Over at TCR, Ng Suat Tong labors mightily and makes the startling and groundbreaking twin discoveries that cartoonists who write use the formal conventions of the comics medium more fluently than writer artist teams and — even more shockingly — that few comics writers are as inventive as Alan Moore and Grant Morrison.

While a number of comic writers claim to revere and admire Alan Moore, few if any have shown any interest in studying or emulating his works. Moore’s influence on comics writing virtually stops short at grimy, gritty realism. To be sure, I’m not asking writers today to develop an imagination on par with Moore’s but there are some skills which can be learned. For instance, his understanding of the formal properties and history of comics, a more complex interplay between text and drawing and the methods by which he layers structures and scripts. It is clear that Rick Veitch in his Swamp Thing run, which followed Moore’s, managed to pick up a number of these lessons and more.

I don’t think either of those particular points is not worth saying, but saying modern comics writers are crappy because they don’t use panel transitions as well as Frank Miller is like saying most people are crappy swimmers because they don’t have 8 gold medals like Michael Phelps. Accurate but not particularly useful.

I’m not sure how useful formalist criticism of comics writing is at this point. I think a lot of today’s hot shots fail because they don’t understand plot, theme and character, not because they don’t understand the proper use of the splash page ending. I think it’s pretty much the biggest given in all sequential art that cartoonists (writer/artists) make overall better comics than team-ups, and use comics as a more transparent transport medium for quality storytelling. (That said, the now-secret pasts of both Brubaker and Bendis as cartoonists is certainly an interesting avenue to explore.)

For what it’s worth, Sean T. Collins didn’t like the essay either. But at least there’s one more good sharp axe around now!

Interviews with folks who design characters for film, animation, video games and comics. For instance, Paul Linsley (his take on the Turtles, above.)

What goes through my mind?… “Okay Paul, we need a completely original character, that’s fun and appealing, but complex, yet simple, and like nothing we’ve ever seen before.” … Panic. Anxiety. A dim bulb of an idea. Start moving the pencil, Paul. You can do this. Just start moving your pencil. Man, that looks like crap. Wait look at some of your favorites in your inspiration folder. Awwww.. Carter Goodrich! Scott Morse! Yess… Clair Wendling Yes yessss… Maybe a little Joe Sorren… Yes More? Why not some Francisco Herrera? Yess. Some Travis Charest. No, wait too stiff! I know, some Nate Wragg, lightly peppered with Matt Nolte. Perfect. Now pick up the pencil and draw again. CURSES!!! Then I go on to take some cheap stabs at a doodle and give it some life. It’s like there is riot of bad drawings clamoring to escape your mind through the pencil, and every time you pick one up, those have to be released first before you begin to find the magic. Of course I go through the basic elements of design: circle, square, triangle, red, yellow, blue. Is this an antagonist/protagonist? If I have the luxury (depending on the project) I’ll go into the screenplay and try to understand their history, inner-conflict and the roll they play in the story.

Speaking of Carson van Osten, we really just mentioned him so we could reprint, again, his guide to comics storytelling which is as simple and direct yet essential, in its own way, as Alex Toth’s Wally Wood’s 22 Panels that Always Work. Although it is specific to Disney characters in some ways, the universal truths it captures will stand many a young cartoonist in good stead.

See the whole thing here.
In the link, van Osten explains the history of the guide, which has been used by cartoonists and teachers for over 30 years to demonstrate the rudiments of comics storytelling:

I wrote and drew those sketches around 1975 and I’m so tickled to know that people still find them helpful today. It started as a slide presentation for my boss to show at the Disney meeting in Frankfurt. It went over so well that he asked me to expand on it when he returned. They printed 2000 copies and mailed it to all the Disney offices. My friend John Pomeroy asked for some to give to the animators at the studio. that was the time when the animation training program was going on. Frank Thomas saw it and used it for an animation class he was teaching at the Screen Cartoonists Guild. That’s how some sketches wound up in the book that he and Ollie wrote, “the Illusion of Life”.

Whew, there were more emails about new books for MOCCA than ever before — more both in number and in the detail of the submissions. This is attributable to the fact that people really need PR now, and they are getting hepper to the ways to do it. It took a looong time to put it all together, part of which was due to my computer slowing up because I was foolishly running a CPU hog Apple Script at the same time. But also because, while most folks did things right, there were a few who didn’t. To make my life and all press’s life easier here are a few teeny pointers:

1) Include your website address! Prominently! In the first few lines. A surprising number of people didn’t, and I was nice and looked them up (most of the time) but maybe I won’t be able to next time. A link to your website is the best way to get people to see the WHOLE story of your book.

2) Include an image! People aren’t really interested in a big block of type. It’s why I bold names. Almost everyone sent an image or a link to an image (even better) to where to find one, but for those who didn’t, I can’t look it up for you.

3) Make sure it is a properly formatted image! DO NOT SEND PDFS!!! Really now. Reformatting a pdf file just to get a cover image is a hassle that wastes time. Also, some people nicely sent along links to pdfs of their entire giant books…I may read these later, but for promo, it’s not as effective. Again, I don’t want to have to download a giant pdf file to get one little cover imge. Also, don’t forget to make sure your files are RGB! Often I won’t notice a CMYK file has been posted until it’s posted and you send me an email and tell me your image looks wonky. Waste of time for everyone. I will almost certainly shrink down the image but you can send it big — as long as it’s at a low resolution. If it’s a great looking cover, I prefer to run it at a size where it has some impact. To recap:

Cover jpg
72 dpi
RGB

4) A sentence or two — and just that! — of why your book is notable isn’t a bad idea. In a listing like this, the image is going to be the thing that people notice first, but an idea of the contents will help drive people interested in that kind of thing to your table.

Once again, for those who didn’t do it exactly as I suggest above, I’m still gonna list your book, but make it easy for me and everyone else and we’ll think of you kindly.

Above all…thanks to everyone who took the time to send me their listings and announcements and schedules. It is always fun for me to see what people have cooking up and there are definitely some people I never heard of before that I will be checking out at the show.

Technorati Tags: Mocca 09

Speaking of N.C. Wyeth, John K., whose blog we don’t link to nearly often enough, compares the illustration great to Yogi Bear in order to demonstrate good composition, and you know what? He’s right!

And to prove how right is he, here’s an unrelated, supporting example, by Jock, via Standard Attrition.

Since we’re not posting much today, you should spend all your time reading Todd Klein’s blog. It’s like sitting around rapping with the Socrates of comics logo design — and there’ no hemlock at the end. Klein has a three-part examination of the logos of AMALGAM COMICS which looks at how back in the late ’90s, Marvel and Dc came together to mix up their characters…and their logos.

Since all the titles and characters were essentially “new,” all 24 books needed new logos. This called for a lot of design work, especially considering they’d most likely be used only once each, but then the same could be said for the art in each title. The two companies approached the logo design issue a little differently, but both ended up with mostly the same solution: work with the guy who’d designed many of the logos being referenced to create the mash-ups…namely, me! In the beginning, though, several of the Marvel logos were designed by JG Roshell of Comicraft, and at DC the logos were overseen and sometimes designed or assembled by Curtis King on staff.

Not only does Klein identify the designers of most of the best known logos of the ’90s, but his comments on how they work together are fascinating reading. Go on to Part Two and then Part Three.

For an even greater contribution to humanity’s legacy, Klein looks at just why Comics Sans causes strong men to weep and women to turn gray overnight. He even does a side-by-side comparison (above) of the fonts by Dave GIbbons and John Costanza that supposedly “influenced” Comics Sans, and why the result is inferior:

Keep in mind that the first two columns are many times removed from the actual original hand-lettering, and are further reduced in quality by my scanning it at a low enough resolution to use here. That said, I see much more style and consistency in both Dave and John’s letterforms than in Comic Sans, the result of many years of practice. Add in the fact that Connare created his letters by drawing them with a mouse on a computer screen, a notoriously difficult way to draw anything, and you can understand why they look the way they do. You can sit anyone down in front of a printed alphabet and ask them to copy it, but the result isn’t likely to look nearly as good as the original. Make them draw with clumsy tools, and the result will be even worse.

Must reading as always.

Over at his blog, David Lloyd talks about the coloring on V FOR VENDETTA:

In my view, what had prompted Dick to offer me that choice between colour and b/w from the high position he occupied in a company which was built on colour comics, was the remarkable success of some of the b/w indie books of the time, such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which sold massively despite being in monotone. I thought then that this development in comic-reader habits was a detour, not a new highway, and I was convinced that Vendetta could be coloured appropriately and effectively in its new incarnation. Printing didn’t always do it’s best in representing the skill that Steve Whitaker and Siobhan Dodds - V’s major colourists - applied to the work, but that’s another long story. For those interested, I can tell you that the definitive colour balances in V were applied to the hardback version of the collection in 2006 and are now also seen in the latest softcovers. And, of course, they will appear in the Absolute edition.

The Wall Street Journal tracks down the designer of the world’s most hated typeface, Vincent Connare, and finds the villain cackling with glee from his Swiss headquarters:

The font, a casual script designed to look like comic-book lettering, is the bane of graphic designers, other aesthetes and Internet geeks. It is a punch line: “Comic Sans walks into a bar, bartender says, ‘We don’t serve your type.’” On social-messaging site Twitter, complaints about the font pop up every minute or two. An online comic strip shows a gang kicking and swearing at Mr. Connare.

The jolly typeface has spawned the Ban Comic Sans movement, nearly a decade old but stronger now than ever, thanks to the Web. The mission: “to eradicate this font” and the “evil of typographical ignorance.”

“If you love it, you don’t know much about typography,” Mr. Connare says. But, he adds, “if you hate it, you really don’t know much about typography, either, and you should get another hobby.”

Connare reveals that he based the foul font on WATCHMEN and THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, so some internet pundits are saying that John Costanza and Dave Gibbons should be blamed…however, anyone who took the work of these two gentleman and came up with Comic Sans isn’t really clear on what made that lettering attractive in the first place.

PS: The famed July 5, 2007 ACHEWOOD strip excerpted above has been viewed nearly half a million times online.

Whoa, we are still here, but it’s been a CRAZY week at Stately Beat Manor! We’ve had house guests, a surprise visit by the FBI, a battle with customs, car bombs, Jude Law, Hoteloween and now a mysterious sound from the abode below. March Madness!

One thing we’ve noted in the tumult: Twitter has so jumped the shark! We’re now getting emails from PR companies referring to their Twitter announcements, like we had time to notice between 70 of our friends talking about what they had for lunch. People who think a Tweet has some kind of lasting impact will soon learn otherwise, although it works great as a news-blasty kind of thing. Also, people who Tweet panels instead of writing good old fashioned blog posts really suxxor1!

Came the Dawn by Al Feldstein and Wally Wood from SHOCK SUSPENSTORIES #9 ~ June-July/1953.

AND

Frank Frazetta’s never finished sketches for a remake of the story.

Damn.

Wait I can’t just go on. Look at that first panel, by Wood. Every panel in the entire story displays a similar mastery of composition and texture. Look at the incredible complexity of the different areas of light and dark. There is more going on in this one panel than in entire Renaissance paintings. As busy as the panel is — there’s even a portrait of an INDIAN CHIEF crammed in — there is no confusion or lack of clarity. The eye is drawn, of course, to the exquisite, inviting figure of the woman, rendered in silky crosshatching, but she stands out against the stark geometric background of the wall covered with frames, and the hard-edged shadows of the man. If I had one cavil, it would be that the cat (the CAT?) is floating in the air, not lying on the floor, but Wood also made the lower left part of the panel more hazy and indistinct to reflect the flickering firelight, so perhaps it is on purpose. Again, I am dumbfounded by the complete confidence of storytelling, design and rendering that this single panel shows — and every other panel is just as strong.

As for Frazetta…the fluidity and liveliness of this drawing astonish me. Again, notice the different line quality that gives texture and form to all the different shapes in the (very busy) panel. The figure of the man is alert, menacing (even if he wasn’t holding a rifle you’d be scared of him), tangible, the unexpected but realistic placement of his feet giving him a solid grounding in reality despite the obvious idealization of the drawing.

Those guys were good.

[Via Matthias Wivel]

§ Eddie Campbell is back with one of the secrets of comics, known only to true initiates:

Due to the overwhelming thumbs up in response to my post telling you kids how to dress properly, I am now offering ‘Comicbook morality in one easy lesson.’ What you gotta do, right, is if you have a character and you want to send the reader a signal that we are not to take this person’s actions as morally positive, you first must show him eating badly. Here is Rorschach with a can of cold beans

§ Van Jensen isn’t going to the store every week any more:

What’s finally happened for me, I realized, is that I’ve moved past monthly comic book issues. All the negatives are well known, so I won’t bother to recite them. Simply put, I’m not buying another long box to shove away in the closet. I buy books to read them, not collect them. And so I’ll buy them in the form they’ll be read more than once.

Aside: What with fellow PWCW contributor Laura Hudson also easing up on the superhero throttle, we’re beginning to think it’s something we said.

§ This is gonna be good! A new Comics Comics Cage Match, this time on one of the most polarizing cartoonists of our times, David Heatley.
Frank Santoro with an uppercut:

And that’s sort of what Heatley does by inserting “Shout Outs” to his homies within the narrative itself.There are larger panels within the dense page design of the story that include a drawing of a figure, of a real Black person like his childhood friend Winton, with dedications like, “Dude, you were the coolest, stoney-eyed artist around!” To me, these come off as really demeaning.

There are also large sidebars and whole pages of handwritten text that are “Record Reviews” of Black music that David loves. It’s the “voice” Heatley uses to describe getting, say, a Jungle Brothers tape that makes me just shake my head. All that “Yo wassup” white-boy lingo that he spits? Give me a fucking break. Just read it, look at in the store. I don’t have the patience to describe it.

Dan Nadel calls for a time out:

One question worth asking is: How does one judge such a work: Is it reasonable for David to expect moral outrage like Frank’s? Does such a story, and the obvious implications for one’s moral well-being, elicit a like-minded response, as it did from Frank? Is that fair? I mean, David isn’t offering a prescription for how to live — just describing his own journey. But it’s the tone and content, I guess, that Frank is reacting against. Just some stray thoughts here. Tim?

§ Finally PopImage columnist Ed Mathews has moved to SF to get married and he needs people’s help:

I need your help. I need you to keep the American dream alive, not for me, but for others. When we started running YOUNG BOTTOMS IN LOVE many years ago, the thought of a daily gay romance comic seemed out of reach. Tim Fish, editor and cartoonist, proved me wrong with an amazing group of talented cartoonists and writers who stepped up to the plate and hit a home run. The logical next step in gay romance is a committed relationship. The ultimate expression of that in legal terms is state-sanctioned marriage. Extending the benefits of marriage and the protections of divorce are essential and assumed in heterosexual circles.

§ At the FLOG blog, Jacob Covey goes on at some length to discuss his dislike of giclée (digital) prints, as opposed to old school hand printmaking:

Meanwhile there is a mind-boggling craft involved in all traditional print-making that makes any hand-crafted print far more valuable than any digital print. Perhaps it sounds snobbish to make these distinctions but the truth is that giving something a French name in order to sell it is far more snooty than my position which is as an advocate for the value of Art in this Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Aside from the fact that giclée prints are far more expensive per-unit than most any other process, I simply find it consumerist and soulless to actively convince people that a digital print has any value beyond decoration or as reference material. It is, as a kind of Platonic thing, not capable of being Art. For example, screenprinting is perhaps the most common and well-known non-printing-press, print-making technique [entertaining Aesthetic Apparatus instructional video here]. It’s potentially cheap and easy if also messy. It can be as simple as one-color screened on paper or something complex and nuanced like this 24-layer Gary Baseman print from Decoder Ring. But it has SOUL that resonates back through generations of our ancestors who developed hands-on methods for spreading information and art.

§ John K. piles it on again with his ideas of the two most important tools of the cartoonist but sweetens the medicine with pictures of cool old comic strips.

You can’t learn the basics faster than by copying the drawings from classic model sheets. Save yourself 4 years of debt piled up at a cheesy animation school that doesn’t teach you anything. If you combine these two broad concepts: 1) strong drawing principles with 2) fun wacky cartooniness and creativity, you get the best kind of cartoons - like the WB and Tex Avery cartoons. Lots of control, without losing the idea that cartoons are supposed to be magic, ridiculous and fun.

The ASIFA blog asks one of the great ineffable questions, “Who invented the three-fingered hand?” An essay by animation legend Grim Natwick explains:

Someone way back in the dark ages of animation got tired of drawing hands with four fingers and simply left one off, and cartoon hands have been much easier to animate ever since. It was a stroke of genius. The four fingered hand disappeared from animation until “Snow White” (1937). Somehow a pretty girl didn’t look right with only three fingers. But the Seven Dwarfs still had three fingered hands.

Cartoonist and SVA teacher Nick Bertozzi posts the results of some homework. His comics storytelling class was assigned the test of adapting a story by O. Henry. The results can now be seen at the O. Henry Anthology.

It’s an interesting exercise to click through the various stories; SVA turns out lots of future cartoonists and comics pros every year. Is there one lurking in this anthology? We spotted one person who will someday be working for Marvel or DC but we also think that JJ Marik (left) is just about ready for some indie anthologies.

Via Chris Mautner.

Today’s “It Kids” of snark and anti-establishmentarianism, Tucker and Nina Stone, are interviewed by Chris Mautner at Blog@Newsarama. Depending on your point of view, you will find them to be ultra-haters or honest proponents of an outsider viewpoint. Nina, who is new to comics, comments on the rollout of her exposure. Sometimes it pays off:

NS: OK. I saw that some of [the site comments] directed toward me were saying things like “this is like jumping into chapter seventy in a seventy-five chapter book and you really shouldn’t expect to understand.” And, you know, I learned from my American Splendor experience. I didn’t like the comic – and my opinion was based solely on that comic, at that time. People “commented” that I should really read his older stuff to get a better picture of what he’s really all about. So, I read a bit of his older stuff and watched the movie…and now I totally adore Harvey Pekar. And his wife. And I get it. I get what the comic was about, how it came to be, why it was successful, etc.

Sometimes it doesn’t:

So, after reading Final Crisis and all those comments, I decided to go to DCcomics.com, and spend a little time around there. Maybe there is some little primer there? Well, there actually IS some section that says “New to comics?” — so I clicked on it and it’s basically — I found it really funny because it has a FAQs page with minimal links and the questions are: “What are comics?” “Where can I buy comics?” “Where can I learn about comics and the comic fan community?” “And How does DC Comics, WildStorm, and Vertigo fit into all of this?” None of those FAQs really helped. So I clicked on Heroes and Villains and basically it tells me that to get caught up I need to read — 52, was that it?

Tucker argues from a more informed viewpoint, and once again, depending on which side you’re on, he’s either a connoisseur or an elitist:

It’s the same standard—that if it’s good, then it’s art, and if it’s not good, well it’s comics and you should shut up–over and over and it shouldn’t be because comics are in the same exact some marketplace as everything else. They’re not fighting for the comics dollar. There isn’t a comics dollar. They’re fighting for the entertainment dollar, It’s not just that manga sells more. Comics are up against TV, movies, video games, playing outside with a rope—run of the mill super-hero comics are fighting for the same free time that everything else is fighting for. It’s not enough that a comic is entertaining—it’s got to be more entertaining then it would be to watch a cat do something cute on YouTube, because that’s what it’s competing with for my time.

Stone also deals directly with the problem so many critics have: Contact between author and subject is all too possible and taints the whole barrel:

I made the mistake of responding directly to a creator who didn’t like the way I treated his shitty comic book. Back and forth, debating it like we respected each other’s opinion when in the end, I didn’t feel any different, he didn’t like me, and it wasn’t like he was going to break down and admit the thing was trash, and it wasn’t like I was going to lie and pretend I was kidding. At the end I felt dirty. I shouldn’t have done that. That’s me though, I had to learn. Now, I think I would just not get into it with them.

In a way,Tucker Stone is saying the most obvious thing possible: We should raise the bar to separate what is considered good from the vast sea of mediocrity masquerading as the majority of comics. And yet so many people spend so much time talking about that mediocrity. Dick Hyacinth picks up on the theme:

Comics readers seem to love the mediocre. I don’t think the problem with comics criticism (in a broad, broad, very inclusive sense) isn’t that it rewards terrible, bottom-of-the-barrell work; it’s that it rewards second-rate work. Any stab at respectability, no matter how modest, is too-often greeted with hosannas. I’ve seen people laud Kingdom Come because it used foreshadowing–which I’m sure we all remember is an actual, honest-to-god literary technique! I guess that’s a step up from those who think crying superheroes holding the charred remains of less-famous superheroes connotes respectability.

The way the comicnets obsess over mediocre comics, it’s as if movie blogs kept arguing the deep meaning and value of Beverly Hills Chihuahua and College all the time.

In all candor, The Beat is as guilty of this as anyone. Confronted with a sincere press release on something of, shall we say, “limited appeal,” we run it anyway, just in hopes that improvement is in the offing.

Look, did you see? We did it again. “Limited appeal.”

We meant to say “mediocre comics.”

We truly believe that this is a golden age for the graphic storytelling medium. Our recent trip to SPX proved that; it was the comics equivalent of a Christmas stocking, full of goodies and treasure. There are more and better trained cartoonists around us than at perhaps any time since the Golden Age of illustration.

Yet, every week we get stacks of comics from major publishers, and just sorting them out is a tedious chore, one to be fobbed off on interns, who, in turn, hate doing it. These comics have become so inbred, so tortured in their self-reflexive appeal to an an ever shrinking base that the brain automatically shifts away. Don’t get us wrong; there will be some new readers who will take the Nina Stone challenge and like it; in an Internet-driven world where mastery of inane factoids is currency, the draconian choice between total immersion or total rejection makes some kind of sense. So creating products for the cult makes economic sense. It’s the dearth of NON-cult products for new audiences that seems total nonsense. And despite what you may have heard, good comics(FUN HOME, WATCHMEN) win over more new readers than crappy comics do.

At the same time, having worked in the comics industry, I know that the monthly or weekly grind lowers one’s resistance to crap. The joy of just getting a book out every month soon drowns out the tastebuds, and it’s only long afterwards that, stepping back, you can see the poverty of imagination.

There are lot of barely readable or unreadable comics out there, and yet they are being argued over as if they were a novel by Dostoyevsky. And you know what? They aren’t.

And people gradually wake up to that fact. Every once in a while, a comic comes along that hastens the awakening. This week, it’s NIGHTWING #149. Greg Burgas tales up the call.

Over at Every Day Is Like Wednesday, I came across a description of Nightwing #149: “[I]t is incredibly, spectacularly awful.” Caleb goes far more into it, and I just thought, “I must buy this. I must read it.” And so I bought it. And I read it. Boy howdy, he’s right. He celebrates its awfulness, however, believing that nothing can come “anywhere near the terrible glory” that is Nightwing #149. I can’t be quite so blasé about it, however. This is a bad comic. More than that, it’s a depressing comic. In a DC Universe that has recently been all about cruelty, this stands out. If you didn’t buy it, I thought I’d break it down for you.

Everyone grows up sometime. You just can’t keep arguing over this stuff and thinking about it without a little bit of your soul dying. Thus it pleases us to see a bright, perceptive person like Laura Hudson beginning to emerge into the light:

Coming directly off of my weekend at SPX, as well as recently reading a string of excellent, engrossing non-superhero graphic novels like Skim, Swallow Me Whole, and Alan’s War, picking up a comic book like Nightwing #149 feels a lot like shutting my hand in a car door. And I’m thinking — I’m thinking I should stop doing that.

We all need to raise the bar a little. I do; you do. We all do. It’s not that potboiling pieces of mediocre pap (or worse) won’t still come out. It’s just that we need to stop pretending they matter in any way, shape, or form.

Watch legendary illustrater Bob Staake create this week’s New Yorker cover in this video. Apparently his process is quite amazing, according to Drawn!

Thanks in part to YouTube, author and illustrator Bob Staake gives the world an inside look at how he goes about creating his one-of-a-kind illustrations. Believe it or not, Bob creates all of his digital work in Adobe Photoshop 3.0… with a mouse… all on one layer!

Reader Pepo points us to this site, with examples of recolored Moebius. On the top, Yves Chaland; below, Valerie Beltran.

This is not as bad as the stuff we posted yesterday, but it’s still…problematic.

Any colorists out there to comment on what we’re seeing?

UPDATE: Thanks to the corrections offered in the gentle manner that the Internet is known for, we’ve corrected the credits for the above weirdness — even if it was the wrong book, the coloring is still pants, however.

We were farting around on the Internet yesterday when we came across an art thread at Ivan Brandon’s forum that included the following shocking before and after. The original comparison is from a French art blog (well worth checking out on its own.) The work in question is THE INCAL AVANT L’INCAL by Jodorowsky and Moebius Janjetov. The first is from the original printing. The second is from the US Humanoids version, recolored by Fred Valerie Beltran, who is not a bad colorist or artist in his own right….but hideously inappropriate. What the hell happened to the delicate linework and shading that Janjetov included in the original? Wasn’t that part of how the art was SUPPOSED to look?

In addition, in an insulting move, naked ladies have been removed. (We’ve added the black bar, but you can see the uncensored versions at both links, as well as more examples of before and after.)

While computerized “modeled” coloring is the standard for today’s comics, it’s basically like giving a loaded revolver to a chimpanzee, as it so changes the underlying character of the art. As we flip through the comics we get these days, we’re struck over and over again by the darkness of the printing, the muddled look of the resulting art, and the idea that comics editors have moved to a system where the traditional penciler/inker/colorist team is being asked to produce painted work reminiscent of video games, which isn’t how the system was set up. It could work to produce great images, but that would require a lot of cooperation, time and vision — more than the present system seems to be set up for.

Excitement ran high on various message boards when an Amazon listing was found for The Carl Barks Collection Set 1, to be published by Gemstone.

It’s here - a ten-volume hardback set collecting Carl Barks’ complete Disney comics cycle! Remastered in more exceptional quality and color than earlier editions, the great tales of Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge McDuck, Gladstone Gander, and Gyro Gearloose are accompanied by a vast selection of archival rarities and fascinating new editorials by lifetime Barks scholar Geoffrey Blum. This initial boxed set includes Barks’ very first 1940s adventures, including “Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold,” “The Mummy’s Ring,” and “Pluto Saves the Ship!”

Priced at $150, this is not for the faint of heart, but it is still joyous news — the Barks canon comprises one of the greatest achievements of comics. It’s the American Tintin. While we’d prefer a kid and librarian friendly reprint series, they’ve tried that a few times, and it never seems to go over.

The trouble begins, however, with the coloring. Matthias Wivel goes on at length. Apparently this edition preserves coloring from the European Egmont edition of this deluxe reprint , and it’s not the best.

This is all well and good, but unfortunately thoroughly undermined by the colouring of the strips, which is not only amateurishly executed but fundamentally misconceived. In contrast to the earlier complete edition, Another Rainbow’s Carl Barks Library (‘CBL,’ 1983-90), the editors of the Egmont edition decided to publish the comics in colour. On paper, this is the right choice; wonderful as it is to experience Barks’ linework in black and white, the comics were drawn for publication in colour. Unfortunately the execution is close to disastrous.

Wivel posts comparisons to back up his contention. Unlike the more taste-oriented KILING JOKE example we just posted, this is something anyone should be able to see.

Technorati Tags: Disney

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There’s a handsome new hardcover edition of THE KILLING JOKE by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland out, featuring remastered color by Bolland. PopCultureShock has done a side by side on the color, and some people, like Chris Butcher, find the new version less than compelling.

This seems like a “changing tastes” thing. One style is more 80s, one more Aughts. Because we’re lurid, our personal tastes are a bit more with the original. But really, color is the hardest thing to judge objectively. Butcher writes:

I think my problem with it is that while artist Brian Boland brings a high degree of craft to the new colouring, he’s drained all of the emotion and… art… out of the work. Little touches like the cast-shadows on the cuffs of the Joker’s sleeves, for example, added more personality and depth to the art than all of the soft airbrush modelling in the world could hope to accomplish. At work my opinion is in the minority, with the majority of customers loving the hell out of the new look. Enh.

The new look may be more tasteful, but at least the modeling is kept to a minimum. Subjective or not, every time we flip through a stack of “mainstream” comics, our eyes are assaulted by a barrage of ghastly, life-draining “cgi” style coloring that has the major effect of ruining any of the balance of light and shade that the original artists were going for. Late deadlines are probably the main reason, but in general this “cgi-stylee” look takes real skill to carry out, and time.

Shonen Jump editor in chief Masahiko Ibaraki recalls his career, including the early years:

Each editor is assigned a mangaka to work with. The first mangaka assigned to me was Akira Miyashita. I feel as if my training as an editor came from working with the mangaka, not my superiors. When I was assigned to Mr. Miyashita, the editor who came before me worked with me for just one day and said, “You should do it from now on.” I still remember how Miyashita looked when we first met. He was a tall guy with black glasses who said to me, “We should go out and get something to drink.” To this day, the Shonen Jump editorial department has a tradition: each editor is given a large discretion. Even though I was pretty busy back then I still enjoyed those days.

Ibaraki also shows that even the mightiest mangazine of them all has its ups and downs:

In 1982, when I joined Shonen Jump the circulation number was 25.5 million copies. Then the circulation grew as high as 65.3 million copies in 1995 because of hit titles such as Dragon Ball, Slam Dunk and others. However, after 1995 the circulation decreased constantly until last year. The circulation number last year was 27 million copies. We’ve seen good days and bad days, but I believe in a bright future for manga. Manga can be created with pen and papers, so it has unlimited possibilities. I hope Shonen Jump will keep producing cool manga with unknown talents like it has in the past.

§ MEANWHILE… Tom Brevoort begins his dip into the mailbag:

What makes a bad editor?

This could be many, many columns in and of itself, and has been if you dig through the archives of this blog. If I had to narrow it down, though, I think the worst editors in general have been those who really wanted to be writing the comics themselves, and who used their position and authority to attempt to do just that, from the back seat. The editor isn’t there to tell his story, the editor is there to help the creators tell their stories. And while the editor will always have a certain amount of say in what goes into a given story, they’re not the star of the show. To be an effective editor, you need to be ready and willing to stand in the wings while other people take the bows. Hiring whomever happens to walk in the door that day regardless of appropriateness for the assignment is bad editing. Not having a viewpoint of some kind leads to bad editing.

Well said, Tom!

Tony Lee’s He’s Only A Writer column at Comics Bulletin surveys a bunch of folks, including Lee Nordling, Andy Schmidt, Rob Levin, Joshua Hale Fialkov, Keith Giffen, Andrew Foley and even (gasp) The Beat on pitching and how to convey yourself during the long, grueling task of selling yourself as a writer:

[Nordling]: Ask for advice, not for jobs. Listen. Discuss what they’ve suggested, showing that you listened. Thank them in person (if that’s how you met them), and thank them later by correspondence - then ask for suggestions about whom they might recommend you speak to that they know. You’ll then be able to use their name as a reference to begin the process over again.

Eventually, you’ll come across somebody who’s interested in what you do, and you’ll get work or the job you’re seeking. This is advice I got from a professional counselling company that specializes in this kind of work, and it’s never failed me.

Speaking of SPLAT, the New York Post (!) previews the event with a cheeky lede:

BESIDES all the usual dreams young people move to New York to chase - singing, acting, sleeping with the governor - you can now add authoring graphic novels to the list.

but then gets into a very serious discussion with Brian Wood about how to break into comics, and
this is as good a list as we’ve seen. Clip ‘n’ Save!

* Publish something, anything: “Just get something into print. Then you’re proven. The next editor you approach sees that someone has already banked on you,” Wood says. If no one will hire you, print up your own copies of a book to give away as samples. “Not only does your work look the best in a printed form, it shows you can follow through on a project.” * Have patience: “I went to conventions and gave away
these self-published books to anyone I could find. It took three years until anyone called me back. You can’t get discouraged,” Wood says. * Sell it before you draw it: “If you’re just trying to get an editor interested in you, you don’t have to fully execute your 100-page graphic novel. You can just do the first chapter.” * Find the right editor: Look at the mastheads of books that you like reading and send your work to whomever edits those. Then mail a hard copy of your work.
“Don’t e-mail. An editor can just hit delete on an e-mail.” * Take to the Web: “That’s what everyone says is the next big business model,” Wood says. Many aspiring artists have been offered work by putting samples of their stuff up online.

New York Mag’s Vulture bloginterviews Jeff Smith today and they bring up where he sees himself on the spectrum of comics:

[Q:]This fall, a mini-debate popped up on comics Websites about the Best American Comics anthology. Heidi MacDonald, who writes the Beat, asked why more of the comics in that book didn’t tell great stories, and she specifically cited you as the kind of writer who is conspicuously absent from anthologies like this. And the debate about Bone in particular is continuing even this week. Do you think that there really is still a great split in the comics world between art comics and pop comics?

[A:] Yeah, I do. I’m not sure I’m too concerned about it. When you work in comics, you’re kind of used to lines in the sand. From the time you’re a kid, you’re kind of raised in this either/or type of a mind-set with comics: If you like Marvel comics, you can’t like DC comics. If you like superhero comics, you can’t like indie comics. There’s kind of like — I believe — a false dichotomy which puts a Chris Ware at one end and Bone at the other. But I don’t think one is more valid than the other. What are you going to do? It’s high art versus low art. You’ve got Chris Ware, who is Beethoven, and you have me. I’m the Beatles. One’s not better than the other. They’re just making different music.

If this doesn’t settle it, this isn’t the internet.

Oops…

Vanessa Davis talks to her mom at the D&Q website. Say, maybe these autobio comics ARE the best form of storytelling!