Comics Should Be Good is running a vote to see what is DC’s most iconic cover. Nominations are taking place now, but for our money, the one above will be very, very hard to beat.
But what do YOU think?
§ HUGE NEWS! Björk has written a song about Moomins!
§ This interview with early Bullpenner and romance editor Irene Vartanoff is fascinating:
By the time I was out of college, I had already been a frequent visitor to DC Comics. It was not hard to convince them to give me a try, and in 1971 I worked simultaneously on superhero and romance stories. People at DC were extremely welcoming and I was insufficiently grateful at the time. I was very young, and arrogant enough to dare to go to the big city, but not quite ready for it on several levels. I did not ride out my moments of self-doubt to writing success in comics. I was a sheltered girl from the suburbs who was trying to make it in a strange place as a freelancer, without much support system or money. After a while, I had to take a break and go back home.
§ Director Chris Columbus reveals how far the HARRY POTTER cast has come
“My biggest pride is seeing the pictures now, and watching the three of them from a distance, and seeing them do an entire scene in one shot,” said the director of the first two “Harry Potter” films, which were released in 2001 and 2002. “Seriously, I know that sounds funny, but in the old days — and, you know, the old days meaning eight years ago — and in that first picture in particular, it’s filled with cuts because they couldn’t really get beyond the first line without either looking into the camera, laughing or looking at the lights.”
§ Director James McTeigue reveals he’s probably NOT working on a Superman movie, but considering that he wanted it to be “super dark,” we are just as glad, because what the world DOESN’T need is another superdark Superman!
§ Lovable eccentric Wes Anderson has just made a goofy stop motion animation movieand wants to spin a comic seen in one scene off from it:
So he and head storyboard artist Christian De Vita put their heads together and came up with their brand-new superhero.
“[Christian] was very good at these kind of drawings and he became the artist that does ‘White Cape.’ We sort of made this comic book series,” said Anderson. “He has posters and we have some pages. We didn’t ever figure out any full stories, but in fact he wants to do some ‘White Cape’ comics now. So maybe we will be developing that property.”
Variety reports that Italian producer Domenico Procacci’s Fandango has purchased Igort’s Coconino Press.
As you might guess from the name (taken from the setting of the seminal comic strip Krazy Kat) Coconino publishes literary European comics, so a film teaming is kind of like Miramax buying Drawn and Quarterly, if we get our Italo-culture references right. Coconino was also the European packager of most of the Ignatz line of comics, published in the US by Fantagraphics. According to the article, Procacci is active in books and music, but he’s especially hot for…what else: Graphic novels!
As for Italian graphic artists, the idea is to foster a level of local excellence, which Procacci finds “somewhat below par right now in this field, considering Italy’s illustrious past.”
“I want to create a pool of young talents, because I think that there could be some potential filmmakers among the artists making graphic novels today.”
As examples, he cites Gallic comicbook artist Riad Sattouf whose hot teen sex-themed helming bow “The French Kissers” unspooled in Cannes, and also Belgrade-born Gallic illustrator Enki Bilal’s ambitious 2004 English-language sci-fier “Immortal (Ad Vitam).”
According to the piece, Igort’s 5 IS THE PERFECT NUMBER is slated for a movie adapted by Marco Mueller.
While we ourselves didn’t have time to link, much less peruse its contents, the entirety of the epoch-defining 30tth issue of The Comics Journal was online for free yesterday. But then someone pulled the plug, Dirk Deppey recounts:
Yeah, I’m afraid that on Gary Groth’s instructions the experiment in online marketing has been cancelled. Sorry.
The line-up of contents remains as stunning as before:
• Art Spiegelman and Kevin Huizenga
• Jean-Christophe Menu and Sammy Harkham
• Frank Quitely and Dave Gibbons
• Dave Mazzucchelli and Dash Shaw
• Alison Bechdel and Danica Novgorodoff
• Howard Chaykin and Ho Che Anderson
• Denny O’Neil and Matt Fraction
• Jaime Hernandez and Zak Sally
• Ted Rall and Matt Bors
• Jim Borgman and Keith Knight
• Stan Sakai and Chris Schweizer
And we’ll read it when our hard copy arrives, just like always. Johanna Draper Carlson has commentary.
On another matter, late last night a story on Variety.com was making the rounds stating that the Warriors Three had been cast for the Thor movie. But it seems whoever wrote the story had gotten his ’60s Marvel characters mixed up, since — not trying to sound racist or anything — but casting a slender Asian man as Volstagg the Voluminous didn’t make much sense. Anyway, Marvel.com has the final lineup:
Fandral will be played by Stuart Townsend. The job of Hogun goes to Tadanobu Asano. And Volstagg will be portrayed Ray Stevenson.
That’s more like it.
After all that talk of how best to convey dynamic anatomy through the flexible spine we’ve been tagging some further examples as we make our daily surf, and we think we’ve found a pose that exhibits many of the same qualities. It’s certainly dynamic and very flexible. It’s also maybe a little NSFW depending on where you W, so proceed with care.
Bonus: This should settle the shorts under the skirt thing, too!
Read the rest of this entry »
§ Superhero division: Maxim presents 12 Superheroes Who Should Be On ’70s Vans, which, considering that several of these characters were created at a time when van art was an influence is a little Moebius strip for our tastes, but has Photoshop ever been used for a better purpose?
§ Indie Division: We’re very late on this, but The Daily Cross Hatch’s Indie Costume Contest Winners are too epic to ignore, esp. this Matt Furie-inspired Landwolf.
A few links making the rounds related to the health of various sectors of the comics business.
§ In Boston, while book industry sales are “in freefall”, comics sales are strong enough to support new retail outlets:
They couldn’t find a single financial backer willing to risk a penny on a comic book store, but the pair knows something about their kind: namely, that comic book fans, who number more adults than kids these days, are serious about their reading material. Look no further than the man who posted a comment on the store’s Facebook page praising the recommendations of the “in-house sommelier.’’ Reed has faith that the business, which has seen heady peaks (hello, Stan Lee) and crushing lows (television nearly wiped it out half a century ago), is poised for another revival.
§ Meanwhile, in Japan as the above scary chart shows, this writer believes the manga industry is in “Dire straits.” In the above chart, magazines sales (red) are plunging, while tankōbon sales (blue) are flat:
The very notion that the health of a medium can be measured by the number of blockbusters it produces is itself increasingly obsolete – in music, books and other media, markets are increasingly centred on the so-called “long tail,” with modern distribution allowing vast numbers of niche titles to be economically supported where before only a few very popular titles could ever find commercial success. Having low or high sales is thus not a measure of how “good” a title is, but instead merely reflects the size of the particular niche a product serves.
§ Meanwhile, Canadian Business magazine salutes the success of Drawn & Quarterly:
While Oliveros is reluctant to claim credit, D&Q was pivotal in that transition. Its titles were lavishly, lovingly produced, and mainstream media outlets took breathless notice of this blurring of publishing boundaries. In 2004, The New York Times noted D&Q’s (along with its closest competitor, Seattle’s Fantagraphics’s) role in shaping the renaissance of the comic book form. Crossover success was concomitant: the titles started to appear in traditional bookstores where, suddenly, every self-respecting independent and chain devoted a section to graphic novels, and major publishing houses started getting into the game. D&Q’s fastest bestseller, Chester Brown’s Louis Riel, an improbable “comic strip biography” of the controversial 19th-century Métis leader, sold 10,000 copies in its first season, and to date has sold more than 36,000, more than most bestselling books in Canada. Publishers Weekly called it a “major achievement.”
Dark Horse has hired former Borders graphic novel buyer Micha Hershman as their new Director of Marketing. According to PR:
In his 13 year tenure, Hershman has developed an extensive professional experience with comics, graphic novels, science fiction, horror and related merchandise. After handling the buyer duties for the chain’s rapidly growing graphic novel section, he became the Category Director for the company’s pop culture section. Having engineered highly successful retail and online marketing campaigns for such recognizable brands as Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and Twilight, and managed the Children’s and Fiction marketing teams, Micha comes to Dark Horse armed with both the experience and passion to grow the brand’s presence in all markets.
“Dark Horse is a world-class organization, unmatched in it’s dedication to comics, their creators and their fans” said Hershman. “I couldn’t be more excited to join Mike Richardson and his team.”
“We are extremely happy to have Micha here at Dark Horse” said President Mike Richardson. “The experience, knowledge, and enthusiasm he brings to our marketing team will be a huge resource as we look to grow Dark Horse over the coming years.”
A very quick google shows Hershman commenting on GNs and their place in the world for years, so he’s very conversant with the field. He starts in his new position later this month.
Thanks for all the birthday wishes, everyone. It was a great day, with unseasonably warm weather such as we never remember in a pre-global warming world, so thank you greenhouse emissions! We took a total internet vacation for the weekend so are just now returning to this wonderful, fact-filled world.
We got about 45 minutes into the Prisoner remake before deciding it was completely misguided and had no idea what made the original compelling — namely mood, tone, storytelling, suspense, etc etc. Adi Tantimedh has a nice dissection of the rather muddled theme of the remake:
Why remake a popular story if you’re going to toss everything that people liked about the original under the bus? The catchphrase and key theme of the original show was Number Six’ weekly decree, “I am not a number, I am a free man!” In an interview in last week’s New York Times, the writer of the remake said he felt the need to modify that sentiment into something more, moderate, less individualist, more… community-minded.
So the credo of the remake is, “I am not a number, but I want to be a member of a nice community that gets along with each other!”
Still trying to figure that one out.
Anyway, back to the trenches. Keep those, links, tips, and inside info coming!
(pretend for the time being there are shirtless pictures of Gerard Butler and Clive [used to be cool before finding out he was a Liverpool fan] Owen here)
We’re sure that FMB will give the Beat a wonderful birthday, let’s hope that AMC also delivers a present of a good adaptation of The Prisoner tonight.
When Marvel sends out one of their teasers on a Friday afternoon with a picture of a monkey and asks “Who Is One Of The Most Exciting New Comic Characters of The Century?” we’re happy to play along.
This breathless account of and stolid railing against selling comics on iTunes from May seems rather quaint now, doesn’t it?
Things change pretty fast around here.
ALSO: Something that will probably seem equally dated in six months: Jim Shelley’s rundown of the various tablet rumors out there.
The winners of the 2009 Friends of Lulu Awards have been announced. Nominees were chosen by a panel, while the finalists were voted for online. Due to the various logistical problems surrounding this year’s awards, there will be no awards ceremony, but individualized awards are being sent out to the winners. And the winners are:
Kim Yale Award For Best New Talent: Kate Beaton for Hark, a Vagrant
Lulu of the Year: Danielle Corsetto for Girls with Slingshots
Woman of Distinction: Joanne Carter Siegel
Female Comic Creator’s Hall of Fame: Gail Simone
Best Female Character: Monica Villarreal, from Wapsi Square by Paul Taylor
Volunteer of The Year: Marion Vitus
The Hero Initiative wants your Ed Hannigan art! Hannigan is a prolific artist from the late ’70s on, with work on such titles as THE DEFENDERS, GREEN ARROW, and SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN. He’s just returned to comics with some covers for CAPTAIN ACTION.
The Hero Initiative is putting together an Ed Hannigan art exhibit to be shown at a museum in early 2010! As Ed has kept only a few of his own originals…we need your help!
If you have any Ed Hannigan art you can loan us for the exhibit, please contact Jim McLauchlin at: jmclauch@aol.com . We’d need to get the art in-hand by December 15, and can return it to you by April 30.
§ Is this the only account of the Ware/Groening/Barry/Feiffer summit at the Chicago Humanities Festival? Witness Todd Allen says it was more of a wake for alt. comics:
The level of pessimism at this panel was a bit depressing. Nobody was really suggesting alternate venues. I think it was Barry that compared comics to having a baby and wanting the baby to make money and pay the rent. Ware went a step further, saying “it’s a problem to make a living” and “do it for yourself, don’t expect to make a living.”
So there you have 3 out of 4 of alt weekly comics’ biggest stars of their respective periods saying you can’t make a living at it and two of them questioning whether you should try.
The death of alt-weekly comics strips comes despite the fact that local newspapers are holding their own in the ongoing media extinction. Maybe this is just because they don’t spend money on frivolous things like…comic strips.
§ Everyone is talking about teen-age Dave Sim’s take down of Jack Kirby:
I maintain, as I have for some time, that Kirby has little or no talent. His writing disgusts me even more than the early work of Gerry Conway. His creations seem to be of less than human quality.
We’d make fun but we didn’t much like Kirby when we were kids either.
I will be appearing tomorrow afternoon at Jim Hanley’s Universe in midtown for this event:
Join film-maker Miguel Cima and special guests at the JHU Underground at our Manhattan Location for screening of the award-winning documentary DIG COMICS on Saturday, November 14 beginning at 3:00pm. Following the screening will be an A-List panel discussion with Mr. Cima, Tom Brevoort, Heidi MacDonald, Andy Helfer, Chris Irving, and Danny Fingeroth!
DIG COMICS is a film exploring the public’s attitudes, about reading comics, and it won the documentary award at the 2009 San Diego Comic-Con film festival. Tom O’Shea interviews filmmaker Cima here, and he has some interesting ideas…
I’ve heard too many big publisher execs say in interviews that their concern is not comics, but how they can monetize the legacy characters. That’s totally fucked up! Imagine Capitol Records was like, well, these Beatles T-shirts and video games are doing great, we no longer need to distribute music. How insane would that be? Robbed of Beatles music, that’s my analogy. How is it that such mentalities are holding the keys to an art form? It’s outrageous! These guys would be ready to let Spider-Man comics vanish as long as the movies prove to be the most lucrative. And the fact is readership is down and keeps going down. It doesn’t make sense economically, either as there are obviously great opportunities to up readership and sell more books, but really, it’s just a sin for them to think that way, and it’s nuts that these guys would admit as much in public. So, yeah, if the big publishers don’t step up, comics may well go the way of the Zoetrope.
As previously mentioned, Sunday night, AMC premieres the first episode of their reimagining of The Prisoner. To support this, there’s quite an extensive website up. They are also serializing a PRISONER graphic novel by M. Scott Veach, Mitchell Breitweiser and Hugo Petrus. The story is a prequel, exploring the background of the Village. Be forewarned, as Comics Alliance reveals, it’s actually a MOTION COMIC, but instead of taking existing art and awkwardly attempting to move it around, Terry Gilliam style, it was planned that way and stays in a flat-plane animation style. Palatable.
The new series debuts on AMC Sunday night at 9 pm. It stars Jim Caviezel as Number 6 and Ian McKellen as Number 2. While we’re neutral on the need of this remake, we’ve got our DVRs set.
On the PLUS side, you can watch all the ORIGINAL Prisoner episodes on the AMC website, and the site for the original series is top notch. We just can’t get enough of these production photos! More in the jump.
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While going around the internet over just the last 24 hours, the following images turned up, all fine examples of the “Brokeback” aka “Show your ass AND your tits” pose, which all male fantasy comics women are required to master. We know artists have a hard time mastering this anatomy-defying pose, since unless you are a member of Cirque Du Soleil it’s actually impossible to turn your ass and your tits in the same direction. But they will try, oh yes, they will try, although the manga example has a rather disturbing addition in the downstairs area that looks like a testicle or a swollen taint or…something.
Luckily, we have comics to rectify that human design flaw.
Darn. This seems like such a paltry tribute to the Brokeback Pose. We encourage readers to send in more tributes. Let’s give the classic the respect it deserves!
As widely reported yesterday, Joss Whedon’s latest TV series, Dollhouse, got the axe from Fox yesterday. The show had gotten one reprieve, but low ratings had led it to be pulled for the crucial November sweeps, so the cancellation has zero surprise factor. On the good news front, all 13 of this year’s episodes will be aired — including the one directed by cartoonist John Cassaday. With one less show to run, Whedon may make more Dr. Horrible shorts, or continue his interest in “binge drinking,” as he wrote on Whedonesque.
Now call us naive, but why does anyone even bother trying to do quirky, intelligent programming on network TV any more? While Dollhouse undoubtedly needed a network budget, it would have been a hit on SyFy, AMC or Bravo. No wonder Time’s Jeff Bewkes says “multichannel TV” (once known as cable) is beating the nets to a pulp. .
While comics and trading cards were once joined at the hip in the Speculatory Era as twin collectibles, the trading card industry has faded over the years into more of a pure hobby and less of a game for flashy high rollers. Since we hadn’t been keeping up, we were a bit surprised to come across a story commenting on the news that Topps had lost the NFL license. Players Inc, the NFl players branding arm, declined to renew Topps’ license.
Since we still have a few old Topps football cards tucked away in a binder, this was saddening in many ways. But, this concise rundown shows it’s been a pretty tumultuous year for the trading card business in general, with far fewer sports licenses, increased competition for those remaining, lawsuits, cancellations and other juicy stuff. In August, Topps got an exclusive on MLB baseball, right from under Upper Deck’s nose, prompting Topps owner Michael Eisner to talk about protecting the children:
“This is redirecting the entire category toward kids,” Topps’ Michael Eisner told the Times. “Topps has been making cards for 60 years, the last 30 in a nonexclusive world that has caused confusion to the kid who walks into a Wal-Mart or a hobby store. It’s also been difficult to promote cards as unique and original.”
“I think when you get to the last page of the story, it was kind of a mission statement for where I wanted to go from here,” Vaughan explained, “which is that it’s perfectly fine to love the characters that we grow up with, and that there’s nothing wrong with keeping them alive and breathing new life into them but the real adventure for any creator is to sort of let go of the past and force yourself to create something new. So in a weird way, it would almost feel like a betrayal of the story and of the characters to go back to that rather than sort of letting their story being their story and for me to I think press on and hopefully keep creating more new things.”
--Brian K. Vaughan quoted atBlog@Newsarama.
Reports are still sketchy on just what the heck is going on with January’s Angoulême comics festival, with threats and counter threats flying. Over at The Comics Reporter, Bart Beaty continues to peg the ongoing flapdoodle over who will pay for big tents as so much posturing on the part of two officials, who want help paying for those tents. This blog post is thought to contain a good account of the goings on, but it is hard to read. Anyway, file this under local politics and just go enjoy the great comics displays.
Because contemporary audiences have gotten way too much of World War II, the long-aborning Sgt. Rock movie is getting a boot to the future. Francis Lawrence (I AM LEGEND, CONSTANTINE) is set to direct.
Until now, “Rock” has retained its World War II setting, with Silver and the studio trying to make a big-budget action adventure movie that was a throwback to flicks like “The Dirty Dozen,” which feature acts of American derring-do.
But a big budget always was an obstacle and, “Inglourious Basterds” notwithstanding, period war movies have not been in vogue in Hollywood for years, unless it was a more serious contemplation of the subject like “Saving Private Ryan.” Also, American jingoism went out of style after 9/11; even this summer’s G.I. Joe movie dropped the toy’s “A Real American Hero” tagline and made the action team internationally focused.
The studio hopes moving the time period to the future solves the dilemma.
Sure, and then they can also blow away soulless robots and clones, and no one will have to feel bad about actual people getting killed, too!
§ Congrats to Ron Perazza, VP of Creative Services at DC, and Linda Lee, Director, Book Publishing at Nickelodeon, on the birth of Hudson Lee Perazza.
§ All-around good guy Kiel Phegley has been named News Editor of Comic Book Resources.
As for what that means, well…I’m still trying to figure that out. I’ve been “on the job” since October, and so far what’s changed is that I’ve shifted from doing your standard “Here’s some product coming down the pipeline” interviews to more stuff like this, this, this, this and this. Long term, I’ll be taking over a lot of the day-to-day planning of CBR’s editorial content and helping to grow the site in a few specific places over the next year.
§ It was widely noted last week that former VAMPIRELLA editor Bon Alimagno has joined Marvel as Talent Manager, a position which requires much interfacing with creators.
§ Less widely noted, Harris’s Merchandise Manager, Chris Caniano, has taken over managing the Vampirella comics. You may have been wondering if comics featuring the sexy vampire are still being publishing, and indeed this very week saw the release of VAMPIRELLA: SECOND COMING #3 which was written by Phil Hester with art by Al Rio, colors by Romulo Fajardo, and covers by Arthur Suydam, Joe Jusko, Ryan Stegman, and Franchesco.
