST AIRBENDER.

Despite the pedigree of the filmmakers, “Tintin” presents a difficult challenge for both studios: The comic is widely popular abroad but is largely unknown in the U.S.

So during the meeting in Culver City, the studio executives were given a backgrounder by two representatives of the Hergé estate, who touched upon everything Tintin, including the comic strip’s history and its cultural significance. At the same time, the executives debated how to prime the U.S. market for “Tintin” and discussed possible release dates.

Sony and Paramount aren’t the only Hollywood movie studios that are studying childhood classics and plotting strategy. Others are working on “Yogi Bear,” “The Smurfs,” “The Lone Ranger” (with Johnny Depp as Tonto) and a live-action adaptation by director M. Night Shyamalan of Nickelodeon’s animated series “Avatar: The Last Airbender.”

§ Laura Hudson hilariously rounds up Marvel’s best known fashion characters.

§ Flashback: Fear and Loathing in San Diego 1996 Day 0

Paul Levitz compares Superman to soul food–comfort food in his Northern slang. Comic book tales embody the Zen spirit that the destination is less important than the journey. We know how its going to end.

Peter Sanderson describes early comics the same way Clinton describes marijuana. Easy to get into, it draws people in and sucks their life away until they know nothing but the powers of their favorite superteam and the date of their next fix. Continuity required investigation in the elder days and this was the hold on fans. Continuity was the gateway drug to comic books.

As long as you don’t inhale. Printer’s ink is death on your lungs.

Mark explains that following continuity is learning the skills of learning. Students who wouldn’t dream of memorizing the presidents of the United States can tell you every member of the Legion, their powers, and their home world. In the old days, Randy Duncan points out, knowledge of comics trivia elevated your self image.

How low was it before, Randy?

Back then, said Paul, there was a defined body of knowledge, and the definition was made by the readers. The readers defined the canon. They decided when the chroniclers–the people who wrote the damn comics–were wrong. Is comics fandom the stillborn precursor to the web?

§ ABC News examines a REAL LIFE team of super powered beings.

§ Joel Meadows posts about this year’s Bristol con with some scenic photos.

§ We’re told that there’s a video of Gabrielle Bell and Miss Lasko-Gross being interviewed by Austin English at The Strand in this link, but our browser doesn’t want to see it.

§ David Welsh wonders why no one will pick up the rights to PRINCESS KNIGHT, Tezuka’s groundbreaking shojo manga, esp. since it is only three volumes long. Just guessing here, but we’ve finally accepted the fact that JUNGLE TATEI (i.e. KIMBA) will never be published in the US because it uses the kind of racial stereotypes so epidemic at the time. Could it be that PRINCESS KNIGHT has similar embarrassing material?

A series of recent interviews:

§ At Robot 6, Tim O’Shea talks to Brian Cronin, whose book version of his popular Comic Book Urban Legends series just came out:

Cronin: Compiling the book probably took a bit longer than actually writing it, since it had to be a 50/50 split of new legends and old legends, but it also had to be a pretty even mix for each group of characters (to wit, it couldn’t be two Hulk legends, twelve Fantastic Four legends and three Captain America legends). I worked on the compilation in a hilariously low-tech fashion - just a piece of paper that I would cross out legends until I had just the right balance.

§ Blog@ chats up Xeric Grant winner J.T. Yost for OLD MAN WINTER & OTHER SORDID TALES:

J.T. Yost: With the exception of “Old Man Winter”, all of these stories were created within a framework of “rules”. For instance, “All Is Forgiven…” was for an anthology called BIZMAR. Each story had to include six familiar icons of comics: Bunny, Insect, Zombie, Monkey, Alien and Robot. I had an idea of what most of the stories submitted would be like, so I wanted to do something diametrically opposed. I worked the icons in subtly so that it could work as a stand-alone comic, and since I knew most of the subject matter would be humorous I attempted something more serious.

§ Graphic NYC gabs with Tim Hamilton whose adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 is imminent:

“It’s kind of like a meditative puzzle for me. You see, when you do artwork, you can work on it all week and make it something fantastic, or work on it for an hour and it might not be quite so nice. Any other job, like anything involving say, mathematics, appears very relaxing to me: add up numbers and you have a right or wrong answer. It’s the same way with working out an adaptation; I need to fit the novel into a certain amount of pages, and take out what I can while making sure the story remains intact.

§ Tom Spurgeon raps with the polymath eccentric, Craig Yoe:

Crumb gave me his consent to reprint his work, but asked if I drew cartoons. When I said yes, Crumb urged me to draw my own comics instead of just using his. He was very evangelical about getting more people to do undergrounds. My early work was psychedelic comics that I continue to love to do. When I showed Mr. Crumb my work later, in France, he said he liked it a lot but I needed to put more sex into it! I’ve been trying to follow his advice ever since. In working with him on a few of my books, I’ve tried to stop being an slobbering fan boy, but, at the same time, I continue to admire him tremendously.

§ In non-interviews, Inkstuds has the audio of one of a TCAF panel on indies and the mainstream:

Here is the audio results of the panel I was a part of at TCAF. I was joined by my fellow nerds, Robert Dayton, Frank Santoro, Dash Shaw and Dustin Harbin for a discussion on mainstream comics and the influence that they have had on alternative comics. It’s not the most focused panel, but we had fun and got some good discussions going with the audience.

§ VIKING #1 release party photos

§ Rich Watson on last weekend’s ECBACC 2009 show, spotlighting comics by and about African-Americans.

§ Many more links about the Maine Comics Arts Festival…everyone seemed to enjoy the salt air. Adri at The Daily Cross Hatch has a brief one with photos.

§ While we’re all in Lost withdrawal Splash Page rounds up all the comics-related appearances of various Lost cast members. Surprisingly, none of them are writing comics! That is left exclusively to Lost producers!

§ Neil Gaiman has been on a roll lately. First it was his epic “George R.R. Martin is not your bitch” post, which doubtless sent shock waves throughout the halls of anal rebels everywhere. (Frankly, we’re a bit surprised that there is so much contention over this; if you sign on for a monthly comic, sure, you should meet your obligations, but books are not on a schedule, and they are done when they are done.)

On a somewhat related matter, Gaiman also posts about the high cost of the HIGH PRICE OF LIVING, the Absolute Death collection:

I’m a bit surprised — I’d been told that it was going to be retailing for about $75, which with an Amazon discount would put it solidly into the area you suggest. but I also know there are a bunch of extra expenses that have turned up on this book, including having to reletter the whole of Death The High Cost of Living, which weren’t originally planned or budgeted for.

and segues into more discussion of good vs Wednesday:

I’m not sure when The Graveyard Book was meant to have been delivered, under the original contract. I do know that I had a $50,000 delivery bonus, if I handed it in by the end of December 2007, which I definitely didn’t collect even a penny of, what with finishing it in March 2008. I’m pretty sure that I could have bashed something out in 2007 and got it in on time and collected the money; I am also certain that that book wouldn’t have won the Newbery, and probably wouldn’t have been very good. And I suspect that people who read the book would have complained that I was just churning it out for the money, and they would most definitely have been right.

PS: Gaiman also had a post recently entitled “The Littlest Beekeeper”, which is something every blogger should aspire to at some point in his/her life.

Just a few quickies:

§ What a 10-hour car ride with Frank Santoro, Dash Shaw and Dan Nadel would be like…jealous.

§ Comics Doomsday Scenario — what if rising prices sink comics sales and a ton of comics shops go under — is being explored more and more. Here’s Valerie D’Orazio’s take and Sean Kleefeld’s, the latter with some talk of Diamond and Haven and the distribution piece of the puzzle.



§ Filipino comics BONANZA from the Philippine Inquirer:

• An interview with Leinil Francis Yu.

• A review of the latest Filipino comic books.

• A list of Filipinos currently doing projects for American comic book companies.

BONUS: Alanguilan reports on the big Komicon Summer Fiesta.

§ TCAF reports abound, gleaming with white light. Sequential has two more link roundups: here and here.

Comic News Insider’s latest podcast has interviews with burgeoning superstar Kate Beaton, Mike Dawson, and Amber MacArthur. Chris Pitzer’s account is almost ilke being there! Mike Dawson has some suggestions — while he suggests MoCCA have free admission, it is pointed out that the show is a fund-raiser, which he talks about here.

§ BRISTOL COMIC EXPO also has a link or two. Geek Syndicate has a podcast of the DC Nation panel, and more to come.

INTERVIEWS:
§ Graphic NYC talks to Joe Infurnari, left.

“I just figured that you’re not going to get anywhere by doing something that everybody else is doing or doing something like everybody else; so do something that’s retarded enough that nobody would dare,” Joe Infurnari says from his drawing table. “The challenge is to make something that sounds nuts actually work. If you can do that then you have something.”

§ Comics Reporter has the ultimate Darwyn Cooke/Ed Brubaker interview on the topic of the former’s upcoming Parker adaptation:

COOKE: When you’re looking at this from a storytelling standpoint, you’re trying to find subtle ways to shift gears and control pacing in a way that a book or a film can’t do. If there’s one thing that you can bring to a book like this that’s perhaps well known, it’s a fresh look at certain things. You can take the time to really blow it out at the beginning and getting to know him visually. You’ll notice that most of the scenes that take place in the here and now have very, very sparse narrative. They’re almost all dialogue and visually driven. Narrative has been stripped down to what I considered essential character or plot stuff that you needed to have. When you go into flashback, which we happened to do twice in the book, I move into a denser narrative. It evokes that sense of someone telling you the story, it allows me to cover more ground in fewer pages, and it gives us a format that distinguishes the flashback from the real-time story, without doing big scallops around all the panels.

Can we just say the art for this looks ultra-tasty?

HOLLYWOOD NEWS:

§ It’s official! Fox has picked up the HUMAN TARGET pilot, and everyone seems to love it so far.

Based on the DC Comics title, the show centers on Christopher Chance (Mark Valley), a mysterious freelancer who offers a unique form of security for hire: He assumes the identities of people in danger, becoming the “human target” on behalf of his clients.

Jackie Earle Haley and Chi McBride co-star in the project written by Jon Steinberg and directed by Simon West. The two exec produced the pilot with McG.

The character was created by Len Wein and Carmine Infantino and was most recently revived by Peter Milligan and artists including Edvin Biukovic and Cliff Chiang. HUMAN TARGET had a previous run as a TV show in 1992, when seven episodes starring Rick Springfield aired.

RANDOM:
This is really quite spooky.

§ Shaenon Garrity visits Tokyo, part 2.

§ Two from J. Caleb Mozzocco: Hate the Alex Ross cover, not Alex Ross and Tarzan as you’ve seen him many times before, and loved each and every time.

§ First, an Al Feldstein health update. Via his mailing list, Feldstein reports that he underwent open heart surgery on April 17th, and is now home making slow and steady progress toward full recovery. Feldstein is the legendary writer/editor of EC’s horror and crime comics and MAD Magazine.

§ Scott Edelman posts two of the most epochal memos in comics history, both from 1976, when DC, and then Marvel, agreed to pay creators for reprints of their work.

I’ve probably made more money in the first decade of this century from the reprinting of comic books I wrote in the mid-’70s than I earned during the mid-’70s from the original publication of those comics.

When I started working in comics back then, however, the concept of getting paid for reprinted material was just a pipe dream. The artists and writers could complain all they wanted, but the companies wouldn’t budge. At least not until 1976, when both Marvel and DC decided that they needed to institute reprint payment policies to hang on to talent.

Now if someone could dig up the memos about royalties, that would be great, too.

§ DC Comics vs. The Paris Review? Not what you think — it’s an elegiac look at how the dwindling of the magazine industry has led to the dwindling of publishing league softball. But the DC Bullets are still going strong!

§ The history of French-language comics writing via a Wall Street Journal profile of Jean Van Hamme, the 70-year-old writer of such series as LARGO WINCH, THORGAL, and XIII.

Now, as Mr. Van Hamme nears the end of his career, he’s searching for a worthy successor. “I will probably be dead in 10 years, so part of my role is to pass the torch,” he says during an interview in his study as he lights a Gauloises and examines the draft cover art for a new comic.

There’s a problem, however: He says the scripts he gets from aspiring Belgian writers are hopeless.

Aficionados are worried, too. “There are so few good writers….It’s a crisis,” laments Reynold Leclercq, who owns one of the 20 or so stores in Brussels devoted to comics.

§ Canadian cartoon genius Seth gets a detailed profile in The Globe and Mail.

§ More Canadian stuff: Toronto’s comics scene is dubbed “White Hot”.

§ AND, the Calgary Herald looks at D&Q’s first Doug Wright Collection. Wright isn’t very well known here in the States, but his place in Canadian cartooning history is crucial:

“The history of cartooning has quite a few seminal cartoonists who were more important (than Wright) in defining the form in some way, and most of them were much earlier in the 20th century,” says Seth. “I think Wright’s real significance was that here in Canada, where there was such a small pool of working cartoonists and a very small market, he was such a very high-quality artist. There is only a handful of guys worthy of study and Wright is right up there at the very top.”

§ Older gentleman collects Rex Morgan comic strips. And there is a video.

§ There’s also some footage from the upcoming SURROGATES movie online:

§ We knew Ray Fawkes was a writer, but we didn’t know he was an artist, too…as he shows with “Black Strings”, a comic up at the Tor.com site.

§ According to Nikki Finke, the Human Target TV show is a go for Fox next year:

HUMAN TARGET (Warner Bros/DC Comics/Wonderland) is a lock after it screened very well. “Peter Rice saw it and loved it,” a source tells me. It’s now considered FBC’s best drama pilot.

§ And there was great rejoicing….Brett Ratner No Longer Directing Conan.

§ Tucker Stone has a report on Gaiman and Tatsumi at the PEN World Voices Festival.