Dan Piraro Wins 2010 Reuben Award; Your 2010 NCS Division Award Winners
Dan Piraro, the cartoonist behind the long-time (24 years), well-regarded panel (that is also reformatted into a strip) Bizarro, won the 2010 Reuben Award last night during a ceremony in Jersey City.
Piraro's work is distinctive, funny and executed with great attention to craft. While I never expected enough of the National Cartoonist Society membership to vote for him because of the slightly out-there nature of that work when placed into contrast with other nominees, I think it speaks well to this group and to the future that they did. What is called The Reuben is the NCS award that goes to Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year, and its past winners include nearly every heavy hitter on the comics page for the last 64 years, including Charles Schulz, Bill Mauldin, Frank King and Hal Foster. Dave Coverly won last year.
Piraro operates a model blog in terms of its consistency and clarity in discussing and presenting his work, here.
Jim Borgman and Jerry Scott's Zits won the newspaper comic strip divisional award in a year where that award seemed 1/3 springboard for future Reuben consideration and 2/3 a resting place for powerhouse strips with massive client lists to lurk in anticipation of a second run at the top prize in future years. Paul Pope won the comic book award for his work on Strange Adventures, and David Mazzucchelli's formally ambitious Asterios Polyp won a newly-minted graphic novels category.
Winners in bold:
THE REUBEN AWARD
* Stephan Pastis * Dan Piraro
* Richard Thompson
*****
TELEVISION ANIMATION
* Kevin Deters -- Walt Disney Prep and Landing
* Mike Gray -- The Infinite Goliath * Seth McFarlane -- Family Guy
*****
FEATURE ANIMATION
* Ronnie del Carmen, Storyboard Artist -- Up
* Tomm Moore, Director -- The Secret of Kells
* Barry Reynolds, Character Designer -- The Secret of Kells
*****
NEWSPAPER ILLUSTRATION
* Bob Rich * Tom Richmond
* Robert Sanchuk
*****
GAG CARTOONS
* Glenn McCoy
* VG Myers
* Dave Whamond
*****
GREETING CARDS
* Glenn McCoy
* Kieran Meehan * Debbie Tomassi
*****
NEWSPAPER COMIC STRIPS
* John Hambrock -- The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee
* Wiley Miller -- Non Sequitur * Jerry Scott & Jim Borgman -- Zits
*****
NEWSPAPER PANEL CARTOONS
* Dave Blazek -- Loose Parts
* Tony Carillo -- FMinus * Hilary Price -- Rhymes with Orange
*****
MAGAZINE FEATURE/MAGAZINE ILLUSTRATION
* Ray Alma
* Anton Emdin
* Tom Richmond
*****
BOOK ILLUSTRATION
* Lou Brooks -- Twimericks
* Tom Richmond -- Bo Confidential * Dave Whamond -- My Think-A-Ma-Jink
*****
EDITORIAL CARTOONS
* Nick Anderson
* Rob Rogers * John Sherffius
*****
ADVERTISING ILLUSTRATION
* Steve Brodner
* Randall Enos
* Mort Gerberg
*****
COMIC BOOKS
* Terry Moore -- Echo * Paul Pope -- Strange Adventures
* JH Williams -- Detective Comics
*****
GRAPHIC NOVELS
* David Mazzucchelli -- Asterios Polyp
* Seth -- George Sprott
* David Small -- Stitches
*****
some of this art is a best guess, I'm afraid; all rights to rights holders
FFF Results Post #212 -- Entitled
On Friday, CR readers were asked to "Name Five Past Or Present Comics Titles You Think Should Always Be Published, Just Because It Would Please You To See Them On The Stands." This is how they responded.
Tom Spurgeon
1. Junior Woodchucks
2. Boy Loves Girl
3. Four Color
4. MAD
5. Fight Comics
*****
Jean-Paul Jennequin
1. Omega the Unknown
2. Young Heroes in Love
3. Incredible Hercules
4. Sugar and Spike
5. Howard the Duck
1. Batman
2. Jughead's Double Digest
3. Usagi Yojimbo
4. Hot Stuff
5. Moon Knight
*****
Jason Ragle
1) Bone by Jeff Smith
2) Starman by James Robinson and Tony Harris
3) Planetary by Warren Ellis and John Cassaday
4) Sandman by Neil Gaiman and whoever he wants to work with
5) 100 Bullets by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso
1. Blazing Combat
2. Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children
3. Weirdo
4. Rare Bit Fiends
5. Magog (mostly because it cracks me up every time you mention it)
Loser Of The Week Speedy, the superhero with a child star narrative arc
Quote Of The Week
"I used to tell people that Seth drives a PT Cruiser, but it got to the point where I couldn't keep a straight face anymore." -- Tom Devlin, as reported by Gil Roth
*****
today's cover is from the 1940s-1950s mainstream comics publisher Avon
* in a week that also saw artist Lars Vilks invited back to the campus where he was headbutted during a presentation on art about Muhammed, Kurt Westergaard's previously canceled German television appearance may come off after all.
Police Confirm Writer Stephen Perry's Case A Homicide Investigation
Various wire reports bring word that police in Zephyrhills, Florida have publicly confirmed that their investigation of Stephen Perry's disappearance is a homicide investigation. Word had slipped out through police interaction with the writer's former girlfriend and his child that the police believe the writer, who had benefited from aid provided by agencies within the comics industry, had been murdered. This makes the two roommates initially believed missing and subsequently arrested on unrelated charges persons of interest in the crime. This article indicates that those two roommates have not had their bail increased to reflect a potential capital crime and that the former girlfriend has stated she was thrown a photo of another party.
NCS Cartoonists Gearing Up For National Meeting: Reuben Award Up In The Air Members of the National Cartoonists Society are assembling this weekend in Jersey City, New Jersey for the group's annual meeting. The highlight of the meeting is the Annual Reuben Awards, which is the only cartoonists soiree to require black tie and facilitates the awarding of one of the top three or four cartoonists prizes in the world.
This year Stephen Pastis, Dan Piraro and Richard Thompson are doing battle for the Reuben. As a well-regarded cartoonist with a hit strip (about 500 clients, I think) that's been around a while (nearly 10 years) that can't really be compared to any particular previous popular strip, Pastis would seem to me to be the front-runner. However, you can't count out Piraro, one of the stronger, more idiosyncratic cartoonists of the last quarter-century. I think the people voting for Piraro will do so passionately, I'm just not sure there are enough of them. Thompson could also win: I think people see Thompson as a cartoonist who will win the award at some point if he's able to continue with current workload for a while. While Cul De Sac is a classic strip and admired by its peers, and Thompson's versatility in a variety of cartooning forms has become more apparent as his strip has picked up more clients, it may a bit too early to see him holding the Reuben. (Since I'm always wrong about these things, I've picked and discounted all three. I can't lose.)
I'm not sure I see any particularly compelling contests in the division awards. For instance, your guess is as good as mine if Terry Moore, Paul Pope or JH Williams is going to take home the comic book award. Sometimes that depends on who is best known to the membership, and I have no way of measuring that.
I would imagine the state of newspaper cartooning and the rise of on-line platforms will make for a lot of fine conversation or a lot of drunk comics people or both, and I'm jealous of those in attendance. The classic advice to anyone going that wants to meet famous cartoonists is that the older male cartoonists seem for some reason to make time for younger, attractive female cartoonists or the attractive significant others of younger male cartoonists. But you didn't hear that from me.
Go, Read: Greg Cwiklik On Frazetta I greatly enjoyed Greg Cwiklik's look back at Frank Frazetta's career, a piece currently posted at TCJ.com. Unlike most of the writers who focused on Frazetta immediately after his passing, Cwiklik can remember what it was like to experience Frazetta's great '60s run of book and magazine covers as they were coming out, in a day where there wasn't the immediate context of the Internet and really not much in the way of fertile ground for such efforts to find cultural purchase, period. Cwiklik is also an artist, and I think smartly encapsulates a certain way that many artists must have regarded the ice-cool, successful Frazetta, at least in part.
Greg Cwiklik was just about the last established, formidable writer regularly writing for The Comics Journal when I sat down in the basement of Fantagraphics for the first time in 1994, and we leaned on him a lot for major pieces on interview subjects like Frazetta. I thought he had a direct, not-fussy quality when it came to mixing personal observation and artistic appraisal that served him and the magazine very well, and it's always good to read a piece by him.
* the great Bob Levin sent along the link to this post from Greg Hoffman about working with Charles Schulz on a Billie Jean King book with tons of Snoopy illustrations.
* the retailer Mike Sterling goes to Hell so you don't have to.
* Sean Collins found this post from Team Secret Acres about what to do and what not to do with submitting to the publisher. As Sean points out, it would be good general advice if you Mad Libbed the proper nouns. There is nothing worse than the insistent arrogance of creative people that think they're not get the plaudits they deserve. The one that really hits me is being given stuff at shows. With flying what it is right now, it's really hard to carry on a bunch of comics without being charged in some fashion.
* not comics: Tony Curtis had one odd Hollywood career, in a time when you could still rip up and down the box office earner charts like a piece on a child's board game. This interview with him is pretty good, although it also underscores why cartoonists are better interviews than actors: they tend to be more articulate and thoughtful and ready to speak at length.
The Never-Ending, Four-Color Festival: News On Cons, Shows & Major Events By Tom Spurgeon
* while there are a few small comic book conventions this weekend the obvious juggernaut on the schedule is BookExpo America, taking place in New York -- it's always in New York now -- right this very minute with lots of comics folk in attendance. While it doesn't have anywhere near the same "holy crap we're comics people at BEA!" feel of five, seven, nine years ago, and in fact you get the sense from some of the writing about BEA that some people believe that show is reeling because of changes in the book industry. I don't think that's true, but I imagine there have been some cutbacks. Also, I'm certain that a ton of useful work gets done by the comics folks over the weekend by simple virtue of being able to network with that many book-selling folk. And if you're into walking around picking up galleys, this week is still Christmas.
* and of course I've already forgotten the Phoenix Comicon, a show practically in my backyard. Luckily, James Owen did not. Thanks, James.
* Heidi MacDonald has a nice floor report up on the rapidly shrinking show, and notes that Fantagraphics has galleys for their long-rumored Joyce Farmer book, Special Exits.
* David Glanzer declares in this San Diego Union-Tribune article that the long-awaited Comic-Con International decision where to have their shows starting a couple of years from now is in the home stretch. They've asked for a commitment from local hotels that they'll discontinue the high rates that have been a huge sore point among detractors for years now.
* speaking of Glanzer, CCI sent out a press release this morning naming another round of guests for the convention's 2010 edition. They are: Ray Bradbury, Emile Bravo, Hunter Freberg, Stan Freberg, Moto Hagio, Dusty Higgins, Van Jensen, Phil Jimenez, Jenette Kahn, Ivan Reis, Rick Riordan, Jeannie Schulz, Ann VanderMeer, Jeff VanderMeer and Gerard Way.
* next weekend is HeroesCon, which means the news updates here will start hitting the Internet in fast and furious fashion. I'm doing a bunch of solo and paired interview panels with the idea the content will be used on CR to drive further attention to that show, and am looking forward to the weekend. One thing I'm doing is budgeting a few dollars to shop for comics, because they have a ton of $1 stuff of the kind I love purchasing at shows.
Not Comics: Several Multiloquent, Very Late Notes On That Iron Man 2 Flick * first thing: did you have any friends that watched the first Iron Man movie that aren't a) naturally besotted with Robert Downey, Jr., or b) aren't the kind of people that habitually go to blockbuster movies? I have about a dozen pals that fit that description, and they all hated Iron Man.
* the reason I mention that is that I think there are things to remember about the first Iron Man movie in relation to this one. The first movie's strengths were a perfectly primed-to-hit Robert Downey, Jr., that it was first out of the gate in 2008 after 2007's summer of tired-ass third sequels, and that it's much easier to do respectable-looking CGI with armor rather than (green) skin. Most of the other positives in the film were secondary to one or more of those factors, or supported one of those strengths.
* Iron Man 2, in contrast, leans on the strengths of the first movie rather than plays to those strengths or builds on them. It does not give a still well-liked Downey enough material to work with or play against. By far Downey's best co-star in terms of the actor bouncing a performance off of him was John Slattery's newsreel image, which is sort of weird. Iron Man 2 does not add significantly or creatively to the sense of new that the first one brought audiences, right down to what I would term an ill-advised re-use of some of the same sets. The CGI material was still only okay, and you still lose the faces.
* more than anything else, Iron Man 2 is a movie with a discernible lack of dramatic tension. I didn't take the blood poisoning threat to Tony Stark's life seriously, and the way it's temporarily ameliorated with injections at the donut shop by Nurse Romanov indicates maybe I wasn't supposed to. We aren't given access to or insight into the stable, base behavior against which we can then measure the personal decline that alarms Tony Stark's friends. The producers finally found the actor -- Samuel L. Jackson -- with whom Robert Downey Jr. seems to have almost no chemistry whatsoever. One villain, Justin Hammer, we're told from scene one not to take seriously. A second, Whiplash, seems to offer as a significant part of his character a sense that he's a tragic figure who wants to spit in the eye of God. This is fine as far as character-building goes, but as a result Whiplash come across much less seriously as an ultimate threat. When Whiplash shows up to fight Iron Man and War Machine in the film's action climax, it's like he's keeping an appointment to get his ass kicked, not arriving at the worst possible time and making everybody crap their pants. He kills more Hammer employees in the course of the film than seriously threatens Stark ones -- in fact, by taking off for the Expo to receive his beating, Whiplash avoids an encounter with two Stark allies in which he would have been an overwhelming, terrifying threat and had a much better chance to cause deep hurt and pain to Stark. I never became scared for any of the people in danger at the Stark Expo, and besides, they felt like extras, not civilians. There isn't any reason to be scared for/of the robots, because they're robots, not something like army men stuck in armor that won't obey them. They're not even super-powerful robots.
* I thought the Nick Fury scenes were uniformly awful. I like Samuel Jackson generally. I'm a Marvel geek, too. I know what the helicarrier is and what LMDs are. I still found these scenes to be dull as dirt. There's a basic dramatic scene failure going on with Fury: there is no underlying drama to the way he enters Tony Stark's space. Fury just sort of walks in to talk to Tony Stark and then walks away. There's more fundamental drama to my family coming over for a holiday meal than there is with the Most Dangerous Man In The World strolling into Tony Stark's life at this time of horrific pain and vulnerability. It always felt like he sauntering in from off-camera than that he was ever approaching another human being, a formidable one, in real space. The one bit of possible drama between the characters -- Fury's directive that Stark must stay at home and work on the Howard Stark locker -- is side-stepped and has absolutely no consequences in terms of the relationship between the two men. Dullsville.
* Nick Fury's general suckiness extends to the Black Widow. If there's a less interesting way to find out a close employee is a spy than to have her walk up and sit next to a guy in a diner booth on what felt like an empty set rather than anywhere in the real world, it's difficult to concoct that scenario.
* I thought the movie squandered a lot of easy opportunities to build action or craft meaning out of specific moments. For instance, Justin Hammer's final takedown is by Pepper Potts -- couldn't there be one tiny scene between Potts and Hammer early on that set up this comeuppance? Or did I miss it? There's another wasted trio of scenes later on, where Happy Hogan and The Black Widow go to the car, have a drive together and then arrive at a business facility and bicker about who is going into the building first. I couldn't possibly fathom who cares about these characters having time together, but even then, the scenes could have been used to more clearly build to the comic payoff of Happy Hogan taking out one guy while Black Widow takes out 50. (Also, to nerd-pick a bit, the fight between Hogan and the guard should have been boxing versus MMA-style fighting to call back to Hogan's distaste for the latter earlier in the movie. Maybe it was; it wasn't clear. It could have been clear.) Black Widow could have let Happy charge ahead and then calmly walked in behind him to devastate the other team -- that would have married that scene to how she plays Tony Stark and thus provided a nice spin on the Black Widow character: she lets guys be headstrong dumbasses and then calmly and confidently goes about her business. Instead we get Happy and Natasha banter. Nitpicking a movie like this is horrible, because it's back-seat driving and these people know way more about movies than I do, obviously. It's just that in scenes like that one and many others I never got put on the edge of my seat, not even close, and I do that really easily with popcorn movies. The whole enterprise felt slack.
* that said, there are plenty of crowd-pleasing things. The leads and co-stars are all super-pleasant, all interesting on some level to watch do their business. That scene of Robert Downey Jr. by himself, reacting to these films of his father while at the same time trying to get some work done, that's some fun acting. Rhodey 2.0 is an upgrade. Fewer people are likely to be enraged by elements of Don Cheadle's performance the way they seemed to be at parts of Terrence Howard's. Cheadle's mirroring of Downey's verbal patter is a smart way of showing why he and Tony Stark are friends: they don't really compete, and Rhodey keeps up. Theactors playing the two major bad guys know how to play off of Downey's performance in a way that generates friction that maybe wasn't there in the script. It's believable they hate Tony Stark on a fundamental level. The femaleco-stars are appealing and while I believe the movie fails the Bechdel test they're both at least formidable characters on some level. I liked the way the fight scenes unfold like video game problem-solving. The first fight between Whiplash and Iron Man had a crazy, something-weird-could-happen feel to it that is the great gift of the better superhero movies. There's stuff to see and enjoy.
* my favorite funny-only-to-me thing was how quickly Rhodey, when confronted with drunk, suited-up Tony, decides that he better put on a suit, too. I bet he did that a lot coming over to Tony Stark's house between movies and people like Pepper Potts had to spend a lot of time blocking the door and talking him down. Like I can see Rhodey volunteering to pick up the Chinese food they all ordered and two minutes later they find him suiting up so he can fly over and get it and they have to yell at him to take a car. Rhodey really wanted that suit.
* in the end, I don't think a ton of people are going to hate the movie, but I think the third one won't have the same guaranteed US box office this one did, the other Marvel films are going to be hard-pressed to find the same situational advantages the first film in this series had, and I think the evaluation of this film may trend downward when it begins to cycle on DVD and other secondary media. I liked the film okay. It passed the time on a late summer afternoon and I didn't look at my watch.
Joel Barbee, an active freelance editorial cartoonist and artist based out of San Clemente, California, died on May 20th. He was 74 years old.
Barbee was born somewhere in the American Southwest and went to school at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He was trained at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. He worked for several years in his 20s and early 30s as an illustrator in Ford Motor Company's aerospace division. He then began an even longer vocational journey as a longtime, working freelance cartoonist.
Unlike cartoonists who settle into a specific niche or go to work for a single client at some point in their career, Barbee seemed to have kept a sprawling array of clients ranging from advertising agencies to magazine publishers to graphic design firms. Major clients included Hallmark and Disney. He had a energetic, loose style reminiscent of MAD's Jack Davis. He was enamored of the water and spent much of his time when not drawing on a boat. His work recently found purchase at some of the on-line repository for editorial cartoons worldwide, such as The National Free Press and Toonpool. He also maintained a personal web site positively festooned with examples of his cartoons and art.
A celebration of Barbee's life including a display of his artwork will be held this evening at Talega Life Church in San Clemente. Details in this post's initial link.
Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update
* reversing an earlier decision, not to apologize, the Mail & Guardian's decision to publicly state that Zapiro's Muhammed cartoon on "Everybody Draw Muhammed Day" was not the news organization supporting the aims of that event is being taken as an apology.
* the Swedish artist Lars Vilks, who entered into the vortex of madness that is the Danish Cartoons Controversy by making a doodle of Muhammed with the body of a dog, has been invited back to the campus where he was recently attacked in order to finish his speech. Michael Cavna has analysis.
* my blogging betters: The writer and comics historian Mark Evanier has unearthed an article on Al Capp by one of his former assistants. Blogger Prime Neilalien digs up a Mr. A parody by Dave Sim.
* "I'm the best there is at what I do and what I do is -- BWA-HA-HA-HA!"
* the writer and cultural historian Jeet Heer produces a preview of the historical material in the new Little Orphan Annie collection. Jeet's writing on Little Orphan Annie is the only comics scholarship my mom follows.
* as promised, Ben Morse has listed his five favorite Avengers. No one that was a member of the Fantastic Four before issue #200 is a second-stringer by any measure, Ben.
* the writer and sage advice-giver of the Internet Kurt Busiek talks up The Hero Initiative. Ironically, it may be their limitations in how much help they can provide that may have granted them a second look from a lot of people. Not Kurt, though -- he was there since the beginning.
The Worst Comic Book He's Ever Read, And He's Read A LOT Of Comic Books there is an exchange of dialogue, a romantic progression, an off-hand comparison of superhero sex partners and a living weapon described in Brian's review that make this book a must-have
* the Dinette Setmoves to United Features. As Alan Gardner points out in the linked-to post, Larson had left Creators recently, ostensibly to self-syndicate.
* did I already post a link to this short article on various new works including the forthcoming second graphic novel by Olivier Schrauwen? Even if I did, I don't mind posting it again.
* in Kickstarter news, Shaenon Garrity and Jeffrey Wells are raising money for the next Skin Horse print volume. Wait... what? Okay, news just in: in just about the time it took me to write that first sentence, Garrity and Wells raised all the money they were looking for. Holy crud, indeed.
* finally, Richard Thompson posts a cover rough for the third Cul-De-Sac book, by which he and I both mean the original series of books as opposed to the new treasury-sized series of books (many strips run multiple series). What's interesting about Richard's post is he gets into where he got the idea and that kind of image-making.
The cartoonist Gabriel Vargas, a major figure in the Mexican arts and a cartoonist who delighted millions in work that managed high sales levels over five different decades, died on May 25 after a lengthy illness. He was 95 years old.
According to his entry at Lambiek, Vargas was born in the central Mexico city of Tulancingo, in the state Hidalgo. He had ten siblings. After the passing of Vargas' wealthy merchant father, the remaining family moved to Mexico City. Despite turning down educational opportunities that would separate him from his family. Vargas continued to press for work at a young age, eventually winning a 1930 contest that helped him get a foot in the door and taking a position as draftsman at the paper Excelsior.
Vargas' first hit was Los Superlocos, which was a sturdy feature for the magazine Pepin, which ran Monday to Friday.
His signature strip was was La Familia Burron, which began in 1937 after Vargas was challenged to create a feature with a female lead. It was the story of a low-income family -- the patriarch was a barber -- struggling with the give and take of everyday life under the realities of economic hardship and surrounded by friends and neighbors in a quirky but generally recognizable barrio. Vargas would draw it from its inception until the early 1970s. He would later become the feature's publisher in addition to its creator.
He won Mexico's National Journalism Prize in 1983 and the National Science and Arts prize in 2003. In 2009 he received an honorary doctorate from the University Of Hidalgo.
He continued to cartoon, providing freelance work to the magazine Gentesur.
According to wire sources, Vargas had been ill for years preceding his death, although exactly from exactly what malady he suffered beyond cardiovascular complications is unclear.
Vargas' passing was announced by Mexico's National Council of the Arts and Culture. A memorial service was held yesterday.
thanks, Tat Bestand. I'd appreciate any correction to any of the above; there's some grind to the facts of what was being published where that I can't suss out with as much certainty as I'd prefer.
Amanda Emmert Of Muse Comics On Female-Unfriendly Direct Market Stores
The well-regarded retailer and industry advocate Amanda Emmert of Muse Comics and ComicsPRO sent me the following letter in response to this editorial from last Sunday. I think I may disagree with every word she's written, but out of respect for Amanda and what was likely a considerable effort in making her objections known I wanted to give her words the widest possible audience without the usual, immediate, combative response, especially for the sake of those that might have read the piece to which it responds and in hope it will make for a better conversation over time. My thanks to Amanda for allowing me to publish the following.
*****
Hey Tom,
I wanted to take a moment to respond to just a few things in your post about the female un-friendly DM, and if you want to talk more about it I'd be happy to email more. But just a couple of quick things:
1. Saying direct market stores as a whole, or even as a majority, are un-friendly to females and then basing that on anecdotal experience is a tough way to start a conversation or debate. It's like me saying that most men are chauvinists because I have 200 anecdotal experiences with chauvinistic men; it's hard to talk someone out of a stereotype or a prejudice. I could come up with 200 anecdotal examples of female friendly stores but you'll probably have more anecdotes to counter that, and in my experience some women can be put off by a shop for many reasons including the product, not by the actions of the employees or the set-up of the store itself.
I have a small, female-owned shop. I've been complemented by female readers, moms, librarians and teachers for over a decade for how inviting my store can be for women. That said, I have had many women put off by my store. It can be anything or a combination of things--we carry card games and miniatures and those are male-dominated hobbies and sometimes a wife or girlfriend can happen to come in when there are more men in the store than women. We don't carry any porn comics but there are still plenty of highly regarded indy comics we carry that can put women off. (Do you know how popular in indy comics is the lonely-guy-masturbation scene, seriously?)
It's hard to even write about this without over-generalizing. We can talk about female-friendly products only as a generalization. Many of the women who come into my store would be put off by Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose but that book has female readers. So do the Zenescope titles. Books that you might think, inside of our industry, are female-friendly can be off-putting. Gail Simone writes wonderful, tough, smart female characters but have you seen what they wear? Gail doesn't have control over that when it comes to writing established characters, but very few female characters in comics are actually female-friendly in the general sense and that's not limited to superhero comics. How put off you are by that just depends on how much, as a reader, you're used to it, how much you care about it, or how much you like it.
When I talk to other retailers about setting up a female-friendly store, I have talked about not putting up posters or even fully-facing books that may put off the casual female reader. But even that is difficult; almost all of the characters we have (mainstream AND indy) can be off-putting if you aren't already into comics. And then as a retailer you're in the position of not advertising a book that could sell very well for you if it's promoted to customers you already have in order to appeal to casual readers who you don't have as customers yet. That's a tough place for a retailer to be.
That's not to say that balance isn't frequently achieved, because we do have many, many wonderful stores that are friendly to everybody. I just wanted to point out that stores can seem unfriendly to women just for carrying comics, not because the owner or the employees are behaving badly or haven't set up a nice store.
2. Okay, so in defense of the direct market: we have many, many wonderful stores. Most of the stores I visit are comfortable and trying to appeal to a wide customer base. Do we have stores that even I, having worked in comics retail since I was 16, wouldn't shop in? Yes, we do. The answer to that is not going to be to continue to talk about how unfriendly the direct market is to women.
Just like it doesn't make chauvinistic men less chauvinistic if I were to say "we need to keep debating about how chauvinistic all men are," it doesn't make poorly run comic book stores less poorly run by suggesting that we need to keep talking about how unfriendly direct market stores are. And, just like if I kept saying "all men are chauvinistic" it would offend the guys who are interested in the discussion, you just continue to offend the retailers who really do care about improving the direct market. They're the ones who take the time to read your blog, by the way, and it's tiring to keep hearing how unfriendly we all are when most of the retailers I know are working 60 hour weeks, at a minimum, to promote comics to everyone. They are the friend of the comic reader, not the enemy, and too often they are castigated by bloggers for any offense anywhere within our industry.
3. What's the answer to the unfriendly direct market stores, then? In my opinion, it's not to give up on the direct market as a whole and send customers to Amazon, it's not to continue to demoralize good retailers, and the answer is not to foster an anti-retailer sentiment in the blogosphere and inside of our industry.
In my opinion, the answer has several parts. We need to continue to promote great stores and spend time talking about what we like in good stores we visit--as a retailer, if I hear that something you found enjoyable in another store meant that you spent more money there, I am far more likely to try emulate what makes money than I am to change what I'm doing because you're down on the direct market. That education takes a while to reach progressive stores and may not reach the poorly run stores at all (since those owners aren't online looking for ways to improve their stores) but I can tell you that most retailers are interested in what actually makes more money and if you have examples that one can easily emulate then we have something to work with.
Another part of the answer is that we need more stores. In my experience, many of the poorly run stores that still exist have been in business a long time (because the newer poorly run stores usually don't last that long) and the owner has found what works and is going to stick with it. So you aren't going to talk him (or her) into changing much, even with all of the arguments and good examples in the world. I think starting on the ground floor with newer retailers is the way to encourage best practices. ComicsPRO has a crazy-cheap way for new or would-be store owners to connect with existing progressive retailers to learn about creating a widely appealing store. All of the retailers involved are volunteers who donate their time and expertise to others because they're interested in improving our market.
If you find a store that's doing a good job, give them your support (even if it's via mail order) and talk about them. The market is going to go where the money is, and right now the easiest money for a retailer to make has nothing to do with being female-friendly. The best discounted and easiest-to-sell comics aren't trying to be female friendly. This example is not universal but for the most part, many retailers know that their female-friendly products and displays cost them more in discount, time, and customer percentage in the short run than the biggest mainstream books that they can make more money on with less effort. Yes, I fully believe that in the long run you make more money by appealing to a wider customer base. But it's not as easy as it sounds from the outside and almost every comic book store is a small business with tight cash flow.
When your money goes to Amazon it does nothing to improve the direct market. If you're interested in improving the direct market, the answer is not to keep talking about how unfriendly many comic book stores are, the answer is to fund the ones who are doing a great job creating and maintaining stores which appeal to everyone.
Your Favorite Comics Farewells
Yesterday, CR ran an article on ten of my favorite comics "finales." I invited CR readers to share a few of their own. This is how they responded.
*****
Andrew Mansell
The Last of the annual Sunday Fall strips featuring Lucy and Charlie Brown and the football. Schulz brilliantly features Rerun -- the very best character of the last decade of the strip -- and provides us with a genuine punchline as well as some closure (depending on how you look at it) Perfection!
The Final Steve Canyon strip. The drawing by Bill Mauldin is splendid on so many levels; combined with the signatures of the "survivors", it truly marks the passing of an era.
*****
Lane Milburn
Last year I reluctantly checked out the Deathnote series from a local library and read all 12(?) volumes. I wasn't into the goth-highschool-vengeance-thriller tale at first but was soon pulled along into the taut, forward-driving plotline. I enjoyed a lot of it and found it to be a wild ride with lots of clever and tense moments.
But wow, what an ending!!! One of the book's signature (and in my mind, most annoying) features is the accruing list of rules for the Deathnote book at the beginning of each chapter. There are so many rules added every few pages that they're impossible to keep up with. But something kinda beautiful happens at the beginning of the last chapter: the two new rules are: "Once dead, they (the book's victims) cannot be brought back" and "They all go to the same place and that is Mu (nothingness)."
The final chapter is a beautiful silent sequence of a procession of robed, candle-bearing figures in the mountains, looking like pious outcasts. This little coda suggests a continued following for the defeated godlike villain Kira.
*****
Chad Nevett
Dashed off my own top ten list for my weekly random thoughts post on Comics Should be Good (in no particular order):
1. The final Calvin and Hobbes strip 2. Animal Man #26 3. Preacher #66 4. Transmetropolitan #60 5. Automatic Kafka #9 6. The Authority #12 7. The Dark Knight Returns #4 8. Punisher: The End 9. The Invisibles vol. 3 #1 10. The end of the original Incal
*****
Douglas Wolk
In the category of "last Grant Morrison issue of a series that continues after he's gone," I love the double-whammy of Doom Patrol #62 (which was, as I recall, presented as his final issue, and ends things in a pretty standard way, with a triumphal everybody-hugs note) and #63 (which turns the previous ending inside-out and recasts it as a desperate attempt at an escape from crushing awfulness). I can't think of any other serial that's pulled off that kind of fake ending/real ending trick.
*****
Box Brown
"Passing Before Life's Very Eyes" by Kurt Wolfgang -- a short story I first read in Best American Comics 2006 about a man's death. Ends in a perfectly placed blank page.
*****
William Burns
I immediately thought of Tom Strong #36.
*****
Chris Mautner
I was just thinking of this yesterday, as I'm currently reading the new volume of Walt & Skeezix, but Frank King's farewell strip for "Gasoline Alley," is touching and brilliant, with a older and slightly forgetful Walt looking over photos of his children and grandchildren and wondering what the future holds.
*****
Michael Carens-Nedelsky
Thanks for that, Tom, quite nice. The final sunday strip of Calvin and Hobbes seems a grievous omission -- that strip really was its generation's Peanuts. "It's a magical world Hobbes Ol' Buddy -- Let's go exploring!" is a line that stays forever.
In comic books proper, I think the finale of Sandman is a towering achievement, not least of which for being the first commercially successful series to end of its volition because Gaiman thought the story was done. Whether you consider "the end" issue #75, or the end of The Kindly Ones where Morpheus story concludes, or view The Wake to be a single, cohesive conclusion, the power of that resolution is undeniable.
Y: The Last Man is some craziness. Not sure how I feel about it's ending certain threads, but emotional character moments are excellent. Coincidentally, Brian K. Vaughan ended up writing for Lost.
Otherwise, never heard of Far Arden -- how was it originally published? And I thought Pluto had a decent ending, but then again it's about the only long-form manga I have ever read.
*****
Mark Coale
The two that immediately come to mind are Starman #80 and the last Calvin and Hobbes. Also Alan Moore's last issue of Swamp Thing (64?).
*****
Shannon Smith
My favorite final issue is The Invisibles Vol. 3 #1. (It counted down backwards.) Just a fantastic Morrison & Quitely comic. Blew my mind. Still does. A great breaking the fourth wall ending that (much like the final Peanuts) feels like the writer and character are speaking directly to the individual reader. But it's much more than a good bye. It's like a grand send off for the reader to begin their own adventure. As if the reader is set free as the word balloons float off the page to infect reality. While, in the spirit of the series, it is full of double meanings and pokes fun at itself. "Our sentence is up." Which means freedom. Or, just it means that the literal sentence on the page is over. Period. Alan Moore's Promethea had a nearly identical ending but it took Moore a full comic to explain what the Jack Frost character explains in the last couple of pages of The Invisibles.
*****
Michael Grabowski
The final Calvin & Hobbes strip is a nice variation on them heading off into the sunset. The final Far Side is memorable, though a little too cute to be truly great. The final few pages of High Society may not qualify, but it's memorable for being very different in style from the way any other Cerebus book or serial ended. I also wonder if it's not the ending Sim would keep if he could go back and change it. The original Omega The Unknown #10 very much has that "suddenly canceled TV show" quality about it even if by itself it's not the greatest comic or ending.
*****
John Vest
I enjoyed reading the CR Best Goodbyes feature. Here are a few goodbyes in comics I enjoyed (although maybe the first two don't count exactly).
I liked Nick Fury #15 when it came out and was always kind of sorry Marvel revived the character. I asked Mr. Friedrich at a Heroes Con about the comic and he said the original intent had been to kill Nick fury, as the comic hadn't been selling well. I'm not sure if Nick Fury has ever really been used effectively in comics since that issue.
It wasn't the end of the series, but Doctor Strange was never the same after Steve Ditko's departure with Strange Tales #146. That issue had the fantastic splash pages with the Eternity/Dormammu fight.
Since you mentioned manga, I thought I'd mention the splash at the end of 20th Century Boys, where the band finally gets back together and plays a tune together was awesome, while the end of the enigmatic Blame! was chilling and eerie, and just a little hopeful.
For comics, the ending of Transmetropolitan is the best finale of any story I've ever read, regardless of medium, and it brought tears to my eyes. Sandman and Preacher had phenomenal endings as well.
*****
Leandro Damasceno
Great list, but I think Bill Waterson's Calvin & Hobbits could find a spot among the top 10.
*****
Danny Ceballos
1. Chester Brown's Yummy Fur #32
A grand exit for a disheveled lady of a comic book. Chester's as yet unfinished telling of the Gospels of Matthew finally takes center stage and then that stage goes dark. With a laff-out-loud depiction of Salome's dance (rendered in a mere two panels) joltingly followed by that grotesque severed head of the baptist held aloft in mockery for eternity. The back cover ends it all with a super-Jewy Jesus laying down a guilt trip so powerful that it should last you at least two or three lifetimes. Worth the original $2.95 price for the cover alone.
2. Doom Patrol Vol. 2 #63
Another "it was all a crazy dream" like ending is gratefully averted by Grant Morrison who allows our herione to slouch off onto that confetti strewn street named Danny. I hope they never find the body...
*****
Thanks, everybody! Great endings. Two editor's notes. One is that on Chris Mautner's entry the 1959 Gasoline Alley art is as close as I could find to King's last strip. Two is that while it's up to you whether Calvin and Hobbes is an egregious omission from your list, it's omitted from my favorites because I thought it was kind of obvious and ordinary. I say that as a huge fan of Watterson's work. My list would be different in five or six places if it were a list of the best endings rather than my ten favorites. I apologize for my soft labeling.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* Happy 5th Year Blogiversary to Bully's Comics Oughta Be Fun! I like Bully so much that I sometimes feel guilty eating steak.
* the writer and blogger Sean Collins asks if you need to like a protagonist for the work they're in to be a good book. Or if you need to like them for any reason at all. You know, the Wilson argument. I'd say no, and it's bizarre that this is even an issue. Only in comics.
* I'm enjoying posts like these where Mike Sterling posts about toys. The X-Men character he's talking about is one of those characters that made me realize that there were people younger than me having an entirely different X-Men experience than the one I left behind and I should lighten up rather than make fun of it or whine or whatever.
* personal note: it may be time for a vacation -- and counseling -- when you wake up from a long dream about going to the Schulz Museum for the launch of something called Vagino Comics.
* not comics: you always remember your first big-city, open 25 hours, takes every credit card including Diner's Club, nobody speaks English, sells you burritos the size of your head restaurant. All hail Arturo's.
* finally, is it just me, or does viewing the new CBLDF blog in Firefox result in a jumbled mess with the right-hand column material kind of looking like it was tossed on top of the left-hand column material?
CR Feature: The Best Goodbyes
So with the finale for the television show Lost rapidly receding into the background, the reaction to the show suggests the question: what are the best "final episodes" in comics history? Like television, some of the best ones weren't official finales, or didn't quite take. With that general caveat in mind, here are ten of my favorite comics good-byes.
1. Milton Caniff's last Terry and the Pirates Sunday: December 29, 1946
There was never a better comics kiss, and that's saying something, especially considering Caniff himself probably put onto paper five of the ten strongest challengers. Instead of mailing it in, and the way Caniff was leaving the feature might have led a lot of creators to wind things down more generally, Caniff provided another classy reminder of Terry's unbeatable combination of shameless soap opera rooted in an idealized sense of human decency and the cartoonist's skill with cinematic scene-setting on the comics page. Reading that strip could be like eating the richest, most perfectly prepared chocolate cake.
*****
2. The final Barnaby run: January-February, 1952 Barnaby was a gently rollicking and humane strip that didn't trade in sentimentalism but counted on a similar well of forgiveness in presenting the sometimes fussy idiocy fostered by its world of moderately out-sized characters. The final sequence (for which creator Crockett Johnson returned), where Barnaby becomes too old to have adventures with his slightly incompetent fairy godfather, stabs right in the heart and, further, underlines the temporary nature of newspaper comics art and art in general in a profound way.
*****
3. Love and Rockets Vol. 1 #50
Two great moments among many in the final issue of one of the greatest serial comics: Jaime's Maggie and Hopey are reunited after several issues of stories that were driven to great extent by their absence in each others' lives. Gilbert Hernandez slips one of the biggest mind-fucks in comics history into his otherwise graceful Palomar story, where a certain character's appearance suggests the two major worlds of each creator are intertwined and provides a potential answer to the mystery behind one of the cartoonist's best comics stories.
*****
4. The final Peanuts: February 12, 2000
Most hardcore Peanuts fans of my acquaintance were prepared for just about any character taking center stage in the final Sunday of this great strip except for the one who did: Schulz himself, with a letter of goodbye that felt in some way like the most unnecessary apology in the world.
*****
5. Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow?
A goodbye to a certain Superman for whom multiple generations of children had feelings ranging from fondness to an imprint of certain daddy issues, and an equally heartfelt farewell to a school of comics storytelling. Plus: good dog.
*****
6. Animal Man #26
I think that the vast majority of this issue and the whole Pirandello-style intrusion of the writer into the storyline was inelegantly handled, then and now. And also this barely counts as an ending except as a cap to Morrison's admittedly distinctive run -- this iteration of the character's comic would run into at least the issues numbered in the 70s and the characters and concepts have been used by DC since then. Still, the idea of returning a group of supporting characters to life simply because it's the most human thing to do is a sweet, affecting and enduring idea, one that has more resonance today than it did back then.
*****
7. Zot! #36
I've always contended that Scott McCloud's YA-before-YA comic book series worked best when it dug into how a certain kind of lonely kid negotiated fantasy -- a progression of immersion, negotiation, assimilation -- so for me the series' final issue becomes a grace note about how sweet it can be to go Someplace Else just for the sake of that experience.
*****
8. Far Arden, Epilogue
There are a lot of great endings to a lot of stand-alone graphic novels, but very, very few of them have that "final episode" feel the same way the last 10 minutes of a satisfying film isn't quite the same thing as the last installment in a long-running TV show. Kevin Cannon's Far Arden was serialized, however, in the manner of a limited-episode BBC series. The nautical saga's final chapter gets its points by being as bleak as they come, both in its inversion of the energetic cartooning of the previous chapter and the sense that all there is to do after a certain point when things go wrong is to submit to the authorities and, when you get the chance, dwell on just what the hell went wrong. (The television equivalents would include the final Sapphire and Steel and the third Veronica Mars "we don't know if we're coming back or not" ruthlessly downbeat season finale.)
*****
9. The Last Several Days of Franklin Fibbs: September 25 to October 8, 2006
I enthused over Franklin Fibbs in the middle part of the last decade the way I all but politically endorsed Richard Thompson's Cul De Sac a few years later. Hollis Brown and Wes Hargis' strip was never better than it was after cancellation, where a lot of humor was wrung from the strip's impending extinction and some of the more drastic measures used to keep it alive (such as booting its elderly protagonist for a kid version of same called Little Fibbs). For the record, while I know they were joking I would have totally read Fetus Fibbs, too. (This is another one with an easy television equivalent: the little-watched Moonlighting self-assessment finale.)
*****
10. Tony Fitzpatrick's The Wonder, Vol. 3
The artist/poet doesn't consider these books comics, but I've gone and claimed them anyway for the way their thematic progressions match more typical narratives beat for beat and for the power of their blend of words and imagery. In the final chapter of a three-volume study of his father's Chicago, Fitzpatrick goes darker than any other of the city's great chroniclers dared into what seems at times like an endless series of monsters, freaks and out-sized characters. What keeps these final pages from becoming intolerable is that the artist turns around and gives us four or five instances of his most positive portraiture, such as this lovely tribute to the Sox's Joe Crede.
*****
That's what I can think of for now. The odd thing is that not a single manga series came to mind, not even when I sat and furiously thought about it. It may be that I don't follow the series with the biggest payoffs, I'm not sure.
This Isn't A Library: New And Notable Releases To The Comics Direct Market
*****
Here are the books that make an impression on me staring at this week's no-doubt largely accurate list of books shipping from Diamond Comic Distributors, Inc. to comic book and hobby shops across North America.
I might not buy all of the works listed here. I might not buy any. But were I in a comic book shop tomorrow I would spy on a few of the following.
MAR100181 BATMAN RETURN OF BRUCE WAYNE #2 OF (6) $3.99
Strangely, this is the only superhero comic book that popped out at me this week -- Grant Morrison on Batman in various time periods. I haven't seen it, but that sounds kind of fun.
DEC090221 WEDNESDAY COMICS HC $49.99
DC's broadsheet-sized hit and miss anthology, featuring a selection of solid creative teams working on a college preview course's group of superhero characters featuring various big hitters. I imagine better paper, discounted bookseller price points and the overall impressive size of the thing will do wonders for it's reconsidered.
MAR101053 COMPLETE LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE HC VOL 05 $49.99
I think these are some of the best comics of all time, and they're being done up right by IDW.
JAN101031 TORPEDO HC VOL 02 $24.99
You won't find any prettier comics this year.
SEP090281 COMPLETE INVINCIBLE LIBRARY HC VOL 02 LTD S/N ED $175.00
I read this series in comic book form, but it's a sign of its health that it sells in multiple iterations. This is obviously the fanciest.
MAR100479 DAZZLER #1 $3.99
The character of Dazzler has been around longer than Indiana Jones. Of course it isn't the age, it's the mileage. Not much mileage on this character.
MAR100661 THOR LATVERIAN PROMETHEUS TP $14.99
Okay, this just looks like they're stringing random words together.
APR100933 BIG QUESTIONS #14 (MR) $7.95
The latest Anders Nilsen and one of the last few alt-comics standing.
FEB101169 DAVE MCKEAN POSTCARD FROM BRUSSELS HC $18.00
A small McKean set of portraits from the city in question. I think there have been others; I've never seen one. Sure sounds pretty good, though, right?
FEB100918 DUNGEON QUEST SC BK 01 $12.99
Joe Daly's latest, an Angouleme Festival essential book this year in its French-language iteration, is so deeply weird it makes his oddball Hergé pastiche in his last work look like actual, straight-forward Hergé.
DEC090861 SEARCH FOR SMILIN ED GN $16.99
A major collection from an A-List comics talent. This time out the great Kim Deitch examines the nature of entertainment through the ways audiences encounter, process and recall it. The joyful image-making couldn't be more entertaining to drink in.
*****
The full list of this week's releases, including some titles with multiple cover variations and a long, impressive list of toys and other stuff that isn't comics, can be found here. Despite this official list there's no guarantee a comic will show up in the stores as promised, or in all of the stores as opposed to just a few. Also, stores choose what they carry and don't carry so your shop may not carry a specific publication. There are a lot of comics out there.
To find your local comic book store, check this list; and for one I can personally recommend because I've shopped there, albeit a while back, try this.
The above titles are listed with their Diamond order code in the first field, which may assist you in finding comics at your shop or having them order something for you they don't have in-stock. Ordering through a direct market shop can be a frustrating experience, so if you have a direct line to something -- you know another shop has it, you know a bookstore has it -- I'd urge you to consider all of your options.
If I didn't list your comic here, that because this entire reality is a purgatory from which I learn by making mistakes.
Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update
* there will be no apology for Zapiro's Mohammad-related cartoon, so don't expect one.
* I'm not sure I agree with many of the sentiments expressed in this article, although he's right to point out that the lack of immediate violence doesn't mean all that much considering how the initial Danish Cartoons Controversy burbled to the surface after several months.
* Hugo Rifkind takes a frying pan and clubs last week's Everybody Draw Mohammad Day a few times right in the face.
Updates On Stephen Perry Case
* this television Monday evening news report from the local Fox affiliate provides a look at various places of interest in potential homicide victim and one-time Marvel Comics writer Stephen Perry. It also suggests that locals are getting frustrated by the way local police are running the investigation.
* a story providing some background and context on Perry's situation was up earlier and is now down. I'm including the link in the hopes that maybe it goes back up at some point.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* Mark Evanier writes a timely post on a delicate subject: the fact that so many writers and artists become at risk because they are eternal optimists when it comes to their own talent.
* Alan Gardner picked up on one gentleman's campaign to have Rollin Kirby honored with a stamp. Sounds good to me. Speaking of which, how great is it to have those Bill Mauldin stamps at the post office?
* go, look: Tom Neely's wild-looking Conan art looks like a straight-up graduate of the Kevin O'Neill School Of Berserk Superhero Comics.
* my friend Gil Roth kicks in with the first part of his two-part travelogue on TCAF 2010, including an on-the-ferry encounter with Tom Devlin and Dan Clowes. I love the fact that people can go to comics conventions now the same way they go to something like "Taste Of Chicago" -- as part and maybe not even the dominant part of a vacation weekend.
Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update
* no surprise that the lingering fall-out from last week's Everybody Draw Mohammad Day is focused on Zapiro's cartoon and the efforts to block it from publication. Zapiro is a huge figure in the press down there, and a lightning rod for controversy, so his participation was bound to result in the most dramatics. Here's a decent general article on how that story has developed.
* this article suggests that one reason that South Africans are touchy about this issue right now is that it's all happy faces forward as they prepare to host soccer's World Cup.
* the Facebook page through which the event was organized was the locus point for some on-line shenanigans, as in the reveal of personal information for one of the event boosters. With death threats in the air, identification theft and subsequent public airing of that information put things into a potentially different and troubling light.
The writer and comics historian Mark Evanier is reporting that the comics artist and animator Howard Post passed away last week from complications due to Alzheimer's. He was 83 years old.
Post was born in 1926 in a neighborhood near Coney Island in Manhattan. He spent the bulk of his childhood in the Bronx, which in an interview with Jon Cooke in 1999 he recalled as a still highly undeveloped area with plenty of park areas and even a zoo to capture a young man's interest. He drew as a child, and later enrolled himself in New York's Hastings School in order to learn animation. His father's illness sent him scrambling for paying work: first at Famous Studios as an in-between artist and then at the various comics packagers located around mid-town Manhattan. He eventually settled in at Bernard Baily's studio, receiving $15 a page.
The remainder of the 1940s and into the 1950s saw Post settle into a pattern of multiple publishers and multiple assignments. He worked with Paramount on their efforts supporting war intelligence. He then received work from DC, almost moved to Dell (replacing Walt Kelly; the money didn't work), Timely/Marvel, Prize and Pioneer. The common thread was that he worked on non-superhero material, mostly humor interspersed with some straight-up adventure material. Although I can't find an exact date, most historians seem to agree that the 1950s is when Post began work for Harvey Comics, working on a variety of their features and given co-creator credit on some of the better known members of the various Harvey comics cast. He is sometimes given that credit for Hot Stuff because of his work on the early comics (lifelong Post friend Warren Kremer did the posters), although Alfred Harvey received official credit. His work on that character's stories is considered by many fans his best.
The 1960s were stuffed with important comics assignments for Post. In addition to the ongoing Harvey gig, Post spent some time at Paramount as the head of their Cartoon Studios (1964-1965), worked briefly as an independent film producers, created the oddball Anthro comic for a DC in the throes of a post-Marvel identity crisis (it lasted six issues, the last with Wally Wood inking Post), and launched the comic strip Dropouts with United Feature Syndicate. The Dropouts ran from 1968 until 1981. With its archetypal cast, minimalist surroundings, dependency on verbal humor, Post's surprisingly facile magazine-illustration style line, and the general sarcasm on display, it was one of the emblematic strips of the post-1950s, pre-1980s newspaper strip "sarcasm" era: a strip that could be reduced to a tiny size on the shrinking comics page, and that could be remembered for one or two lines of a verbal jab.
"The writing was difficult but drawing funny stuff was the boon of the whole thing, because I had done them by rote for so long," he told Cooke. "After the first couple of months, you could draw it in your sleep. Writing the gags was tough and, if you're a harsh judge of your material, it was tougher. And I was a harsh judge."
Like many of the Harvey artists of the 1950s and 1960s, Post briefly caught on with Marvel's 1980s kids effort Star Comics. He also began to teach at the School of Visual Arts, a position he held for several years.
Howard Post was preceded in death by twenty years of a wife of some approximately 20 years. He is likely survived by two daughters.
Writer Steve Perry Believed Murdered
Steve Perry, briefly a writer at Marvel Comics and perhaps better known for his contributions to 1980s animation as a writer on the Thundercats show, garnered attention earlier this year as a success story in charitable efforts by the Hero Initiative in assisting creators in trouble. The contributions from the organization to Perry, in addition to independent fund-raising efforts from people like Perry's friend Steve Bissette, allowed the writer to move out of a homeless, destitute state and begin writing again. An appearance at a convention near the Florida town where he lived was a further, encouraging sign.
Go, Read: Interview With Jess Fink On Latest Round Of Content Appropriation
Gary Tyrrell at Fleenhas a nice, short interview with Jess Fink on the newest use of her work without permission, including what that means when the original work in question has been licensed elsewhere and how discouraging -- and never flattering -- this kind of thing can be for artists who live and die professionally on the strength of imagery that gets ripped off.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* The Daily Cross Hatchhas up a nice, short interview with Jonathan Rosenberg, following up on the Goats cartoonist's announcement he'd be re-thinking his comics career.
* Frank Santoro remembers having Bill Watterson around on Sundays.
* we used to have a policy at The Comics Journal in the mid-1990s to be really careful with interviews, because it was a way-too-easy way to do things that should be hard. I'm reminded of that policy these days the more I read these roundtables that seem to be popping up everywhere. The positive is that if I distrust them, they're probably super-popular. And that I'll probably soon be doing my own.
* not comics: I watched some of the original three Star Wars movies over the weekend while cooking and cleaning house. I like that Princess Leia and Darth Vader are the only characters to kill people with their bare hands in those movies, although maybe I'm forgetting someone. Watching an enraged, 85-pound Leia choke out a 900-pound muppet makes me think that if Luke failed and the dead Jedis had turned their attention to the Princess as a last hope she would have flipped to the Dark Side in like 85 seconds.
Three Arguments We Could Be Having
Riffing off of a line or two in an interview with yours truly conducted by Noah Berlatsky, Sean Collins at Robot 6 made a list of comics arguments that could go away. The readers of that site suggested several more. I thought their suggestions at least reasonable in nearly every case. I will probably find a place for most of the old arguments for the rest of my life, as I personally learn and advance very little in the overall scheme of things. (I can do ten minutes on Beta vs. VHS, and don't get me started on baseball's Designated Hitter.) I recognize, however, that there is a place for new arguments in comics, discussions that should be going on around the Internet and in convention bars and on the train between Los Angeles and San Diego, debates that might better reflect the more pressing issues of the day or at least give voice to concerns that are squeezed out by another round of complaints about those downer hate-the-world crybabies making all the alternative comics.
Here are three more interesting questions for comics people, 2010, at least from my point of view. I'll add more as they come to me.
1. Does Reprinting Archival Comics Material Have A Moral Component?
We live in a Golden Age of comic strip reprints, a market where we can read not just the current hits through multi-tiered programs at Andrews McMeel but where we find a variety of publishers -- including AM -- packaging together near- or complete runs of strips that have passed the way of the Dodo. If you were to stumble into a bookstore boasting an employee with a serious desire to sell comic strip reprints or a comic shop that can handle a number of these projects within it overall financial profile, you could find books ranging from Little Orphan Annie to Dick Tracy to Mary Perkins: On Stage to Bringing Up Father to Peanuts to Prince Valiant to Bloom County to Doonesbury to Betty and Billy and Their Love Through The Ages. And you wouldn't be 1/3 done looking.
There are also a range of comic book reprinting projects that range from the systemic (the DC comics archives), to the scatter-shot but still wide-ranging (the Marvel Essentials books), the legacy-driven (Vertical's devotion to Osamu Tezuka), to the specifically targeted (Chip Kidd's book of Jiro Kuwata manga starring Batman and Robin), to the eclectic (the Dan Nadel-edited collections like Art In Time; the Craig Yoe-edited books at IDW like the book collecting Krazy Kat's "Tiger Tea" storyline.
This is mostly wonderful material, all of it represents comics of some sort of interest on some level, and as is the case with most other art forms one could conceivably read nothing but amazing older material until the end of one's days.
What doesn't get explored is the moral dimension of such publishing. Dan Nadel identified the core issue in a recent panel in Toronto: the idea of such collections doing right by the authors involved. Nadel meant this mostly, I think, in an aesthetic sense. There is only a limited window for each artist's work: a book that collects sub-standard material visually or is otherwise poorly conceived, or is poorly executed, can be a crime against that artist's potential legacy and shapes not only the future debate on an artist or a feature's merit but provides financial barriers against future projects that could show the work in a different, better light. There are other concerns. Another potential moral consideration is revenue -- very few artists whose work has slipped into the public domain or remains cemented within a corporate structure receive payment for the use of their work, sometimes to the point of great and embarrassing imbalance (a modern cover artist getting a check for copying an old-timer's style while the family of that old-timer doesn't even get a complimentary copy). It is also worth considering the issue of credit, whether or not artists particularly in "hosted" presentations of their work receive the proper amount of the spotlight for having created certain works in the first place.
These are all difficult conversations to have: no one wants to talk about financial considerations on any level, it's hard to get at what exactly constitutes an aesthetic betrayal of an artist's work and there are easy defenses to be made on behalf of projects that make a lot of money ("But we made that guy a lot of money.") and those that don't ("Do you realize I'm doing this on their behalf for basically no money?") Sometimes both arguments can be made. That doesn't mean we shouldn't keep having the discussion. Even the notions that sting or that force us to justify ourselves have a purpose in the long run.
2. Why Are So Many Direct Market Comics Shops Still Female Unfriendly?
One of the reasons I'm so hard on the Direct Market system of comic shops and hobby stores is that I have an inkling as to how awesome they can be. I love what the elite comics shops can mean to a specific customer base in their area; I love what they can do for certain market segments. I also have a long enough memory to appreciate the numbers on a lot of different kinds of comics that were moving through a system of mostly sell-everything stores 25 years ago, just before a new breed of scumbag poisoned that system for personal gain, younger publishers stomped over it without realizing or caring what they were doing, and the big companies roared into market share contests that stuffed so much material without corresponding attention to the infrastructure so as to give the collective a kind of cape and cowl diabetes that continues to casts a pall of sickness over the entire system. Combine that with a mostly under-capitalized publishing class and a distribution system that while enjoying obvious successes in some areas still acts in others like it's 1988 and their partners should bid on services, and you have some real problems.
Nothing irks me as a sign that comic shops have calcified to their detriment as much as the fact that so many still seem to be specifically resistant to female customers. Being repulsed by a comic book shop seems to me in a lot of cases a perfectly rational response. I'm an adult male, 6'2'', can as of my last birthday still bench press my body weight, fully nerd conversant, and in the last decade I've shopped in at least two comic books that sort of frightened me. One was down a stairwell in a church's basement with an entryway full of standing water, a Lovecraft story-like gateway that always seemed like it could be hiding someone with a tire iron. I used to bend over and stare into the shadows from the opposite side before going down the stairs. Another shop I used for a while was so filled with junk and dirt wall to ceiling and had a proprietor so scary that it actually felt at all times that I was buying illegal porno and the guy selling it to me might stab me in the neck. Seriously, that second one I had to sit on the floor to look at some of the older magazines and I always sat facing the counter. Not exactly Nordstrom's. And this doesn't even get into how retail staff might conduct themselves or the content of the material displayed might bring with it some rational objection. I have plenty of female friends that love comics and will shop at a DM store with me, but over all my years I have left more of my female friends sitting in the car than I've ever been able to convince to come into stores -- at least more than once -- and I bet that's true for a lot of people. I once took three girls 6-14 I was baby-sitting into a pretty average comic shop -- the girls all read comics -- and within five minutes each went to sit in the car. I quickly rang up and we sped away. Their parents and I joked with them at dinner about the Scary Comics Shop, and they laughed about it, but the more I think about, the more that wasn't all that funny an afternoon.
Comics is a secondary art form. It has undeniable appeal but relative to that wave of positive feeling a small audience of people willing to buy, buy deep, and buy wide. And yet one of the primary systems for selling comics to such an audience seems geared to limit what gets sold and to whom: an appalling lack of regional coverage, a single and restrictive retail model, a near-religious focus on a primary genre, neglecting entire product categories or expressions of the art form because it's not something they feel their store is interested in selling (the winnowing out of alt-comics pamphlets; the non-starter for most shops that was manga). All of these things are problems, but nothing should gall more than the idea that any customer feel less than welcome in a retail establishment on the front lines of commerce for an entire industry. This should be a base-line consideration, every single store that drives away customers in this fashion should be mocked and censured, the big companies should take a much more active interest in how they're represented community to community and I'd argue that this is important to discuss again now because it seems like very little came of such discussions 20 years ago. There is no other art form where I dispense everyday advice about how to enjoy it and make routine, casual qualifications based on someone's sex. I've never sent a prose reader to Amazon because Amazon doesn't leer; I'd like to stop doing it in comics. I think we should talk about this until it stops, and then maybe we can talk about the rest of it.
3. What Are All These Superhero Comics Really Saying?
The prism for talking about most comics, but particularly mainstream comics, is their monetary success, either relative to the industry in which those comics come out or for their value within the wider entertainment world. I'd like to see more discussions on what these comics are actually saying about the concepts they engage. One reason is I think the conversation would be deeply disturbing and thus somewhat hilarious to have. Forcing people used to justifying creativity through marketing language to actually discuss the ideas they're putting out there can be a fun ride. It's not that comics don't exist as items that are marketed; they do. But they also exist as a vehicle for ideas, for stories, and that almost never gets discussed except under a strange construction that relies on the notion of fan entitlement. That's too bad.
The way comics work as a forum for ideas offers up a variety of things to discuss. One is identification, inclusion, the way that a comic can reflect a reality of gender and age and race that either has a place for you or doesn't. When you kill off a character, you're indeed making a shocking move that shows just how serious the storyline is, or whatever goofy way it gets phrased in the next day's CBR interview, but you're probably also offing some poor younger reader's favorite character, some fictional construct with whom some group of readers identify for some reason or another, a reason you probably provided them. Isn't that just as important to talk about as whether the numbers of who and what is killed breaks one way or another? Some characters also embody abstract principles that are frequently betrayed by the soap opera elements of twist, turn, shock and surprise. When characters that extol the virtues of great responsibility act in an irresponsible fashion and are rewarded in some way, that can confuse the effectiveness of an idea you're foisting on people as a core strength of said character. If you really think your characters have cultural power, or even iconic status, switching up what makes them that way for some sort of temporary oomph in this year's mega-crossover just weakens your ability to communicate those primary ideas over the long term. Santa always stays on message. Superman might consider following Santa's lead. This kind of thing is exacerbated with the editorial control these companies favor, as you don't even get the same kind of back and forth and correctives between creators you might of seen 20-30 years ago.
Mostly, though, I'd just like to see that kind of comic held to the basic standards to which all popular entertainments are held. What do these stories actually mean? I read all these Image comics about these apocalyptic confrontations and the nature of good and evil -- are they saying anything of value about these concepts, and if they're aren't, isn't that worth noting, too? I barely watch Lost, and I still know it has something to say about the spiraling costs of bad parenting; I read all of Final Crisis like three times and I couldn't tell you about one idea it extolled beyond looking up its own ass and giving a thumbs-up to the general, grand spectacle of imaginative superhero comics. If comics say something about the cultural zeitgeist, what exactly is it they're saying? The current cycle where the monies made justify every last act of goosing core concepts and telling increasingly cynical and unpleasant stories, and the criticism that mostly comes in response of pointing out outlandish aspects of this and saying "Holy crap, that's idiotic!" -- both of those things could make way for some real conversation, I'd say. I laugh whenever I see superheroes standing around at yet another funeral that probably won't take in their disrespectful-looking circus outfits, but I'm not sure I know why I have my reaction and why other fans join them in their Iron Eyes Cody impersonations. If nothing else, the generation of people for whom such characters seem to hold unquestioned, unimpeachable importance is going to start dying in droves in a quarter century. Getting back to the ideas behind such stories seems to me a better way to understand how the stories working with such ideas might continue, or if they're not destined to continue at all -- a World War II-era fan of Westerns time travels to 2010 and almost immediately starts shrieking -- help nail down an important aspect of their legacy.
*****
So that's three. I'll try to come up with more. It's depressing to me that we keep arguing the same things over and over again and rarely if ever move forward or at least move on. There's a lot out there to talk about.
1. Chepan Island (owned by Dr. Beaky, Love and Rockets)
2. Plunder Island (Popeye)
3. Paradise Island (Wonder Woman)
4. Blackhawk Island
5. Manhattan Island (DMZ)
*****
Ryan Sands
1. Panorama Island (from Maruo/Rampo's The Strange Tale of Panorama Island)
2. Terra Amata (post-explosion in Dungeon Twilight)
3. Tiphares (the floating island in the sky from Gunnm/Battle Angel Alita)
4. Shin-Takarajima (New Treasure Island by Tezuka)
5. Genosha (from xmen, no brainer)
1. Drum Island
2. Thriller Bark
3. Long Ring Long Land
4. Island of Rare Animals
5. Skypiea
*****
Grant Goggans
1. Devil's Island (Mega-City One's open-air prison)
2. Kooey Kooey Kooey
3. Sealand (as depicted in The Losers)
4. American Samoa (as depicted in Doonesbury)
5. Plunder Island
*****
Michael DeForge
1) Islands Fold http://www.islandsfold.com/
2) Genosha
3) The Strange Tale of Panorama Island (upcoming)
4) The Island of the God Watchers (Kamandi)
5) Hellboy -- The Island
1. Monster Island (as in Sam Glanzman's KONA, MONARCH OF...)
2. Monster Island (as in Stephen Bissette's KING OF...)
3. Monster Isle (as in Joey Weiser's)
4. NoMan (as in Wally Wood's T.H.U.N.D.E.R. AGENTS) [think about it...]
5. Manhattan
*****
Tom Bondurant
1. Blackhawk Island
2. KooeyKooeyKooey (from the Giffen/DeMatteis/Adam Hughes Justice League America)
3. Dinosaur Island (from The War That Time Forgot, etc.)
4. Transformation Island (from the Marston/Peter Wonder Woman)
5. Monster Island (from Fantastic Four, etc.)
1. Nova Venezia (Tozo, the Public Servant)
2. Maas Island (Fantastic Four #263-264)
3. Atlantis (raised up off the ocean floor in Fantastic Four: Atlantis Rising)
4. Manhattan (not the real one, but that one Hercules inexplicably pulled around by a chain in Marvel Team-Up #28)
5. Cerelia (Breakfast of the Gods)
*****
Michael May
1. Hydra Island
2. Paradise Island
3. Dinosaur Island
4. Madripoor
5. Oolong Island
1. The Black Island (Tintin)
2. Blackhawk Island
3. The island where Jimmy Corrigan was stranded by Superman
4. The island where Wash Tubbs and Capt Easy were shipwrecked (in issue #2 of the Dragon Lady Press Wash Tubbs reprints of 1930 dailies specifically. They were probably shipwrecked hundreds of times.)
5. Marzal
*****
K. Thor Jensen
1. Neo-Tokyo
2. Coldheart Island
3. Hulligan's Wharf
4. Hate Island
*****
Des Devlin
1. Charlie Brown's pitcher’s mound, after the game has been rained out.
2. That island with the exploding mushrooms, from Tintin.
3. Concrete, swimming.
4. That island that sank when the castaway plucked the flower, from Don Martin.
5. NoMan, from T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents (because NoMan is an island).
1 Whatever island Conchy lived on
2 Manhattan (DMZ)
3 Muir Island (Xmen)
4 Attabar Teru (Tom Strong)
5 Any island in a "desert island" gag cartoon
*****
Don MacPherson
1) Dinosaur Island
2) Blackhawk Island
3) Marvel's Manhattan
4) Star Island (Green Arrow's "birthplace")
5) Paradise Island/Themyscira
*****
Johnny Bacardi
1. Oolong Island, home of the current incarnation of the Doom Patrol
2. KooeyKooeyKooey, of Justice League International fame
3. Mordillo Island
4. Paradise Island
5. Monster Island, home of the Mole Man and all those rooms with sashes
*****
Jamil Thomas
1. HYDRA Island
2. Vathlo
3. Marzal
4. Coldheart Island
5. Dinosaur Island
1. Paradise Island (Themiscyra? I always knew it as Paradise Island)
2. Dinosaur Island (the only war comics I ever read as a kid were The Land that Time Forgot. and Monster Commandos)
3. The Island from Battle Royale
4. Madripoor (clue to how big Wolverine was at the time: they had to invent a whole island-nation for his new series)
5. Monster Isle/Monster Island (were they different? They both were secret headquarters for Mole Man, and I always thought they were the same, but I've had stupid arguments where somebody argued they were separate)
*****
Uriel A. Duran
1. Dinosaur Island
2) Cobra Island
3) Madripoor
4) Blackhawk Island
5) That tiny island with a single palm tree featured in all those castaway cartoons
First Thought Of The Day
I'm certain people much smarter than I am have figured out this out and written endlessly on the subject, but the scary thing about social networking media is how it seems to engender a state of mind that mirrors what little I know about mental illness: you're constantly hearing voices in your head and you set about controlling them through the application of obsessive/compulsive maintenance tools. At best it feeds a narcissistic impulse to see your entire world of outside stimuli as some sort of ongoing vote on you and what you do.
2. Slovakian PM joins list of powerful world politicians that have sued an editorial cartoon over a cartoon they didn't like.
3. Prominent Pittsburgh-region retailer and convention organizer Michael George has his bail reduced on way to second trial for the murder of his first wife in Michigan. He was convicted the first time around before it was set aside due to what the judge believed was misconduct by the prosecutor.
Quote Of The Week
"People talk about breaking into comics, but there is no breaking in. If you're not compelled to make comics by a deep visceral need that doesn't let you go, then you're not going to be able to make it. There's no breaking in, only doing it." -- Colleen Coover (I'm guessing it was "breaking in" and not "breaking it" as the text says, but I could be wrong and my apologies if I am.)
*****
today's cover is from the 1940s-1950s mainstream comics publisher Avon
Police Potentially Investigating Case Of Missing Comics Writer And Charity Beneficiary As Murder
Kevin Melrose has a smart write-up of the details of a story that writer Steve Perry, a one-time animation and the beneficiary of largesse from the comics community in both unofficial and semi-official ways, has gone missing after having his home ransacked. The details are horrifying. Perry seemed to grateful for the help he received from all corners, particularly the Hero Initiative, and it would be a very sad thing is the details bear out in the direction most seem to think.
* most of the political coverage was about Pakistani reaction, including the blocking of networking media that might carry news of the offending day to the people of that country.
* as many articles noted, perhaps most strongly this one in the Guardian, the cartoonist who did the original "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day" cartoon wanted no part of yesterday's event.
* the Christian Science Monitorran an editorial by Husna Haq that sought to explain exactly the nature and depth of the offense felt by many Muslims when these things are done. There are a number of such editorials around the Internet today. (I think the editorial in that last link is largely idiotic, but I'm sure it's well meaning.)
The yearly Prix Mangawa Awards, organized by two bookstores to allow participating students to pick what they think is the best manga, have been announced. Over 160,000 students from 260 schools voted.
Shonen:Letter Bee, Hiroyuki Asada (Kana) Shojo:Arakure Princesse Yakuza, Kiyo Fujiwara (12bis) Seinen:Fool On The Rock, Chihiro Tamaki (Kaze)
Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico Sues Cartoonist Martin Sutovec
Darryl Cagle has the best write-up -- maybe the primary write-up -- on news that the Prime Minister of Slovakia, Robert Fico, has sued a cartoonist named Martin Sutovec for a cartoon making fun of the politician for having no spine. The original- and English-language versions are above and below. Cagle is one of Sutovec's distributors.
Cagle points out the three things that need to be pointed out here. First is that politicians like Fico tend to make a habit of suing media sources for compensation after critical coverage, and that they frequently win -- whether through a cultural tendency to discount the positives of satire, the influence of a powerful sitting politician on the courts or a little bit of both tends to be debated. Second is that the suing of cartoonists by major political figures is pretty common in places like Algeria and Turkey, and that this can be an obvious and understandably huge hassle for the cartoonists in getting their work out there and read. Third is that much has been made about Slovakia joining the EU and its general status vis-a-vis the west. Turkey's membership in various Western organizations was cast into doubt for its anti-press activities, and this could alter how people view the "new" Slovakia.
Appeals Court Upholds Judge's Call For Second Trial; Former Retailer Michael George Has Bond Reduced According to coverage in the Detroit Free Press, Judge James Biernat reduced the bond for former retailer and convention organizer Michael George from $2.5 million to $500K. This comes roughly two weeks after the Michigan Court of Appeal decided that Biernat did not overstep his bounds in his shocking decision to give George a second trial on charges he murdered his then-wife in 1990 in their Michigan comic book store, a case that became a high-profile trial in 2008. Biernat made that decision after the defense accused the prosecution of not bringing all of their evidence to bear, evidence that may have indicated an alternate narrative.
If released -- previous attempts to have George released planned to have the accused go to his mother's -- George would be unable to leave the location except for approved appointments and would be monitored.
Macomb County prosecutors plan to appeal this latest decision.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* retailer and industry blogger Chris Butcher writes an obituary for the CMX line from the point of view of a retailer. I found it compelling: Butcher claims they basically acted poorly towards retailers from the very beginning and that the whole line was poorly conceived.
* looks like DC is putting together its own Covered-style project to celebrate its 75th anniversary. Why are we only getting to the 75th anniversary stuff now? It seems like they blew off five months of perfectly okay anniversary time.
* this isn't news, but there's nothing like spending three hours on various travel aggregate sites looking at hotel rooms in order to attend a con under a certain budget and then remembering the con itself offers discounted hotel rooms. You think I'd be much better at that kind of thing by now.
* the Comics Comics kids would like to sell you stuff for money. They need it for candy and to help run their site. It's like an elementary school's end-of-the-year Mardi Gras, except with Johnny Ryan rape art instead of an inflatable moonwalk ride.
* here's an editorial on the (mostly) superhero news blog run by Newsarama about DC offing its character that was playing the Atom role in their fictional universe. I wish I could kill the headache I get trying to figure out how to write sentences like that.
* I should have known that of all television shows, Heroeswould find a way to annoy me even after it got canceled.
* if you think I'm missing a sizable or important show -- I missed a show last week, and it was sort of embarrassing.
* see, I already missed the Bristol Comics Expo. That's the 22nd and 23rd as well. This column sucks balls.
* the big news of the week would seem to be Gareb Shamus' decision to move Wizard's Big Apple show away from direct competition with the New York Comic-Con and into a slot the week before. Makes sense to me. You still get to draft in the NYCC publicity wake, you may even be able to confuse potential attendees into believing the first of those comics shows is the only or better show that month, and you're not going head to head where reporters can make facile comparisons by looking at one crowd versus another. I would also assume there are some pros that might be convinced travel to do both shows and catch some east coast time between gigs. I'd be tempted to do so if there were anything about the first show that interested me in the slightest.
* via The Beat comes this message-board conversation about how Comic-Con landing in Anaheim might have an impact on Disneyland. It's hard for me to wrap my mind around anyone except the park owners caring about Disneyland as an entity this way, but some of the back-and-forth is intriguing.
* before I forget, the Copenhagen show commissioned one of their festival posters from Chris Ware. You can see a smaller version around the Internet and a bigger version in a couple of places, including right here.
* the director Morgan Spurlock talks a bit about his planned Comic-Con movie. I can't remembering being blown away by any of Spurlock's previous efforts, but exploring that show as a place of influence seems to me like it would be a pretty fruitful avenue for a documentary filmmaker.
* finally, I hadn't heard of The Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo before receiving a link to their web site, but that's a great city to visit and the price for a table and for a half-table could barely be any better. If they're coming out with this kind of solid information this early it's a pretty good sign they'll be on top of publicity all the way up to and including show time.
Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update
* today is Everybody Draw Muhammad Day, a free-expression stunt and collective statement of support for beleaguered cartoon artists who have pissed off a subset of stridently political activists with their own portraits of the Prophet. It's a tricky thing from my vantage point. People have the right to draw whatever they want, and that's indeed something to celebrate, but one of the more noxious things about the original Danish Cartoons Controversy is that it was an unnecessary stunt by a business that enjoyed, like it or not, a role as a civic institution. That role might not supersede the requirements of journalism when it comes to informing one's readership -- a test nearly every journalistic entity in the world got an F-minus on in early 2006 -- but it can be argued that it trumps the paucity of wisdom required to engage in touchy political points outside of that journalistic role. I would argue that, anyway. So I think there's some nuance there.
* so in case there was any question, I won't be drawing Muhammad today, mostly because I suck balls at portraiture but also because I feel that CR's support for the free speech issues involved has been best displayed through our constant and consistent hosting and publication of the Danish images since Fall 2005, the contextual republication of one or more of those images every time our journalistic mission has called for it, and our constant attention to the issues swirling around this matter. So this site will pass. Still, I recognize everyone else's right to draw whatever the heck they want. I hope some of them are funny, and I hope any attempt to use them to rile people up into some paranoid, unfortunate political reaction dies in the early stages. While folks have a right to be pissed at this happening, they don't have a right to to cross the line into intimidation and violence.
* Michael Cavna explores the event from the perspective of working political cartoonists.
* at the time I'm writing this, there hasn't been a severe reaction to the event anywhere in the world. I hope that holds, but if you want an update before tomorrow the wire reports found through Google News or any similar service will be sensitive to these stories today. Many believe the event was a factor, if not the factor, in driving Pakistan to ban YouTube for sacrilegious content.
Go, Read: Hope Larson's Survey
The cartoonist Hope Larson has posted results from her not-scientific survey of 198 female readers of comics. She's careful to state that nothing about what she's doing makes for a representative sampling, but the results are so stuffed with matter-of-fact statements and solid ideas I can't imagine anyone caring. For instance, I'd love to see comics retailers come to grips with the basic fact that some people find a lot of funnybook stores deeply uncomfortable places to shop, and that this is exactly the kind of issue where improvements can be made without pointing fingers or shrieking in self-defense that it's not them but by even the stores with no real obvious problems in this area making whatever improvements they might be able to pull off.
Missed It: Your 2010 Jay Kennedy Memorial Scholarship Winner I'm glad Mike Lynch caught this because I sure didn't: the cartoonist Sandra Bell Lundy at her blog revealed that Mengxin Li was the winner of this year's Jay Kennedy Memorial Scholarship. Li is a Film and Animation major at the Rochester Institute Of Technology -- Gary Groth and Debbie Drechsler both went to school there, so it's not a totally unheard of comics-related school -- and is the author of Wind Chevalier, which was featured in Shoujo Jump.
The scholarship is named after the late, long-time editor of King Features comics' efforts and noted underground comix scholar Jay Kennedy and goes to a rising junior or senior in North America. It is named by a panel of professional cartoonist, of which I assume Sandra Bell Lundy was one this year, and the winner attends the NCS meeting and Reuben Awards over Memorial Day weekend.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* over at Robot 6 Kevin Melrose has more on the lawsuit against the now-canceled show Heroes and its last-season carnival storyline. I think it would be fitting if there were something to this and some money exchanged hands as the entire show felt like a third-generation Xerox of someone else's work, someone who wasn't profiting.
* this Faith Erin Hicks Wolverine try-out comic is awfully, awfully cute. How is its existence not an overall positive? I think Marvel should open up the X-Men and encourage people to make stories like this and maybe even publish them concurrently while allowing the fans to do so with impunity; DC should do the same with the Legion of Super-Heroes. That would really open up a couple of moribund franchises with a lot of juice left to them, just not necessarily the kind of juice that gets squeezed into glasses solely at editorial meetings.
* not comics: I'm trying to figure out the specific appeal of a film version of Tamara Drewe. Watching this film clip I think I have a pretty good idea, and then I have a really good idea at about the 41-second mark, and then it escapes me. I better watch it again a couple of times.
* Mari Ahokoivu has finished her 'zine about being stuck in the recent volcano-ash related travel difficulties, and is selling copies to defray further costs she incurred trying to complete her trip. My additional hope is that some of the New York comic shops might buy some copies from her to sell. (thanks, Johanna Rojola)
* the big news of the week -- well, there was a lot of pretty big news this week -- is DC shutting down its CMX imprint, their manga line. This is the latest step in a series of what collectively seem more and more like body blows for the American manga scene. Johanna Draper Carlson has the most succinct write-up, including Anime News Network's list of last titles to be released by the publisher and the observation that jibes with my own gut reaction that what is specifically troubling about this move is that this is essentially a vote of no-confidence for manga from a publisher that could have easily borne the pressures of a down market for the category. As far as I know, DC has no plans to release information such as what they'll do with licenses or the fate of those working on the line directly, although if I subsequently find that information I'll alter this sentence.
* one thing that's interesting to me about the CMX thing is that despite six years' worth of publishing history it never felt like CMX was viewed within or without the company -- either WildStorm or DC -- as vital to any overall publishing strategy. It also never seemed to benefit the way that other lines did a couple of years back when DC saw a general boost in book distribution. That was the promise of the CMX line from my vantage point: that it would use the strength of DC's corporate backing to introduce another model for selling manga into the comics market, or at least supply the basic model with some interesting special features, a twist or two (increased comic shop penetration, or the kind of targeted marketing that's supposed to be part of DC's skill set now). Instead it just seemed like a general manga line that happened to share offices and convention space with DC. Another thing I wonder after is that CMX was the home for some classic manga series; I don't know if that's still the case, or what the end result is there -- boutique publishers are probably slightly more interested in that category than someone looking for general sales strength across the board, but it can't be a good sign in terms of diversifying that sub-market.
* I also think it's fair to look at the general bad news for manga -- from sales figure to firings to entire companies seeming to slip out of existence -- and wonder about the structural issues involved. Certainly there seems to be enough of an appetite for manga out there generally that the whole thing needn't show signs of collapse, but it's clear that the structure for profiting from said appetite isn't being served. Anyway, so much for Manga Triumphalism, even with a sustained comeback and continued strong category sales. Let's hope for Manga Rationalism from here on out.
* the cartoonist Josh Simmons announces two short pieces in two Robin Bougie publications, which given previous Josh Simmons comics for Bougie is both great and slightly terrifying news.
* Rich Tommaso has re-jiggered his web site so that his Sam Hill serial takes over as the solo feature. It seems to have become his most promising feature.
* Dark Horse has joined its mainstream publishing brothers in offering up a discount comic book line, in their case 12 Dark Horse comic books from their publishing library they'll make available at $1 each. The first six book in the initiative will arrive in August and come from the Aliens vs. Predator, Sin City: The Hard Goodbye, Hellboy: Seed of Destruction, Usagi Yojimbo, Conan and The Goon. I've never been the target of one of these initiative, although back in the 1980s and early 1990s the better retailers I used would occasionally gift me the first issue of a new series in order to try and hook me into buying it regularly from that point on. I'm not sure what the next step is with something like this, and I wonder if you're not whetting someone's appetite and then offering them a HUGE meal of trades. Is there any retailer out there that's had success with these kinds of books that would as to how?
* the cartoonist Ellen Forney has sold a graphic novel to Gotham/Penguin through agent Holly Bemiss. It sounds like a 2012 release.
* the influential Atlanta-area training ground and artists' collective Gaijin Studios has closed down, what they're calling an indefinite hiatus. That's not really publishing news, I guess, but I don't know what else to do with it.
* this week marked the debut of a Wallace & Gromit comic strip in the UK newspaper The Sun.
* a recent Chris Mautner interview with publisher Dan Nadel about his book Art In Time segued into a Picturebox, Inc. update: long-promised books from Brian Chippendale and CF, a 216-page graphic novel from Renee French (!!!), a limited edition Yuichi Yokoyama book and new Ben Jones.
* finally, I thought the cover images for the ICON iterations of the earlier Casanova work were awfully pretty when I stumbled across them a couple of days ago on the Moon/Ba cover Flickr area.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* Ian Brill talks about the decision at Boom! to take his Darkwing Duck comic to ongoing status. I have nothing whatsoever to say about Darkwing Duck, although Brill is a nice young man.
* finally, I'm always a bit hesitant to do this sort of thing, but Noah Berlatsky was nice enough to ask me to interview with him for his site Hooded Utilitarian. Learn my favorite playwrights!
This Isn't A Library: New And Notable Releases To The Comics Direct Market
*****
Here are the books that make an impression on me staring at this week's no-doubt largely accurate list of books shipping from Diamond Comic Distributors, Inc. to comic book and hobby shops across North America.
I might not buy all of the works listed here. I might not buy any. But were I in a comic book shop tomorrow I would be totally checking these out for later download to my iPad.
*****
MAR100302 AIR #21 (MR) $2.99
Another issue, another dollar I owe my friend Murray. I'm beginning to suspect that first issue was designed to trick us into thinking "immediate cancellation." But I kind of liked that first issue. Only three dollars to go, though, which is terrible news. I would have kept paying.
MAR100516 AVENGERS #1 HA $3.99 MAR100161 BRIGHTEST DAY #2 $2.99
Two potential #1 selling books of the month. The Avengers comics is the anchor book in Marvel's new "Heroic Age" foray. As for the Green Lantern-focused Brightest Day, I wonder if three years from now they will launch a bunch of mini-series out of Aquaman? At this point, it wouldn't surprise me. I still don't know what this one's about. Zombies?
JAN100330 EX MACHINA #49 (MR) $2.99 JAN100331 EX MACHINA DELUXE EDITION HC VOL 03 (MR) $29.99
This has been a sturdy performer and I believe it's nearing its final issue.
MAR100304 JOE THE BARBARIAN #5 (OF 8) (MR) $2.99
Did I stop paying attention to people talking about this, or did people stop taking about this? It's the eternal question.
MAR100210 LEGION OF SUPER HEROES #1 $3.99
If nothing else, Paul Levitz's return points out how much more fun the Legion and mainstream comics in general were back in the days when an issue of teen superheros cost $.40 rather than $4.00. You know what they should do? Just declare these characters open source.
MAR100234 ZATANNA #1 $2.99
!yrruH .gnitnaw enoyna enigami t'nac I koob rof deen tekram etaerC
MAR100214 SPIRIT #2 $3.99 JAN100456 ASTOUNDING WOLF-MAN #23 $2.99 FEB100403 WALKING DEAD #72 (MR) $2.99
Three comics I'd consider picking up if I were in a comics store and loaded with bucks. The first one has more art from Moritat, the latter two are Robert Kirkman comics including I think the second-to-last Wolfman comic. That one's kind of more entertaining for the fact it didn't work out.
SEP090280 COMPLETE INVINCIBLE LIBRARY HC VOL 02 $125.00
As much as I collect these comics I collect them in comic book form, so no thank you, but it's another sign of Robert Kirkman's matter-of-fact success he's been able to bust these comics out into all kinds of formats without anyone I know of complaining.
JUN090893 CAPTAIN EASY HC VOL 01 SOLDIER OF FORTUNE $39.99
The best adventure comic everywhere; Crane's clean, thought-out actions scenes are a tonic for all those confused superhero fight scenes out there today.
MAR100916 CATLAND EMPIRE GN $29.95
This is a longer work from former Petits Livres featured artist Keith Jones.
FEB100789 LEONARD STARRS MARY PERKINS ON STAGE TP VOL 07 $24.95 FEB100790 STAN DRAKE HEART JULIET JONES TP VOL 03 $24.95
How great is it that there are ten volumes of these books between the two series?
JAN100915 MASTERPIECE COMICS HC (O/A) (MR) $19.95
How great is it that demand for a Bob Sikoryak comic was such that it needs to be offered again?
MAR100951 WALLY GROPIUS HC $18.99 FEB100912 WEATHERCRAFT HC $19.99
Two generations of cartooning from Fantagraphics. The all-new Weathercraft is my book of the week and would be my book for most weeks, frankly.
*****
The full list of this week's releases, including some titles with multiple cover variations and a long, impressive list of toys and other stuff that isn't comics, can be found here. Despite this official list there's no guarantee a comic will show up in the stores as promised, or in all of the stores as opposed to just a few. Also, stores choose what they carry and don't carry so your shop may not carry a specific publication. There are a lot of comics out there.
To find your local comic book store, check this list; and for one I can personally recommend because I've shopped there, albeit a while back, try this.
The above titles are listed with their Diamond order code in the first field, which may assist you in finding comics at your shop or having them order something for you they don't have in-stock. Ordering through a direct market shop can be a frustrating experience, so if you have a direct line to something -- you know another shop has it, you know a bookstore has it -- I'd urge you to consider all of your options.
If I didn't list your comic here, I'm sure there are many universes where I did.
Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update
* a pair of brothers aged 19 and 21 have been remanded into custody for trying to burn down the home of artist Lars Vilks. Vilks has been in the news for renewed interest in his 2007 cartoon doodle featuring Muhammed's head on a dog's body, an effort made in the context of controversy over the 2005 publication of the Danish Muhammed Cartoons. Wilks was also attacked during a college lecture last week and is currently in hiding.
* that makes it a good as time as any to point out that "Everybody Draw Muhammed Day" is only two days away.
Weyni Deysel, an award-winning South African cartoonist whose major newspaper client was The Citizen, died after shooting himself in his home in Alberton, a town southeast of Johannesburg. He had just turned 59 years old.
Deysel was born in the eastern cape town of Port Elilzabeth and was trained at Pretoria Art School. He briefly worked as a train driver before coming under the tutelage of Len Lindeque.
Deysel had worked for The Citizen since 2007, and was also known for his work in partnership with the comedian Leon Schuster, providing his CD covers and movie posters. His site indicates a cartoonist working a variety of gigs, from graphic design work for corporations to directly-commissioned cartoons. The article in The Citizen indicates that like many staff editorial cartoonists Deysel was part of the publication's general editorial meetings; he was described by his editor as "a vibrant presence."
Deysel won the 2009 Vodcaom Journalist of the Year Award in the cartoonist division for the Gauteng region. Most of the articles on his passing cite the general sense of humor displayed in his work as well as its generally light-hearted tone. He was a three-time winner of Standard Bank's Cartoonist of the Year honor in the mid-1980s, won the Federasie van Afrikaanse Kultuurverenegings Prize in 1989 and took the ABSA Dolphin Prize in 2001. Among his clients in the publishing world were Die Transvaler, Rapport, Sunday Times and Vaderland.
Weyni Deysel is survived by a mother, two sons and an ex-wife. A gallery of his work can be found here.
Billy Ireland Database Now Available This article published yesterday in the Ohio State University campus newspaper indicates that the searchable database for the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum is up and ready to be used. Seeing as I can barely remember that the OSU library is called "the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum," it's nice to be reminded of this fact and to have a new tool when it comes to checking out potential research material. One of the more important stories of this relatively flush period in the comics medium's history is the establishment of resources at academic institutions, which is the kind of thing that can be of use moving forward into the next few decades, not just the next few book publishing seasons.
Go, Read: Fanboy's Secret Origin Harry McCracken at Technologizer does the cultural excavating that no one else thought to do: exploring where the term fanboy came from and exploring the pejorative's impact and effect on a generation of nerds, particularly the use of the term in computer circles. According to McCracken the key document is a 1973 comic where Jay Lynch and Glenn Bray rework the humorous put-down "funboy" into something that distinguishes one kind of fan from another. It's worth it for a better look at the comic art depicted at left, and the John Byrne fumetti. Is there any day that can not be made between three and four percent better through application of the phrase "John Byrne fumetti"?
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* Evan Dorkin has a nice report from the commencement speech he gave at CCS over the weekend. I bet it was a lot funnier and more memorable than the one at my college graduation.
* Ben Morse talks in two parts about his five favorite Avengers and his history with Marvel's team title. That was one of the two books I collected when I was a kid -- I had issues #1-#200 -- so this is totally up my alley. My five favorite Avengers team members would be:
1) The Vision. It's hard for people who started reading superhero comics after 1980 to believe this, but the Vision was for several years the hardcore Marvel fans' favorite character. I liked that he had creepy powers, was totally red, was at one-time the re-animated and reprogrammed corpse of an earlier Marvel character, and with all of that working against him still managed to be one of the few Avengers we knew had sex.
2) 10-Foot Goliath. I think I liked him just because I was a big kid. He was also the most miserable character in the history of all comic books, to an almost comedic degree, which made me feel like I comported myself well as a prisoner in my 5'4'' body. Plus for some reason Roy Thomas seemed to think being 10 feet tall automatically put you in the Marvel heavy-hitters weight class instead of what that power would really give you: constantly sore feet and perpetual, targeted ass-beatings from smaller and stronger super-villains, by which I mean all of them.
3) Hawkeye. We all had someone in our core group of friends growing up who's just a little too into being a member of the group. That's Hawkeye. Hawkeye was also the emblematic character of the awesome Cap's Kooky Quartet era -- Captain America, Hawkeye, Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch -- where the uniting factor was that every Avenger had powers that were super-annoying to face in open combat. Can you imagine being tricked out in your finest Gear Of General Badassery, primed and ready for Go-Time, and some carny dickweed stands 200 feet away shooting paste arrows at you? Most of the stories back then ended when some heavy-hitting super-villain basically said, "God, fuck this" and took his invading army home as the various Avengers danced around in front of him, serpentine fashion, ready for round 17.
4) Captain America. Captain America in the Avengers was always sweating how to stay in the game with all the roster's heavy-hitters, something I found way more appealing than the bland, super-confident tough guy he always seemed to be in his solo comic. Also, I always liked how he was really good at fighting people in hallways. Like if there's a hallway with a bunch of dudes in it, he could totally beat up that entire hallway.
5) Swordsman. I liked the fact he just showed up out of the blue with his hooker girlfriend and decided he was going to be on the team. We all know someone like that, too. Plus he was great as Schneider on One Day At A Time.
Yeah, I could do that all day. My CPR training? Don't remember one bit of it.
* not comics: the problem with unimaginative superhero plot-lines is that they either sound like they've been done 50 times before and they probably really have been done at least a half-dozen times before. So then someone gets sued. It's like vampire stuff. If you say "vampire mobsters," I know without looking that someone has done vampire mobsters before.
Your Danish Cartoons Hangover Update
There's only one story today, but it's an awful-sounding one: the artist Lars Vilks is in hiding after arsonists attempted to burn down his home, according to a variety of international wire reports. Vilks was recently head-butted while giving a speech that included the showing of a film with adult content that depicted Muhammed, and has enjoyed worldwide media coverage after renewed attention was paid his 2007 cartoon-like doodle of a dog with Muhammad's head -- both by the press and the people who would wish to do harm to those who make such an image. Two men have been arrested.
Philippe Bertrand was born in Saint-Jean-de-la-Ruelle in north central France. His initial work upon leaving school came as a designer in the early '70s on such publications as Partisans and L'Idiot International. By mid-decade, he was providing a lengthy client list -- including Charlie Hebdo -- with illustrations and making personal comics such as 1979's A cet instant aux antipodes.
Bertrand was perhaps best-known for his erotic work, which he began to work on in earnest in 1983. He employed an off-beat style that sabotaged a lot of the standard erotic signposts in comics art. He called his approach "nouvelle manière." The look of that art, the basic visual approach it embodied, became popular above and beyond the comics in which it was employed. Perhaps its biggest showcase in comics was in the Linda Aime L'Art series in Pilote, which was republished in three stand-alone albums between 1985 and 1992. The success of that work in comics form provided Bertrand with opportunities in areas as disparate as illustration and stage design. It also led to a memorable exhibition at Galerie Lambiek in the early 1990s. The Linda story was even animated.
Bertrand worked a writer for other artists at various points throughout his long career, coming to depend on that model more and more in his later years. Among his creative partners when working as a writer only were Jean-Marie de Busscher (Olympia, published in A Suivre in 1984), Elisabeth Brami (a children's book entitled Les Petits delices from Seuil Jeunesse in 1997), Frederic Beigbeder (two volumes of Rester normal with Dargaud in 2002 and 2004), and Jean Teule (Le Montespan, published by Delcourt in 2008). He also wrote and drew solo books for Futuropolis, a rock magazine called Best and Les Humanoides Associes. He made CD-ROM game called Bugmonsters and was a longtime illustrator for Le Monde in what has been described as a full and significant career.
Philippe Bertrand had just turned 61. His death came after a long period of illness.
A Final Note Or Two On Frazetta
Most of the first rush of Frank Frazetta obituaries have arrived on-line. I'll continue to update this site's Collective Memory for as long as I run across or am sent entries. Unlike some cartoonists or people with a comics past, Frazetta should see a slew of magazine obituaries that may have an on-line expression, just not for a few weeks yet. For instance, Steve Ringgenberg mentioned he's working on one for Heavy Metal.
If you're late to the news or just want a quick way to check out some material on his passing, you could do worse than run a gauntlet that included our obituary, Jesse Hamm's analysis, William Stout's personal reminiscence, the Frazetta posts at Golden Age Comic Book Stories and then wash it all down with Gary Groth's 1994 interview with the late artist.
One interesting thing about that interview and one that might increase your admiration for Groth's interviewing skills is that the original Frazetta tapes were lost. Gary coaxed an entirely new interview from Frazetta when given some time for follow-up questions. So there's not a whole lot there in terms of tracking Frazetta's career to its specifics, but there's a career's worth of his thoughts on various phases of his life and things like film icons. It's one of my favorite interviews with a comics person ever.
Missed It: Lengthy Post On Trailblazing Comic Book Artist, Illustrator EC Stoner This link was just sort of sitting in my bookmarks, like some forgotten Christmas gift shunted behind a houseplant. I have no idea where it came from, but it turns out to be a lengthy investigation of a comics artist with whom I was completely unfamiliar, EC Stoner. Beyond its obvious interest because of Stoner's race and the time period in which he worked in comics as compared to other prominent black cartoonists, it's also just a pretty good story of an artist who used his time in comics to more firmly establish what sounds like a successful freelance illustration career. It's also copiously illustrated, although the author is quick to admit that Stoner was more a of working cartoonist than a forgotten star of the four-color world.
Your 2010 Glyph Award Winners
The winners of the Glyph Comics Awards, designed to "recognize the best in comics made by, for, and about people of color from the preceding calendar year," were named during a ceremony held in Philadelphia this weekend as part of ECBACC. Jay Potts and his on-line World Of Hurt comic won three awards; the latest Aya the Marvel effort Luke Cage: Noir two apiece. Winners are as follows, in bold.
STORY OF THE YEAR
* Luke Cage Noir; Mike Benson & Adam Glass, writers; Shawn Martinbrough, artist
* The Original Johnson; Trevor von Eeden, writer and artist * Unknown Soldier #13-14; Joshua Dysart, writer, Pat Masioni, artist
* War Machine: Iron Heart; Greg Pak, writer, Leonardo Manco, artist
* World of Hurt, Jay Potts, writer and artist
*****
BEST WRITER
* Joshua Dysart, Unknown Soldier
* Jeremy Love, Bayou
* Greg Pak, War Machine
* Jay Potts, World of Hurt * Alex Simmons, Archie & Friends
*****
BEST ARTIST
* Chriscross, Final Crisis Aftermath: Dance
* Jeremy Love, Bayou
* Shawn Martinbrough, Luke Cage Noir * Jay Potts, World of Hurt
* Trevor von Eeden, The Original Johnson
****
BEST MALE CHARACTER
* Black Lightning, Black Lightning Year One; Jen van Meter, writer, Cully Hamner, artist; created by Tony Isabella & Trevor von Eeden * Isaiah "Pastor" Hurt, World of Hurt; created by Jay Potts, writer and artist
* Jack Johnson; The Original Johnson; Trevor von Eeden, writer and artist; inspired by the life of Jack Johnson
* Luke Cage, Luke Cage Noir; Mike Benson & Adam Glass, writers, Shawn Martinbrough, artist; created by Archie Goodwin & John Romita Sr.
* Moses Lwanga, Unknown Soldier #13-14; Joshua Dysart, writer, Pat Masioni, artist; inspired by the character created by Robert Kanigher & Joe Kubert
*****
BEST FEMALE CHARACTER * Aya, Aya: The Secrets Come Out; created by Marguerite Abouet, writer, Clement Oubrerie, artist
* Lee Wagstaff, Bayou; created by Jeremy Love, writer and artist
* Michonne, The Walking Dead; created by Robert Kirkman, writer, Charlie Adlard & Cliff Rathburn, artists
* Misty Knight, Immortal Iron Fist; Duane Swierczynski, writer, Travel Foreman & Tom Palmer, artists; created by Tony Isabella & Arvell Jones
* Nola Thomas, NOLA; created by Chris Gorak & Pierluigi Cothran, writers, Damian Couceiro, artist
*****
RISING STAR AWARD
* Jiba Molei Anderson, The Horsemen
* John Aston, Rachel Rage
* Kerry & Tawanda Johnson, Harambee Hills
* Julian Lytle, Ants * Jay Potts, World of Hurt
*****
BEST REPRINT COLLECTION * Aya: The Secrets Come Out; Drawn & Quarterly
* Bayou Vol. 1; DC/Zuda
* Icon: A Hero's Welcome; DC/Milestone
* The Life and Times of Martha Washington in the 21st Century; Dark Horse
* Static Shock: Rebirth of the Cool; DC/Milestone
*****
BEST COVER
* Final Crisis Aftermath: Ink #1; Brian Stelfreeze, illustrator * Luke Cage Noir #1; Tim Bradstreet, illustrator
* The Original Johnson; Trevor von Eeden, illustrator
* Unknown Soldier #8; Dave Johnson, illustrator
* Unknown Soldier #10; Dave Johnson, illustrator
*****
BEST COMIC STRIP
* Bayou; Jeremy Love, writer and artist
* Jump Start; Robb Armstrong, writer and artist * The K Chronicles; Keith Knight, writer and artist
* The Knight Life; Keith Knight, writer and artist
* World of Hurt; Jay Potts, writer and artist
*****
FAN AWARD FOR BEST COMIC
* Adam: Legend of the Blue Marvel; Kevin Grevioux, writer, Mat Broome, Sean Parson & Alvaro Lopez, artists
* Black Lightning Year One; Jen Van Meter, writer, Cully Hamner, artist
* Final Crisis Aftermath: Ink; Eric Wallace, writer, Fabrizio Fiorentino, artist * Luke Cage Noir; Mike Benson & Adam Glass, writers, Shawn Martinbrough, artist
* War Machine: Iron Heart; Greg Pak, writer, Leonardo Manco, artist
The judges for the 2010 competition were David Brothers, Carol Burrell, Brian Cronin and Katie & Dan Merritt. That picture of the character Aya is from the first book in the D&Q series; I couldn't find a single decent interior shot from the third book, and never received one myself.
This story was also run Sunday morning, and is being re-run for maximum exposure.
* go, bookmark: Johnny Bacardi starts a look at what I think is the third-best book during Marvel's 1960s heyday: the Stan Lee and Jack Kirby Thor. If nothing else, he promises a lot of visuals. I don't know how I've avoided doing Volstagg for Halloween.
* not comics: Devlin Thompson sent this to me as if this is good news, and so I assume it is: Criterion will be releasing an edition of the documentary Crumb, along with another Terry Zwigoff documentary, Louie Bluie. Or has released. Or something. Man, I don't even own a DVD player. But those are good movies, especially the one about Crumb. I still think about that segment where we follow Charles' descent into creative madness.
* you're probably not in the mood to read another TCAF report, and I feel you, but this one from Sequential addresses some critical aspects regarding the show that others missed. It is an overall positive report, however.
* I can't recall every seeing any photo-driven reports about an event at the Toonseum in Pittsburgh. Here's one by Rina Ayuyang about her own recent trip to that frequently awesome city, including a stop by Copacetic Comics, one of the major ley-line hubs on the Magic of Comics Worldwide Grid.
* Steven Thompson remembers the Annie strip. Basically, he sort of remembers not reading it. I don't know; it cracked me up.
* that jerk James Sturm is still off-line where he won't be reading any insults lobbed his way. You know what's a poopy book? Down and Out Dawg Treasury Edition. I'm glad for a chance to finally say that out loud.
* Chris Butcher takes a look at a giant manga anthology from Japan. This thing looks like the NFL football season-by-season book I used to carry around as a child.
* finally, I don't think I can ever recall reading an interview with Warren Miller before. Someone needs to be interviewing all of these Shawn-era New Yorker guys before they pass on.
Am I The Customer They're Seeking? Brian Hibbs, recent CRinterview subject and longtime Direct Market retailing advocate, posted a column last week about the ongoing digital comics revolution. His focus is on the still-in-development plans of the big mainstream comics market players. As befits his established set of interests, Hibbs paints a picture of an on-line strategy that supports worried comics retailers. In his conception, the availability of digital comic books plays the same role as the newsstand played in the early days of the direct market: as an on-every-corner outreach program for the casual fan interested in checking out some comics. Hibbs proposes that the most influential companies lead the way in progressive scheduling that protects the golden goose of comics retail as it currently stands, that business gets funneled towards comic shops in as many ways as is possible, and that the price points be established that facilitate attraction to customers across the board: on-line, initial print serialization, print trade collection. It is a rational, hopeful document, and I urge you to read it.
However, since we're talking comics, none of what Brian writes is likely to happen. In fact, there's a much greater chance we'll see something close to the opposite of what he painstakingly lays out. People in comics can't decide where to eat dinner at conventions; setting policy for maximum return over the long term is beyond most industries, but it's especially beyond comics. Our industry's past indicates that most influential comics companies would time travel into the future and literally hack away at the profits that might be enjoyed then -- including their own -- if it meant a temporary gain in market share or the arcane positioning of your choice in the present. The last time seismic shifts in approach gripped the comics industry, Marvel pursued a series of moves so goofy that their editors likely kept sending company memos back up the pipeline having written "not plausible" on them. Marvelution was not just an indictment of the then Marvel brain trust, the results were such I believe it actually challenged the general theories of Darwin after which it was named. The rest of the industry, of course, rushed to follow Marvel's lead. The period of change that came before the 1990s era version proceeded at such a glacial pace that only a Lucasfilm intervention in the form of Star Wars comics sales likely kept Marvel afloat. With the digital revolution's glacier period just about played out, I fully expect at least one of the companies (probably Marvel) to adopt a more-aggressive-than-some-hoped-for same-day publishing philosophy when it comes to on-line iterations of their comics, and I expect them to adopt it soon. And then I expect the rest of the companies to do something similar. Because that's what they do.
Why? Because I think the perception of something occurring that may be profitable, that may offer a company an advantage, that may play well in the press and may do wonders within a massive corporate structure for the person deemed responsible is more attractive to the decision-makers at comics companies than any bird in the hand. For one thing, past experience says that bird is going to hang onto that hand with a loyalty that makes hard men weep and lift their beers. Stroke it on the head and say pretty, pretty bird every once in a while -- look at it like you're listening -- and that bird may provide you with all the cover you need for a smooth transition to birdless or at least bird-light society. And that's not to say there isn't some credence to the thought that multiple ways of disseminating comics to the world can indeed coexist for a long, long time. There are very few extinction events in any arts business. Punditry in comics tends toward apocalyptic shrieking and the just as myopic "did the world just end? no? I told you so!" rejoinder. A culture of short-sighted business moves rarely decapitates an industry, but it makes much more likely unattended-to cuts around the body. A continual weakening of the fabric eventually produces tears: fewer hardships can be borne, fewer things can be done to move the needle in any direction, more and more effort is soon required to restore the market to rational behavior and reaction to the most positive business moves. And then, market segment by market segment, things begin to give out.
Another thing about which I wonder more and more when I read various think-pieces on comics and the development of on-line strategies is whether or not it's wise to assume that everyone sees the onset of digital comic as a way to get more people reading comics, to increase the audience size. I mean, I hope that's the case. And I even think we've seen signs that's true in the broader sense. When I think of the audience for webcomics I don't see it as an audience where everyone involved would automatically be as passionately reading a different bunch of comics if things like Penny Arcade or Bad Machinery didn't exist in the form they exist. When I think of a newspaper strip like Cul-De-Sac, I think its chances for survival are improved ten-fold by having it on-line where opinion-leaders can see it and be impressed by it and perhaps advocate for it when the possibility of running it locally comes up. I know that CDS is the first comic strip where I bought the trades before reading it in the newspaper. But when you're talking specifically about companies like Marvel and DC, companies that have habitually ignored ways to improve their basic publishing habits in a way that would maximize their current audience avenues, is it really fair to assume they see new platforms the way we'd wish for them to? The last time Marvel sought out new readers it did so almost entirely by ramping up the drama and complexity of their comics to create "events" which would lure relapsed readers back into the fold. At least that was my reading of their press statements at the time. DC also seems to presume some level of pre-existing affection for their big cultural icons and to my ear talks about successful comic books as bringing their awesome characters the readers they deserve rather than as creative efforts that stand on their own.
My point is that after years of fighting little territory wars over the same group of readers with intermittent forays back into comics land by a slightly bigger group of less devoted fans, mainstream comics companies might be just as happy to see various digital platforms as a way to win those wars, too. When I think of my friends and my family for whom I can predict behavior (say 50-60 people), or even limit it to just thinking of all the occasional comics reading ones in that group (say 15-20), it seems to me most likely that I'm the one that they're going to target. I don't buy serial comics presently. I don't live in a town where I can buy them and the system as currently constituted relies on a single model mixing high capital investment and arcane knowledge in such a way it doesn't seem likely to ever hold hope in returning to me such an outlet. I have enough money I could buy a chunk of comics but not enough I'd be all that happy dropping a lot of money at $4 a unit. I don't desire enough comics that mail-order seems worth the trouble. I consider the experience of shopping for comics part of the fun, even if it's only a few clicks. The companies in question make the kind of comics I don't care if I ever have in paper form. I have serious clutter concerns for my home, besides. I find downloading comics illegally and for free distasteful. I'm conversant enough with the various universes that they don't have to aim creative efforts specifically towards me: I know what the Badoon are, I can name the Metal Men, I can tell the difference between Skartaris and the Savage Land. I've tried but not been wholly satisfied with on-line comics viewing services that focus on older comics. I'm up enough on the current comics scene that I hear about what's in the ones that are currently coming out and I'm thus more curious about them than I am in what happened to Batman in 1996.
See what I mean? It's kind of spooky. They could probably be getting $10-$20 out of me every week, with very little effort on their part, right this very minute. At the same time, I can't see that being a great thing. It's a baby step in really big shoes. New technologies tend to bring about change, but the last thing to evolve may be the ingrained commercial instincts of the corporations serving the existing model. The forthcoming war in terms of digital comics is going to be fought on a many different battlefields, including and maybe especially the ones the big companies seem to prefer fighting.
the first comic book that made me think "I'd buy one right now on-line if I could"/a panel from John Allison's Bad Machinery
FFF Results Post #210 -- Dance Card
On Friday, CR readers were asked to "Name Pairs Of Characters You Like To See Fighting." This is how they responded.
Tom Spurgeon
1. Hulk/Thing
2. The Spirit/Big Crowd Of Dudes
3. Uncle Scrooge/Beagle Boys
4. Captain Easy/Bull Dawson
5. Popeye/Alice The Goon
1. Hulk/Thing
2. Maggie/Hopie
3. Pupshaw/Pushpaw
4. The Spirit/The Octopus
5. The Demon/The Howler
*****
Grant Goggans
1. Captain America/corridor full of Hydra agents
2. Lum/Ataru
3. Nikolai Dante/Konstantin Romanov
4. Ace Garp without a sword/Evil Blood with a sword
5. Superman/Captain Marvel
*****
Thomas Scioli
* Orion/Darkseid
* Dr. Strange/Dormammu
* Thing/Silver Surfer
* Captain Victory/Lightning Lady
* Ogami Itto/Retsudo
*****
Chris And/Or Katie Mostyn
* Silver Surfer vs Blackbolt
* Spiderman vs Scorpion
* Usagi yojimbo vs TMNT
* Bighead vs Incredible Changebots
* Manthing vs Swamp Thing
1. Thing/Human Torch
2. Phoney Bone/Granma Ben
3. Ignatz Mouse/Krazy Kat
4. Monkey in a Wagon/Lemur on a Big Wheel
5. Spider Jerusalem/anyone he doesn't like or respect
1. Ron Post/Russ Post
2. Daredevil/Stilt-Man
3. Dormammu/Eternity
4. Snoopy/World War II (the Cat Next Door)
5. Albert Alligator/Cloud of Gnats Forming Fists and Taunting Word Balloons
1. Doctor Strange/Dormammu (drawn by Gene Colan)
2. Doctor Strange/Baron Mordo (drawn by Steve Ditko)
3. Orion/Darkseid
4. Itto Ogami/any poor, doomed fool who challenges him
5. Lucy/Linus
1. Gran'ma Ben/Stupid, Stupid Rat Creatures
2. Lucy van Pelt/Linus van Pelt
3. Hyakkimaru/48 Demons
4. Hulk/Avengers
5. Invincible/Any Vitrumite Warrior
*****
I dumped a few that went with fantasy match-ups, like "Underdog Vs. Lockjaw"; that wasn't the intention of the question and the examples given should have been enough to indicate that. That might make a good question in the future. I would have just included them anyway, but for obvious reasons I couldn't find art. Better luck next time.
2. Viz fired up to 40 percent of its staff in a move so troubling people really wanted to believe its PR-driven explanation that there was nothing all that major about it, which will either eventually prove to be untrue or we will all remember Viz 2000-2010 as the most inefficiently-staffed company on planet earth.
3. Lars Wilks was assaulted while giving a lecture at a prestigious European university, based in part on resentment for his having made a cartoon doodle once of Muhammad with the body of a dog.
Winner Of The Week The newspaper page. I hate to say this about any gig that employs comics people, but one of the reasons that the comics page is weaker than it should be right now is because of legacy strips.
Quote Of The Week
"We are of course saddened by these departures, and sincerely appreciate the hard work, passion and dedication of those that have moved on, but we feel confident that with these changes Viz Media will be more streamlined and able to withstand the climate of the economy at this time." -- Viz Press Release
*****
today's cover is from the 1940s-1950s mainstream comics publisher Avon
Go, Look: New Comics Day, 1964 a friend e-mailed me a link to this gallery of Roger Nelson's first store, Rockford's Collector's Corner, which opened back in 1964. They're worth joining Facebook or whatever just to stare at them. My apologies to anyone that had the link first where my friend could read it.
Too Hammered To Drive; Sober Enough To Read A Dylan Horrocks Comic This article about a Dylan Horrocks-drawn anti drunk-driving comic book, 3000 of which will be distributed to various drinking establishments, raises two intriguing questions. First, how do comics work that might be especially useful in providing a corrective to dangerous behavior? Second, are comics really something that appeals in a specific way to 18-30 year olds?
I also totally missed this interview from a few months back, which leads off with a great picture of Dylan and his boys.
Bernard "Bernie" Schoenbaum, an artist, teacher, cartoonist and prolific contributor to the New Yorker for nearly three decades, passed away on May 7.
Schoenbaum was born and raised in New York City. His family bounced back and forth between Manhattan and the Bronx. He received his art education at Parsons School of design. He worked for decades as a freelance advertising illustrator. He sold his first cartoon to The New Yorker in 1974 at about the two-thirds point of the William Shawn era of the magazine, when the publication was still for readers coast to coast the print equivalent of what NPR would one day become: a ubiquitous window into culture and politics as seen through big-city eyes. He would continue to provide cartoons, which usually depended on some instance of visual whimsy upon which the text bounced in some odd direction, through its transformation into a more general prestige magazine.
Schoenbaum placed more than 400 cartoons in the magazine. He also pursued a variety of artistic interests in life drawing and painting, the results of which were sold to private collectors. His final cartoon for the New Yorker appeared in 2002.
In his later years, he split time between New York and Florida with his wife, Rhoda. A comment left at Mike Lynch's site indicates the cartoonist needed some level of outside care in later years. He is survived by a wife of 62 years, Rhoda, three daughters and a granddaughter, and was preceded in death by a brother, Samuel, one of the great Shakespearean scholars of his generation. the artistic Schoenbaum would only do one Shakespeare-related cartoon, in 1995, but it's one of the more memorable cartoons from that magazine in the 1990s.
Members of the National Cartoonists Society are assembling this weekend in Jersey City, New Jersey for the group's annual meeting. The highlight of the meeting is the Annual Reuben Awards, which is the only cartoonists soiree to require black tie and facilitates the awarding of one of the top three or four cartoonists prizes in the world.
I greatly enjoyed 
* the great Bob Levin sent along the link to 
By Tom Spurgeon
* first thing: did you have any friends that watched 
* Nick Fury's general suckiness extends to the Black Widow. If there's a less interesting way to find out a close employee is a spy than to have her walk up and sit next to a guy in a diner booth on what felt like an empty set rather than anywhere in the real world, it's difficult to concoct that scenario.
* that said, there are plenty of crowd-pleasing things. The leads and co-stars are all super-pleasant, all interesting on some level to watch do their business. That scene of Robert Downey Jr. by himself, reacting to these films of his father while at the same time trying to get some work done, that's some fun acting. Rhodey 2.0 is an upgrade. Fewer people are likely to be enraged by elements of 
* the cartoonist Nick Bertozzi is celebrating his 40th birthday and the ten years since his Xeric-aided Boswash was published 
* GeekDad 
* did I already post a link 
Vargas' first hit was Los Superlocos, which was a sturdy feature for the magazine Pepin, which ran Monday to Friday. 
* 
* Alan Gardner picked up on one gentleman's campaign to have 
The remainder of the 1940s and into the 1950s saw Post settle into a pattern of multiple publishers and multiple assignments. He worked with Paramount on their efforts supporting war intelligence. He then received work from DC, almost moved to Dell (replacing Walt Kelly; the money didn't work), Timely/Marvel, Prize and Pioneer. The common thread was that he worked on non-superhero material, mostly humor interspersed with some straight-up adventure material. Although I can't find an exact date, most historians seem to agree that the 1950s is when Post began work for Harvey Comics, working on a variety of their features and given co-creator credit on some of the better known members of the various Harvey comics cast. He is sometimes given that credit for Hot Stuff because of his work on the early comics (lifelong Post friend Warren Kremer did the posters), although Alfred Harvey received official credit. His work on that character's stories is considered by many fans his best.
The 1960s were stuffed with important comics assignments for Post. In addition to the ongoing Harvey gig, Post spent some time at Paramount as the head of their Cartoon Studios (1964-1965), worked briefly as an independent film producers, created the oddball Anthro comic for a DC in the throes of a post-Marvel identity crisis (it lasted six issues, the last with Wally Wood inking Post), and launched the comic strip Dropouts with United Feature Syndicate. The Dropouts ran from 1968 until 1981. With its archetypal cast, minimalist surroundings, dependency on verbal humor, Post's surprisingly facile magazine-illustration style line, and the general sarcasm on display, it was one of the emblematic strips of the post-1950s, pre-1980s newspaper strip "sarcasm" era: a strip that could be reduced to a tiny size on the shrinking comics page, and that could be remembered for one or two lines of a verbal jab. 
* Frank Santoro 
1. Does Reprinting Archival Comics Material Have A Moral Component?
2. Why Are So Many Direct Market Comics Shops Still Female Unfriendly?
3. What Are All These Superhero Comics Really Saying?
* looks like DC 
I'm glad Mike Lynch 
* 
* one thing that's interesting to me about the CMX thing is that despite six years' worth of publishing history it never felt like CMX was viewed within or without the company -- either WildStorm or DC -- as vital to any overall publishing strategy. It also never seemed to benefit the way that other lines did a couple of years back when DC saw a general boost in book distribution. That was the promise of the CMX line from my vantage point: that it would use the strength of DC's corporate backing to introduce another model for selling manga into the comics market, or at least supply the basic model with some interesting special features, a twist or two (increased comic shop penetration, or the kind of targeted marketing that's supposed to be part of DC's skill set now). Instead it just seemed like a general manga line that happened to share offices and convention space with DC. Another thing I wonder after is that CMX was the home for some classic manga series; I don't know if that's still the case, or what the end result is there -- boutique publishers are probably slightly more interested in that category than someone looking for general sales strength across the board, but it can't be a good sign in terms of diversifying that sub-market.
* 
Harry McCracken at Technologizer does the cultural excavating that no one else thought to do: 
* 
Bertrand was perhaps best-known for his erotic work, which he began to work on in earnest in 1983. He employed an off-beat style that sabotaged a lot of the standard erotic signposts in comics art. He called his approach "nouvelle manière." The look of that art, the basic visual approach it embodied, became popular above and beyond the comics in which it was employed. Perhaps its biggest showcase in comics was in the Linda Aime L'Art series in Pilote, which was republished in three stand-alone albums between 1985 and 1992. The success of that work in comics form provided Bertrand with opportunities in areas as disparate as illustration and stage design. It also led to a memorable exhibition at Galerie Lambiek in the early 1990s. The Linda story was even animated.
If you're late to the news or just want a quick way to check out some material on his passing, you could do worse than run a gauntlet that included 
* go, bookmark: Johnny Bacardi 
Another thing about which I wonder more and more when I read various think-pieces on comics and the development of on-line strategies is whether or not it's wise to assume that everyone sees the onset of digital comic as a way to get more people reading comics, to increase the audience size. I mean, I hope that's the case. And I even think we've seen signs that's true in the broader sense. When I think of the audience for webcomics I don't see it as an audience where everyone involved would automatically be as passionately reading a different bunch of comics if things like 
This article about 
