Rolling Comic Books 2020 Visions

https://storage.googleapis.com/hipcomic/p/afbf5429b0abd0de34c31aa10a041ded-800.jpg

Here's a note of some hope from the always excellent Beehive Books that I am passing along here to those that can use it:

We're instituting a pay-what-you-can policy on our digital editions. If you can't afford our prices on eBooks, just shoot us an email at info @ beehivebooks.com, and we'll send you any of our titles free of charge.

Was just thinking about 2020 Visions yesterday! Love early Delano but never got around to that one.

TIL the Bryan Talbot Grandville books are a direct reference to a 19th century French artist: http://www.tcj.com/j-j-grandville-a-matter-of-line-death/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=j-j-grandville-a-matter-of-line-death

https://www.polygon.com/comics/2020/1/9/20995875/politics-in-comics-dc-marvel-superman-trump-lois-lane-art-spiegelman

honestly, ewing's immortal hulk strikes me as the most explicitly political book in mainstream comics; it just doesn't go TRUMP TRUMP FACEBOOK TRUMP in the text

It's been coming pretty close recently!

indeed, but i love that ewing allows the subtext to be that; it allows him to get utterly crazy with the story without running afoul of marvel's twitter troublemaker policies

https://www.instagram.com/p/B7jX3OujYIH

Going to a Kieron Gillen “Guardian masterclass” tomorrow in London on how to write comics and stuff. Will report back! I’ve quit Die as I found it too difficult to follow/boring but I generally like his Marvel stuff (more than the indies tbh)

Was caught unaware of the new Forbidden Planet Glasgow. To start with I was dismayed by sheer quantity of merchandise and more of the bloody Funkopop but as I was leaving, I realized there is an upstairs (exclusive Frank Quitely art created for the stairway?) and there's more of everything and some new stuff the never had. More prose books than they've had in years (admittedly a lot of it looks like old stock), so I was quite impressed overall. Hope this goes well.

Funkopops are everywhere and are the most loathsome things.

They recently opened a huge retail store in Hollywood: https://www.funko.com/hollywood-1

Funkopops are everywhere and are the most loathsome things.

OTM, just fucking hideous.

The funkopops and other merch are, needless to say, what keeps Forbidden Planet Glasgow afloat. Certainly not comics or graphic novels. If and when the funkopops craze dies away, I imagine a number of comic shops will be in pretty dire straits financially.

It's nice to have more space to browse in Forbidden Planet Glasgow - the old Buchanan Street shop was a no-go zone on a Saturday, it got so crowded - but their new back issue section is rubbish. Poor selection and high prices.

tbf I avoid the Forbbiden Planet in London because it mostly feels like a shop for geek culture merchandise, stick to Orbital and Gosh which seem to be keeping afloat (knock on wood)

I suspect they do keep some shops afloat, but if that is what it takes, let the industry die.

Comic shops have had to rely on this kind of merchandise to stay float for decades, whether it's collectible card games or beautifully detailed busts of questionable taste. I'm fine with it. GameStop/ThinkGeek occupies a lot of that market, and modern chains like Newbury Comics and FP make it something like 95% of the store.
(Though I do kind of want to let the industry die to kill its ridiculous ordering system.)

funko pops are the backing currency of comics stores, much like petroleum underpins the petrodollar

These vast seas of inert, blankfaced fuckwit things, huge pockets of landfill in waiting.

but enough about the current ruling class, let's talk funko pops

lol

i dunno who at marvel thought that 2020 was the perfect time to introduce a character called 'brittania' (not 'britannia' for some reason) draped in the union jack as part of something called 'the union' but i suspect it's not gonna be entirely well-received on this side of the pond

They wanted her to give them heroes. Meet Brittania in "The Union" #1, coming in May. #MarvelComics pic.twitter.com/EFpW956OBH

— Marvel Entertainment (@Marvel) February 18, 2020

Last year, the main comic book mart in London gave over a large part of its floorspace to funko pop dealers - they drew an almost completely different crowd from the usual smelly old comic book fans - much younger, many more female fans. So I think there is the possibility of using these (basically harmless if useless) model toys to broaden and grow the comics audience a little bit; not sure most comic book stores would know how to go about this tho.

It's not entirely clear most comic book stores would want to!

dunno who at marvel thought that 2020 was the perfect time to introduce a character called 'brittania' (not 'britannia' for some reason) draped in the union jack as part of something called 'the union' but i suspect it's not gonna be entirely well-received on this side of the pond

dunno if he created the characters but this series is written by Paul Grist

I mean, Captain Britain is already a thing in Marvel, and the team will also feature, er, Union Jack.

Debuting in a five-part series spinning out of the forthcoming Empyre storyline, The Union teams Union Jack — a hero who first appeared in 1976’s The Invaders No. 21 — with four all-new characters, each one representing different countries in the U.K.: Snakes from Northern Ireland, Kelpie from Scotland, The Choir from Wales and team leader Britannia.

So yeah I'm going with Britannia as the least worrying of these, particularly if she's darker without the light source that appears to be coming from her cleavage.

hmm, maybe it deserves more benefit of the doubt then, but either way someone at marvel marketing needs a starter guide to uk politics xp

'the choir' from wales is cracking me up tbh, maybe this will be good after all

I'd argue investing more in manga produces the same result. Customers in Gosh and Orbital (and the Gosh reading group!) pretty young and diverse.

Not that I begrudge comic stores stocking some of those funkos.

I think Snakes might actually be a clatter of snakes in a trenchcoat!

snakes in a trenchcoat / two bits

yeah I'm going with Britannia as the least worrying

call her by her name

Her name's Britannia.

It's ok. I know how it's spelt.

— paul grist (@mistergrist) February 18, 2020

feel we should honour and respect the intent of the legal author itt

well, there it is

Why have Marvel created a UVF mural? https://t.co/710LwfR30l

— Jamie (@jamieplsstop) February 20, 2020

I hope the funkopop owners and their inheritors believe in recycling instead of binning when the time comes to decide.
One of the greatest comic shop successes had to be one with the least craft.

Are all big manga successes ones with anime versions? Are some fans reluctant to read unless there is a version to watch?

For all the stereotype of geek culture being for loners I think there might even be too much emphasis on community and sharing because nobody seems to want to try anything unless there is versions in different mediums, merchandise and a busy fanbase ready to talk to you. Surely all the crap like funkopop is just to show other people your bedroom and all the stuff you like?

Just imagine book and music stores being half merchandise. Funkopop of bands and writers you cant even find in the store anymore.

large US chain Barnes & Noble is about 1/4 random merch like that and fancy notebooks!

... and record megastore Amoeba Music is basically half merchandise these days!

(well, maybe 1/3)

I’m not sure what it’s like in 2020, but five years ago the physical store chain that sold the most vinyl records in the US was Urban Outfitters, which is a clothing/miscellaneous junk chain. Most records sold overall was Amazon.

I wouldn’t be surprised if B&N moved more graphic novels and trade paperback collections of comics than local comic shops in a lot of areas

Funko Pops are easily found in all chain bookstores

Great fucking walls of the things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Gq3qVqJL10
Fun!

Diamond not shipping anything after 4/1. Death of the direct market?

Hah! The way we live now - how will covid-19 change us?

I am gonna be really sad if my local shop goes under, I was already a patreon patron :(

Marvel already made a Heroes-World-style attempt to wipe out the DM last week, by offering enormous pandemic discounts to (in functional effect) online mail-order retailers

I should probably email my local shop and ask them what they want me to do... I'm sure they'll stay open as an eBay store as they did before they had a physical storefront, but I'll be sad if they end up closing down, even with their problems getting my holds every week.

I told my store (Mega CIty in Camden) I'd pick up and pay for everything when it's safe in a few months, and offered to help if they had any £££ issues in the meantime.

I assume it'll be Comixology-only for a while, then nothing at all. Who knows? I wish there was a way to buy online editions through my local store.

Marvel already made a Heroes-World-style attempt to wipe out the DM last week, by offering enormous pandemic discounts to (in functional effect) online mail-order retailers

sic, how would discounts for retailers cause the DM to collapse? Because the discounts will stop if/when physical comic shops re-open? Because the discounts are in effect a loan that will leave retailers forever in debt to Marvel? Because by offering incentives that other comic companies can't match Marvel hoped to secure a bigger slice of a rapidly shrinking market?

By giving a huge (supposed) boost to all retailers at the exact moment when brick-and-mortar shops are taking the biggest customer-based hit in the 50-year history of the market, and days before many of them are directly ordered to stop trading, it's effectively giving a massive advantage to online sellers at the expense of those who have actually done hand-selling, promotion, marketing etc for years and decades.

forever in debt to Marvel... secure a bigger slice of a rapidly shrinking market

These too, especially the latter, and in the specific way they did with Heroes World: they outright prefer a retail landscape that a) they control all the terms of, and b) does not offer non-Marvel product at all.

are there online sellers of note of the monthly titles that aren't also brick and mortar stores?

"buyer's club"-like enterprises and eBay-focused folks, yes. but it also provides an incentive for owners who do both to lay off staff, disenfranchise customers with catholic or non-Marvel-focused tastes, and switch strictly to selling corporate product online, at the expense of stores who have spent careers directing their energy into serving the best interests of customers and the creative field alike.

if the only stores that survive are doing subscription and flipping tulips, the actual market no longer exists.

catholic tastes? huh?

https://wompampsupport.azureedge.net/fetchimage?siteId=7575&v=2&jpgQuality=100&width=700&url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.kym-cdn.com%2Fentries%2Ficons%2Ffacebook%2F000%2F022%2F524%2Ftumblr_o16n2kBlpX1ta3qyvo1_1280.jpg

catholic tastes? huh?

...? The narrowing of margins, the rise of spined comics and then destruction of the international bookstore market (and concomitant shifting the business model of the '80s-surviving publishers), and the aging of the superhero customer have all been major factors in increasing one-on-one festival sales as a proportion of artist's sales, but walking into a shop is still the best method for a reader to assess and then purchase author-driven comics.

ah ok. sorry, i've actually never heard the term catholic (little c) used before and just looked it up

oh lol

Diamond not shipping anything after 4/1. Death of the direct market?

No shipment this week for the UK, I just learned. And understand that your 'after' there might actually be 'on'?

Half-price sale on Fantagraphics gift coupons (Fantabucks) for the next two days. All their books for the next season have been stuck in China for months already, so you can hold onto the credit or dig through the catalogue.

I should amend my original breaking story, as I understand that Diamond will still be shipping warehoused material, just nothing newly-published.

I'll say it right now, "Stephen Bissette has sent you a friend request" is not something I thought I'd ever read.

Cool. Is he mostly doing film journalism these days or still working on his dinosaur comics?

Oh yeah, that reminds me that I was pleasantly surprised to see his pieces in one of the genre rags (Screem? Monster!?) I was picking up for a while.

Bissette say hi to me

Bissette very publicly quit his dinosaur comics, and the comics industry altogether, in 1999 when Diamond raised their reorder threshold once their monopoly was established (after Marvel's previous Heroes-World-style attempt to wipe out the DM). Video Watchdog closed in 2017, but I don't think he'd been writing regularly for it for a long time - he's been a full-time lecturer at CCS for fifteen years.

He does have a 700-page hardcover monograph on The Brood out next month in the UK, though.

Speaking of the major parts of it attempting to wipe out the DM, apparently AT&T is going to continue releasing weekly comics digitally through the pandemic.

The monograph is out now, or at least mine is because I blew through it over the weekend and is why we are now friends.

It's amazingly wide-ranging (I suppose unsurprisingly given the length) and looks at most of the takes on the film in real depth and breadth, with a real insight into things I never knew about the Canadian film industry.

"DC Comics has also announced they are looking into ways of getting single issue comic books into stores without using Diamond Distribution." according to Charles LePage's ComicsList.

Bissette on Cronenberg? Cool!

I thought that Bissette was still working on Tyrant (his dinosaur thing) as a very long term project that wouldn't be finished for years. Saw him talk about it on his blog, but can't be certain that was it. It was in a semi-rant about why he wasn't willing to collaborate with new comic writers he didn't know, that he and many other comic artists have their own comics they want to do; for these pitching writers not to assume that comic artists are just sitting on their hands because they haven't had steady comics coming out.

as a very long term project that wouldn't be finished for years. Saw him talk about it on his blog

Sure, but he hasn't even blogged about sketches or prints for sale since the end of 2013, let alone discussed narrative work* - drawing a page or two a year, and needing to redraw the 80-odd published pages from 1995 before re-publication due to changes in scientific consensus, puts "for years" into perspective, on top of how many of them ago he wrote that.

*(I went to the pub w/ him after sitting in on one of his first-year classes that October, and tsked about his long- and medium-form blogging all having moved to Facebook: at the time he said it was because student-aged kids mediated all their internet through Facebook, so it was the only way to engage them.)

https://www.sothebys.com/en/series/dc-complete-the-ian-levine-collection

I4n L3v1n3 is selling his complete DC Collection as a single lot. It's not an exaggeration to claim this might be the biggest comics auction of all time.

wow. i wonder what the reserve is.

too many comics imo

gonna just stack em on my coffee table as I make my way through reading em all

love that it's a reading collection and not slabbed at all

Speaking of the major parts of it attempting to wipe out the DM

Diamond has stopped paying publishers.

what do people make of this

https://bleedingcool.com/comics/today-the-comic-shops-direct-market-was-saved/

It seems like it might be the best option to allow business to continue as close to normal as possible, but I also don't really know how many smaller publishers still have yet to embrace digital.

Pretty sure in the longer term, Diamond is gonna need to get the boot (or have its monopoly broken, at the very least). One week into this and they're already unable to pay their vendors. The corporate entities behind the Big Two are almost certainly gonna be asking why the entire business model rests on the back of an entity with (apparently) no liquidity whatsoever.

"Our Last, Best Hope for a Piece"?

why the entire business model rests on the back of an entity with (apparently) no liquidity whatsoever.

May or may not be relevant: Geppi himself has apparently been bleeding money like an artery was cut for the last 14 years

Slightly off-topic (haven't finished the video but the occasion is a prose horror anthology about a fictional Hammer/Amicus-esque film studio) but a longish interview with Bissette seems appropriate enough
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4NwwskeW3E

He was great on Joe Dante's podcast!

lol, he really needed three episodes on that

Fantagraphics are delaying the digital release of many of their new books, in order to give surviving retailers a better chance of selling them.

(While for customers on lockdown, they've also dropped prices on a lot of digital back catalogue through April 23rd, and are doing free shipping on direct orders in the US, with code SHUTIN.)



In pvmic, I4n L3vine is screaming at ppl on the internet to GET YOUR FACTS STRAIGHT, as he sold his collection years ago and it's that buyer who's auctioning it now. (iirc, aimn, he was so disgusted by the New 52 that he didn't want to have DC comics around any more.)

iirc, aimn, he was so disgusted by the New 52 that he didn't want to have DC comics around any more

LOL — tough, but fair.

https://bleedingcool.com/comics/milo-manara-draws-women-very-differently-in-recent-weeks/

Manara's new direction is a thing.

I was anticipating different types of women from his usual but only the clothes has changed really.

^

I’ll never forgive Marvel for letting him do that Spider-Woman variant cover. “Click” my nutz

I bet they tried really hard to stop him

Pretty low on the list of Marvel's crimes.

Top of the list for me though.

Why? Especially given they've treated people horribly, the copyright extensions, they're part of that hegemony noted in that Disney thread and pump out piles of shit constantly and their shitey films.

I'm not a fan of Manara but he's head and shoulders above most of their artist stable.

Because I’m a fan of Spider-Woman, and didn’t appreciate seeing her turned into Butt Crack Chick (it’s not even a good drawing). I’ll leave those other fights to others, we all have our own emotional investments.

Yeah, all those "different" pictures of women still all have the single same face he knows how to draw, it just has a mask on it sometimes.

Molly Crabapple presented a sex in comics documentary which was quite good and I was surprised she criticized him for drawing the same girl with a different wig. She liked him overall.

Frazetta and Jack Kamen are the artists I liked most guilty of this. I think that most artists who are interested in having a good looking cast struggle with deviating from the same face/body type. Some people call it sameface syndrome. What a lot of artists do are almost emoticon faces. Regardless of using a small number of models, Dante Gabriel Rossetti didn't have much range in this regard but he's still great.

Doesn't help if you work by comics deadlines, even if it's more lax european deadlines. Nowadays I'm kind of amazed that comic artists on regular monthly or weekly deadlines manage to be even pretty weak or mediocre. A lot of great artists would be completely terrible under those deadlines.

I was surprised she criticized him for drawing the same girl with a different wig.

― Robert Adam Gilmour,Wednesday, April 15, 2020 9:25 PM

Surprised because I didnt expect a documentary to make these kind of judgements about people they were interviewing.

High recommendation for this longass bagel high school story on instagram, that’s been running all through lockdown (and still continues!)

https://www.instagram.com/p/B9xRzZNjpMJ/?igshid=s51cxebri9f5

My LCS got their March 25 order a couple days ago (over three weeks late). Bought some extra stuff on top my pull to give them a little support. Thinking about doing some mail orders for some other local shops too, but then I'm still conflicted about buying unessential stuff through the postal service.

If we're recommending Quarantine Comics I have to recommend this remarkably funny and gross storyline by Simon Hanselmann (Megg and Mogg?) that's been running every day

https://www.instagram.com/p/B9sB-C3hQ_X/?hl=en

(Unfortunately you'll have to do the crappy IG browsing to figure it out)

i've always had mixed feelings about Hanselmann but the COVID storyline is dead fucking on

ha, same. i wasn't really a believer until i started reading this

I think i've read everything they've ever written and it's always been sorta like, well i see what you're doing there but it's so often gross and sadistic for no other reason except you're having a good time drawing it but their moment is definitely now. it's honestly the most of-the-instant bit of art i've seen so far in this shitstorm.

Who needs excuses to be gross?

http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/10/25/magazine/25gross2/25mag-25gross-t_CA1-jumbo.jpg

More Junji Ito books from Viz: Venus In The Blindspot in autumn and Remina in winter.

https://patmills.wordpress.com/category/clerical-abuse/

I've read some of it (about him being abused by priests) but I don't know the full scope of it, it's quite a lot of blogging.

Lots of interesting Humanoids releases in this digital bundle.
https://groupees.com/humanoids

Marvel is shuttering their webcomics store, redirecting customers to Comixology. But their mobile apps will remain online, so.. kind of a weird decision.

Steve Bissette saying that Marty Pasko has died. I think his Swamp Thing work is very underrated because of Moore.

Update on the state of things with a (good) local comic shop here in L.A. (from this article):

At Golden Apple Comics on Melrose Avenue, the doors are still closed to customers, but people are picking up orders in the back parking lot. Owner Ryan Liebowitz said his shop hadn’t received a shipment of new comics since March due to shutdowns in printing, distribution and shipping, but he expects new comics to start arriving next week.

“Comic book stores live and die every week by their shipment,” Liebowitz said.

Until curbside pickup was recently allowed, Liebowitz said, Golden Apple was relying on customers who subscribed to titles through the store and on online sales, with expanded online events intended to connect with customers.

“Our online sales are through the roof,” he said. “We’re waiting on Phase 3, where we can let people inside the shop. That hasn’t happened yet.”

I've been doing as much curbside pickup and mail order as I can during this time.

going to post the tweet in the thread of reactions that encapsulates a thought rather than going on at length, because wtf

https://t.co/xGL2n6PQrs amazing article here trying to defend this guy, claiming that somehow context that's been removed here is that he isn't JUST horny, he wants something meaningful pic.twitter.com/ogWm8r45nD

— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) May 18, 2020

I think the funniest sentiment is “he knows these women and they appreciate this” and I’m thinking.. knows them how? appreciate it because.. it’s their job to react positively to this attention and monetize it?
I am thinking this is a big confession essay about how the writer has an alt account for horny replies

Geppi is the founder and owner of Diamond btw, not just an exec

If he knew them he probably wouldn't be asking to meet them like that.

to paraphrase the comments, just because it's not "wrong" doesn't mean it's not "funny."

I recently found a little community of people creating art and stories about sexy people with really big heads. Some people in this community like large exposed brains, some people like elongated domes and some people just like heads that are bigger as a whole.
Somebody posted (what I'm guessing was from early 60s) comic panels of Lois Lane losing her hair and the dome of her head growing longer. It brought to mind images from that era (early 60s?) of The Flash getting a big elongated head and I think it happened to him and other DC heroes multiple times? I remember an interview with Gilbert Hernandez where he asked what was with all the enlarged head stories in DC Comics at the time.

I know it was a staple in old science fiction to have characters (especially mastermind villains and super intelligent aliens) with huge heads but I'm wondering if this can be traced particularly to certain writers or artists in or out of comics.

It's way beyond my capabilities but I'd love to write an encyclopedia of everything that is fetishy or seems like it could be in science fiction and fantasy, while trying to be respectful and not presumptuous. Including how certain characters can become part of a fixation they were probably never intended for (the snake from Jungle Book and Midna from Zelda spring to mind).

Something entirely different.
https://blanddcheadcanons.tumblr.com/

kinda need a link to your big head kink friends deviantarts page

I don't know how much of this will be visible to non-members because most of it is NSFW
https://www.deviantart.com/bigbrainedbeauties/
Lois Lane
https://www.deviantart.com/maxgrowth/art/Who-likes-this-653544338

lol, i guessed right on deviantarts

always low-key assumed that the elongated-head thing came from Mort Weisinger being self-conscious about balding, but I don't know if I've ever seen a photo of him

Allow me to set your mind at ease:

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/marvel_dc/images/2/27/Mort_Weisinger.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/350?cb=20110213063153

irl tee hee

https://www.instagram.com/p/CAn6ZGDB6h6/

I've been following this case closely for a number of reasons and was surprised to discover that Chris Cooper, the (unrelated) guy opposite Amy Cooper in the recent racially-motivated Central Park birding kerfuffle, happens to be an ex-Marvel editor who introduced the first openly gay characters to the canonical Star Trek universe back in the mid 90's

everything that is fetishy or seems like it could be in science fiction and fantasy

Fixed that for you.

Interesting thing about this stuff on deviantart and similar sites is that something really niche can flourish on one of them but can't be found at all on the others.

I had this really weird amazing dream that I was holding this Daredevil Annual from the 80s written by Frank Miller with artwork by Art Adams that of course does not really exist. In my minds eye memory it had this cool cover where Daredevil is swinging by on his billy club being chased both by Hand ninjas and Venom.

Been reading a bunch of horn head comics (to use the Stan vernacular) but not the Miller issues, the later part of the original run and the earliest issues, neither of which I read when I was a kid. Venom does show up in the 'Fall from Grace' story, so that must have been part of it.

http://i.imgur.com/Ze2Ratv.png

Gary Panter - https://www.instagram.com/p/CA9fbNHl0Ul/

i...don't get it?

it's offisa pup
https://artduckomagazine.wordpress.com/2016/02/24/krazy-kat-spotlight-by-erica-lambright/

nhex, ilxmail me and i will send you some Krazy Kat cbr
or just do this
https://joel.franusic.com/krazy_kat/

I don't really "get" this particular appropriation / recontextualization of Offisa Pupp, but whatevs

pupp represents control, structure for the sake of structure rather than truth and dumb power; he claims to protect but doesn't care what his constituents actually want and is fast to throw ignatz in jail for upending order
panter is a noted obsessive drawer and hand drawing waves of baton-raised lockstep pupps to cope struck me as pretty brilliant

yes

Seems kinda reductive, but ok

Panther has been posting these giant tapestries of classic comic characters on his Instagram for ages, you don't even have to see it as a political statement if that doesn't work for you.

Love the Panter, thanks for sharing forks

seems almost quaint now, since offisa pup never had a riot shield or helmet

good share, thanks forks

Been seeing quite a lot of cool drawing/painting and comics stuff appearing on my youtube recommendations (what taken so long?)

I don't know if I've ever seen Shinichi Sakamoto's work. I still find the idea of drawing digitally really disconcerting but I am impressed how well he works with his assistants and how seamlessly he can place on a bloody readymade wig onto a character. Maybe I'd notice the seams if I was reading. I often notice artists drawing over 3d models and I don't like it most of the time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDpn9fdsRbY
The channel is generally interviews with japanese creators in different mediums.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haaZ4X_hyeY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRqIYbg18sY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVKFvdHgc3s
Loving Ed Piskor and Jim Rugg's Cartoonist Kayfabe channel. The interviews are lengthy; they do interesting commentaries of Wizard and Comics Journal issues; I hadn't heard anything about Octobriana; they've got a Kaze Shinobu video; liked the videos about "outlaw" and bootleg comics.
Thing I enjoyed most was probably the Tim Vigil interview. Sad that there hasn't been collected editions but he wants to do one. I get a kick out of seeing 80s/90s/early 00s alternative comics getting collected even if I'm not into them but I'd probably get a Vigil collection. Sad that it pretty much always ends up being a crowdfunding thing that gets them going.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIVSjH-srqM

Below is the link to a Google doc list of all the titles suggested by members of the CSS Facebook Group in response to a request for comics/graphic novels addressing racism, policing, and social justice.

I'd like to build this list with member and comics community input, so if you have more suggestions please add them and include a link, and then we can share it more widely as well.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a6RYz3NkT_SOhMr_GKfdYv0SmgHWstYPGGUPhHDFCRg/edit?usp=sharing

RE: Octobriana - Bryan Talbot incorporated her into his Luther Arkwright strip, I believe (the link above may mention that, haven't watched it yet)

I also have that Octobriana and the Russian Underground book - 1971 UK h/c £3.90 - there isn't much actual comic strip content, but the big stylistic influence appears to be Barbarella.

Yeah they did mention the Arkwright thing and a few other comics even did that.

Gary Groth interview was good. He's publishing Barry Windsor Smith's Monster soon, which I assumed died many years ago but he was working on it for something like 3 decades. A story about living with Jim Sternako. And talking about a couple of really impressive sounding upcoming graphic novels by first timers.

Man, DC really wants to kill print comics.

Black history
https://www.yoebooks.com/upcoming-books/215-invisible-men-by-ken-quattro.html

Man, DC really wants to kill print comics.

^^ Pulled out of Diamond altogether, switching all their periodical distribution to two mail-order companies, no international distribution to comic shops.

In normal times, this would definitely be a case of pointing and laughing when, like Heroes World, the plan flops. This seems so much more speedily doomed to failure that the only thing that makes sense is that it's intended as a strongarm move to get better terms out of Diamond.

However, decisions from DC that make sense have not been a core business strategy for about the last 15 years.

If it's all just feeder content for the eventually digital content mill of whatever the final Frankenstein's monster of HBO Max, CBS All Access, and DC Universe will be in a couple of years... comics are a pretty cheap loss in comparison.

Yeah, I think they'd genuinely be happy if print died and they could just farm content for TV and movies until the superhero boom is completely over.

DC can exist as an imprint that keeps Watchmen in print just to fuck with Alan Moore.

Also of note in the Groth interview: Eisner, Joe Kubert and Gil Kane being unable to do "serious" work well, and funny story about Mark Waid.

Tbf Diamond looks like an absolute basket case of a company to be associated with

tfw you intentionally create a monopoly for your exclusive trading partner and then get confused when they act like a monopoly for 25 years

Diamond should be tarred and feathered just for forcing owners to put up with the ordering software. It's clunky as hell and decades out of date.

I am a bit concerned that shops are going to be hurt since their shipping costs will effectively double, but that's the price of losing a monopoly.

Shops will be destroyed - what's the incentive for the two retailers who have been handed the new distribution duo-exclusive to make terms favourable to the competition?

To say nothing of English-language shops in Canada, the UK, Australia et al

Didn't realize - DC's preferred distributors are also direct-to-consumer retailers - DCBS and Midtown Comics. Leading to fears of Amazon-style behavior where they use order data to give themselves a competitive advantage.

(Normal bookstores will go with Penguin/Random House.)

There's still a monopoly, really. There's no competition between DC's two distributors, they're not going to offer better discounts to get your business.

They figured out, I think that they couldn't mandate regional exclusives but they strongly suggest one or the other. Also points to how little thought/effort was put into this, DCBS is shipping from either Indiana or Mississippi so everyone on the West Coast is going to get all their DC books from there. Should be no problem at all!

If by no other means, you can tell this year is a swirling miasma of shit by the fact that the impending death of the direct market is like fifteenth in my list of pressing concerns.

I've never really understood why comics completely quit the same distribution system that magazines and other periodicals use. I'm guessing it's too low volume, but the way the comic book dealers ship, it's no returns. There appears to be plenty of esoteric magazines out there that have to have fairly low sales numbers, why are comics different? I'd figure that would be great for whoever distributes magazines.

don't remember the exact reason but i don't think it made much sense
specifically talking about the no-return system, but pre-order-in-almost-exactly-three-months system is also awful

Again Cartoonist Kayfabe, the David Choe interview was nuts but I didn't know much about him before. He hasn't done much comics but he has a lot of stories about comics people he knows.

Comic shops have to handle subscriptions and special orders week in and week out, customers demand books be all but mint conditions, anything past like Spider-Man and Batman requires salesmanship. Shops need a hub where they can special order that book from three months ago for someone - not an issue for a store that carries Time.

Periodicals are just there, it's a different model.

The ordering in advance is also how they're unlike other periodicals - like, one issue of Teen Vogue isn't going to be a blockbuster because they revealed something on page 47. Batman will be. So orders go in to set print runs, then are adjusted again a few weeks before actual shipment.

I respect that this system is difficult for the shops to run it as well. But in my experience - as someone who stepped away from floppies for about two decades and came back to the fold about two years ago - I am trying my *Damndest* to help keep my local shops afloat with subscriptions and advance orders, spending a lot of extra time to find things to pre-order, selling myself. Holy shit it is awful compared to just, you know, buying books, films, or anything else in life. (Some of it is specific to my local shop, I'm sure...)

For example - If the store doesn't order WAY too many issues of an issue, then they get shorted (which can easily happen if your store ordered like only one copy of a low-selling book like Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen, or even like an issue of something like Batman that suddenly gets really hot), then you have to hope a reprint happens...three months later. God help you if you try a random new book or miniseries and want to catch up. If I see something advertised on Comiclist (these are official press releases and solicits) with on-sale dates... nope, Diamond's garbage Windows 3.1-era-looking software isn't letting you order it yet, try again in a few weeks, maybe it'll be available, maybe not.

Meanwhile - and I'm talking about TPBs, manga, hardcovers here - I can just one-click pre-order on Amazon a year in advance and forget about it. I rarely do this anyway, but I feel like I have to play all these games when ordering from an LCS. Too much of the time I end up filling issues from eBay or Midtown Comics online down the road. It makes the hobby frustrating when there's a million other things competing for my attention and money.

shortened point: returns should be allowed, ordering should be easier.

Too much of the time I end up filling issues from eBay or Midtown Comics online down the road

great news for you!

sigh

Temporarily at least. I'm laying odds on DC completely bailing on print by this time next year, which would take down print comics in general IMO and Midtown/DCBS with them.

There are a couple of conversations I know are happening this week with the retailers a level under Midtown/DCBS that will demonstrate their commitment to print under the new system.

All the problems you're talking about are real but many of them are unavoidable, like pre-ordering and not carrying everything that's available mail order. It's just not possible for brick and mortar of any kind to compete on selection or price with mail order/Amazon. Retailers basically have to hope they have what you want and if not c'est la vie. I don't think there's a system in existence that can change that. I've never found an issue with ordering something once it hits Diamond's system - that's not a software problem or a Diamond problem, it's publishers not communicating hard and fast details about publish dates and everything to Diamond so that it can be entered into the order system. No one can go on press releases.

Returnability isn't really that great a deal - you still have to have the cash flow to make the initial buy and in bookstores it comes back as credit rather than that cash. DC has had a lot of returnable books over the last year and they're months behind on letting them be returned. I don't think it would radically change the industry, except that it would bankrupt some shops who got trigger happy planning to recoup the unsold merch in 8 weeks.

I dunno, just from the inside I can't imagine being mad at anyone but Marvel and DC for making it impossible for readers to just walk in and buy a random comic off the wall and get a complete narrative, constant reboots and rejiggering and crossovers and EVENTS. Image to a lesser extent for not keeping anything on a regular publication schedule. Walking Dead remained huge up to the end because it came out every damn month come hell or high water. When a book takes a six-plus month hiatus it loses most of its readership. Saga's awesome but whenever it starts publishing again, half as many people will care.

I hate that Marvel and DC do that too, but I have to blame the readers for supporting those giant crossover events. (In recent times, shit like Absolute Carnage, War of the Realms. I found DC's events a little better self-contained, but still kind of bad. Even DCeased can't just be a single straight miniseries at a time!) As long as the books keep selling, they're going to keep doing it. Gotta give the people what they want, I guess. Except consistency.

I don't totally disagree with what you're saying, but it almost makes me feel that the business model deserves to die if those problems are truly insurmountable. Let most comics go digital. Last year an owner was complaining to me how insane it was that Marvel and DC alone were publishing ~75 floppies a month EACH, I don't see how that's sustainable for readers or shops. They can't even properly advertise all the series they're publishing.

That's interesting to know about Walking Dead and Saga though - I thought Saga was doing great.

...And also, I guess, be thankful Immortal Hulk hasn't had any major delays.

Everything's a blur to me but Saga's last issue was sometime in 2018 and it's not on the horizon. People will have just forgotten about it if/when it comes back.

If comics go digital the format will change/die - there's no incentive to do 12 issues and deal with all the staffing/delays/etc.. Everything will be original GNs on an intermittent schedule and all the smaller publisher stuff will just not exist.

12 monthly issues

I say that with some certainty because all the major events end up getting stretched and delayed for one reason or another and they only keep doing it because of the relationship with comic shops. Acting more like a book publisher (but really just building IP for the mass entertainment divisions) would let them cut a ton of staff costs.

I skipped around the Steve Bissette interview on Cartoonist Kayfabe (it's enormous) and he talks about his plans for Tyrant. He still definitely wants to do it.
I didn't know anything about his aborted trilogy of Swamp Thing novels.

I have to admit, while I am a big fan of Ed Piskor's work, I can't stand listening to or looking at the guy. Something about him.

That's harsh, and I love his voice! Maybe there's tons of slightly Mitch Hedberg sounding guys wherever he's from but it's a novelty to me.

I'm continually astonished how well an independent comic from the early 90s could do.

Also very interesting was Bissette talking about when he was deciding to give up comics, about a distributor that would have been much better than Diamond but died because Image chosen Diamond along with DC.

...one that wasn't Capital? No-one else had the same level of infrastructure.

It was Capital.

Yes, their big guns in the exclusivity wars were the moral victories of Kitchen Sink Press and whatever name James Owen was publishing Starchild under at the time.

Before the DC right-to-buy deal memo broke.

Fascinating mystery in here. At the 13 minute mark there is a japanese magazine celebrating american comics, with cosplay and japanese artists drawing some Marvel heroes; but also this "what in fuck is that?!" moment, something completely unfamiliar that I doubt is even american but looks amazing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4vu7NmQowA
I just love the stuff with flipping through trashy and obscure comics so much. In my days of back issue shop hunting I didn't see nearly enough stuff I didn't already know about but it was great when I did. Finding a Glenn Chadbourne comic was a special moment and there were some odd small press british comics and a ratty sword and sorcery comic I wish I picked up.
I'll never love most of this stuff completely but I feel some love has been reinvigorated and I should give some of the really bad 90s comics more credit because there's still things about them I really like, and a feeling that there was serious potential from these types of comics that was never really realized and a slightly different audience that could have been cultivated.

So much great comics-adjacent artists, too bad they had to all be on instagram (which I think is a pain in the ass to browse and you can't save images). Probably too many of them draw eyes similar though.

https://www.instagram.com/julimajer/
https://www.instagram.com/lilisignorini/
https://www.instagram.com/bl00mfield/
https://www.instagram.com/slimesistren/
https://www.instagram.com/annadegnbol/
https://www.instagram.com/odaiselin/
https://www.instagram.com/____gage____/
https://www.instagram.com/magsmunroe/

not a big fan of the paul pope inspired stuff but Oda Iselin's work is pretty intresting

A lot of these artists seemed to spring up after Jonny Negron and Lala Albert came on the scene and they all share some similarity, usually the eyes. Post-manga or something.

i thought this was fun in a repurposed batshit rightwing images sorta way
http://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Carlesgod_StaySane_Web-img-3.jpg

hashtag radiohead social media prophecy

I'm glad Print-On-Demand is becoming more prevalent in comics, half the books I read are POD these days. Seen Rick Veitch say it wouldn't reproduce pencil art that well but I hope it keeps evolving.
The Carter Ryder comics and public domain comics are the main things I'm aware of going POD, is there much else notable yet?

Sorry, Carter RydYr

I never really dug Chaykin but his interview was great, such a great knowledge of illustrators but his keen eye suggests he didn't choose his overpowering colorists at Image, or did he?

Still smiling at Choe saying "Ron Lim is a fuckin' pimp".

Re: Groth talking about Eisner, he thought Eisner's graphic novels were a purely cynical attempt at respectability. The acclaim for them seems to have dropped quite a lot.

i'm not a big fan of eisner's graphic novel work (tho lord knows i've tried) but the spirit is right up there with donald duck and mister natural in my pantheon

Contract With God is okay bcz he was stretching to find something new (after decades of desk supervision), To The Heart Of The Storm has some personal feeling involved, otherwise it’s trash melodrama.

His late period is more interesting when serialised in the Spirit magazine, as there’s interesting contrasts between young-Eisner-when-he-was-good (and had good ghosts), businessman Eisner conducting interviews with various generations, and current Eisner trying to find a voice.

That's a shame if his reputation has decreased. I think his stuff is still very much worth seeking out.

I love all old funky 70s and early 80s Howard Chaykin. None of his character attempts (Ironwolf, Cody Starbuck, Monark Starstalker, Dominic Fortune, The Scorpion, etc.) really caught on but they all had a cool energy to them that really appealed to me as a kid.

Its too bad you could not license to put them all together in one book as that would be a cool compilation of a certain style.

Howard Chaykin was cool as fxxx the time I met him at the Chicago comic con as a teenager in the 80s. I think it was '87 they had a backroom for the artists row and it was like Howard Chaykin, Denys Cowan (sharing a table) and like two tables down was Harvey Pekar and Daniel Clowes. Someone like Chris Claremont was speaking and the gallery was really empty at the time, so we got to talk to all of those guys a bit. Good day.

I always liked Cookalein best of all Eisner's non-Spirit work.

Chaykin's visual style appeals to me but i have never been able to finish a single issue of anything he's written. My memory of his writing is that it feels like Frank Miller directed by Verhoeven. Can someone convince me to try American Flagg?

The first 12 issues of Flagg are good, and packed with enough still-timely cynicism and media commentary that it outweighs the typical Chaykin cocksmannery.

i'll give it a go sometime.
I've been exploring the Eisner nominees with mixed returns. Should i post my thoughts here or start a new thread?

Post thoughts here

R.I.P. Denny O’Neil.

I hadn't realized that a friend interviewed Denny O'Neill before a local comic convention. He accidentally misquoted him, saying that O'Neill's mom was in a nursing home and not an assisted living one, which O'Neill nicely corrected when he met him at the convention after the initial phone interview. I guess his mom lived in my city. My friend got to meet Denny's mom, who he brought to the convention, and she was also nice and seemed much younger than her age.

https://www.comic-con.org/awards/2020-eisner-awards-nominations

I find the Eisners to be VERY hit and miss as far as quality and scope goes but there are certainly worse year-past recaps of popular/semi-popular work in the field so hey, why not. I'll jump in by category.

By far the Best Short Story nominee this year is Emma Hunsinger's outstanding long-form public debut and coming of age story "How to Draw a Horse" from the New Yorker. If you haven't already, you should go read it right now at the link below. It's easily among the very best and most memorable short-form comic that I've seen in the past year.

https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/how-to-draw-a-horse

Hunsinger has a longer project, Chunk, up for free on her website that I read just before posting here; it's remarkably accomplished, thoughtful student work and also more than worth a go. I'm excited to see what she does in the future.

Miriam Libicki's story for The Nib, "Who Gets Called an Unfit Mother" is beautifully executed and timely but, like much of the Nib's comic work, is less like comics and more of an illustrated essay. I will read her Fanta book "Toward a Hot Jew" sooner or later; she's clearly quite talented as an illustrator but I don't know if she's a solid storyteller or not.
https://thenib.com/who-gets-called-an-unfit-mother/

Mira Jacob's "The Menopause" is stiff and poorly rendered. She's gotten really hot as a literary crossover creator but I find her work awkward and the writing dull. Her themes are worth exploring but the scripting is cliched and lacks illumination. This is a pet peeve for me but I'm not seeing any intent in using the art of comics as anything but to prop up literal cut-out figures. Libicki is at least a solid illustrator, this is clip art unsuccessfully utilized.
https://believermag.com/the-menopause/

Matthew Inman's "You're Not Going to Believe What I'm About To Tell You" is of a piece with everything he puts on his abundantly popular and deadly dull webcomic site The Oatmeal: it reads like the unholy child of xkcd and Penny Arcade, the art is Reddit Casual and the tone is 'particularly quirky TED talk'. That clearly works for some people. It does not work for me.
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe

I still need to read Ebony Flowers' debut graphic novel collection which includes the nominated title story "Hot Comb" from Drawn and Quarterly. The concept is of interest and the art seems very Aline Kominsky-Crumbesque (which i can hang with) but i wish EVERYONE WHO MAKES COMICS would stop using cursive lettering; it makes my eyes cross. Nevertheless, the critical praise suggests this definitely merits an effort to find. Will report back.
https://drawnandquarterly.com/hot-comb
https://blacknerdproblems.com/hot-comb-review/

ty for all that ulysses!
"How to Draw a Horse" was indeed very excellent! I'll get through the others too. (Though I've already read "Who Gets Called an Unfit Mother" which was good, and I agree with your criticism there)

"Crunk" was great and totally worth reading!

When I read "The Menopause" I recognized the artwork from Mira Jacob, hate the clipart + photocomic style and it's hard to get to past for me. That said, the story is funny and I did like the goofs on Dale Carnegie (his book remains popular btw).

The Oatmeal article is... fine. Pretty much what you said, it's the TED talk method. I don't despise it because I get that they're going for a broad audience, the dumbing down is exactly why it exists.

Hopefully "Hot Comb" gets put up somewhere

Nothing to add (I also really liked Hunsinger and struggled to read the Jacob story) but thanks for pointing me towards How to Draw a Horse and Chunk, both so great

http://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/BLACK_LIVING_COVER_Sikoryak_CMYK-Nation-img.png
sikoryak coming through

Two sets of grooming / sleaze allegations over the last few days.

One is Aviva Artzy (and others) regarding Cameron Stewart

https://www.comicsbeat.com/cameron-stewart-sexual-misconduct-allegations/

And the other is Katie West (and others) regarding Warren Ellis

http://www.multiversitycomics.com/news/warren-ellis-allegations/

ugh

Super disappointed but not entirely surprised to hear that about Ellis.

Yeah, that's a good description of where I'm at.

Same here.

Ellis got exposed, chatlogs and cam-caps and all, 15 years ago, so I was very not surprised.

Ah, I'm not the only one that remembers that (and so not too surprised here either).

I never saw that and bringing it up now feels like an empty shrug to the women who either didn’t see it, or gave a man the benefit of a doubt that past behavior wouldn’t predict his actions in the future. Or that that behavior didn’t seem as bad as it could have been, not realizing how it’d affect them.

I’m always at least mildly surprised when someone’s vaguely seedy behavior indicates actual exploitative behavior, or when people don’t learn from publicly being outed, because I guess at heart I have this naivety that people will try to do better.

I saw that Chip Zdarsky mentioned Stewart on twitter in the context that he saw him dating younger women, although not the age difference indicated by grooming, when they shared a studio and felt bad about not seeing signs. But without community, including men who are willing to be open to calling things out, it’s difficult. If a woman in my field knew my colleague was abusive, am I approachable? Or did I know and was already protecting him?

Hadn't heard these accusations against Ellis until now, but even when he was a fan/just starting out as a writer he was a total arsehole in person/public.

bringing it up now feels like an empty shrug

absolutely not intended - given all of the openly known sexual abusers aggressively protected by DC and Dark Horse and DC and DC in the years since, I'm very saddened that he was apparently able to cruise right back along with the same grooming behaviour, except even more exploitative & no benefit-of-the-doubt re consensuality from his cult-of-personality message board, with the earlier revelations somehow not even making it into one of the whisper networks.

This is obviously not specific to this situation:

Guys: you know that dude who said something creepy about women to you once or twice, but seemed fine after that? That dude was testing you. Pushing your boundaries to see how you'd react, the same way they push the girls they prey on.

— Stacy King (@stacyking) June 17, 2020

Dave Sim has, to all intents and purposes, retired from comics. (What's that?, I hear you cry, We thought that had happened over a decade ago!)

http://momentofcerebus.blogspot.com/2020/06/breaking-strange-death-of-alex-raymond.html?m=1

Even the fanbase stuff - and I was/am still buying the Archive prints when they crowdfund as they're pretty fascinating historical documents - is making less than no money and Dave getting by on about $85CAD a week. His move to the puritanical life at the turn of the century might have made him better placed than most to eke out meagre income, but he's clearly sick of even trying any more.

The dude who's been drawing Dave's comics for him, unpaid, for several years is further into the blog expressing his frustration that Sim has been erecting completely arbitrary barriers to his own success for a long time, so that he can blame those as an excuse for not publishing, and continue his martyr complex. The post includes a link to a letter he wrote Sim over three years ago yelling at him about this.

Sim is absolutely the master of his own demise and I don't think anyone has any sympathy any more. Even the Archive series has been through three volunteers and they've only got to vol 8.

Old Cerberus books don't sell? I guess they've been out of the limelight for a while...

Also, they're not all in print at once, and when Dave spent many tens of thousands of dollars on remastering the art so they were better-looking than ever before, on cleaner paper, he just put them back out under the same covers (and I think under the same re-order codes?) as and when the previous editions were especially drastically out of print, rather than giving anyone a chance to promote them.

Yeah, they went back under exactly the same codes so if you wanted to actively trade up you couldn't.

My copies came from Dave via a pledge level on one of the Archive KSs before the Patreon days (and wrist issues) because it was the only way I could guarantee the new editions (and I think it was something trivial like $5CAD over trade price).

From Warren Ellis's newsletter (sorry for hueg)

Hello. Please forgive the lateness of my appearance. I have been speaking to people, and listening carefully, for a few days.

Recent statements have been made about me that need to be addressed.

I have never considered myself famous or powerful, to the point where I’ve made a lot of bad jokes about it for twenty-odd years. It had never really occurred to me that other people didn’t see it the same way—that I was not engaging as an equal when gifted with attention, but acting from a position of power and privilege. I did not take that into account in a number of my personal interactions and this was a mistake and I own it.

While I’ve made many bad choices in my past, and I’ve said a lot of wrong things, let me be clear, I have never consciously coerced, manipulated, or abused anyone, nor have I ever assaulted anybody. But I was ignorant of where I was operating from at a time I should have been clear and for that I accept 100% responsibility.

I hurt people deeply. I am ashamed for these mistakes and I am profoundly sorry. I will not speak against other people’s personal truths, and I will not expose them to the toxicity of the current discourse. I should have been more aware, more present, and more respectful of people’s feelings and for that I apologise.

I have had friendships and relationships end, sometimes in bitterness, often due to my own failings, and I continue to regret and apologise for the pain I have caused.

I have always tried to aid and support women in their lives and careers, but I have hurt many people that I had no intention of hurting. I am culpable. I take responsibility for my mistakes. I will do better and for that, I apologise.

I apologise to my friends and collaborators for having created this situation, and I hope they will be treated kindly. Mistakes and poor choices in my personal life are not on them, but only on me.

We have a responsibility to one another, every day. And I have, in my past, let too many people down. I hope to one day become worthy of the trust and kindness that was placed in me by colleagues and friends.

I will continue to listen, learn, and strive to be a better human being. I have sought to make amends with people, as I have been made aware of my transgressions, and will continue to do so. I have apologised, I apologise, and will continue to apologise and take total responsibility for my actions without equivocation.

I am going to be quiet now, to listen more than I speak, for other voices matter far more than my own right now.

I will be closing this newsletter. Thank you for your past support. Look after yourselves.

And a post from Doctor Nerdlove on it: https://www.doctornerdlove.com/on-finding-out-your-heroes-are-monsters-or-detoxifying-comic-culture/

Enjoyed the Kayfabe interview with Frederik Schodt. He talks about a lot of the things he's best known for but also tries to emphasize underestimated factors in keeping manga translations unflopped (powerful artists putting their foot down in particular),the International Manga Award and some more recent manga he has liked.
https://www.manga-award.mofa.go.jp/index_e.html
He said this award has helped a lot of careers, I do recognize a few of the winners (stuff that has been printed by american publishers) but some I can't find anything about.

Has anyone ever felt that some important franchise characters just never got interesting despite efforts to try and make them interesting ("Uuuuoooh god, they're so iconic so we have make them interesting and pretend they were always interesting"). I always felt that way about Dr Octopus and Lex Luthor.

Maybe it was Howard Chaykin wondering why anyone would want him to draw Emma Frost (he didn't know who she was until he was asked) got me thinking about this, but I was thinking about how some people, often women are subjected to interrogation about their fan credentials; but frequently the people who make comics don't read them much or know who a lot of the characters even are (this is probably more often artists than writers). A lot of artists who draw popular characters as a living gravitate towards characters that look cool but don't necessarily care about them beyond that, which cosplayers or someone who just buys a t-shirt or a toy gets criticized for.

My favorite example of this is John Buscema (who generally didn't like superheroes) resenting having to draw Aunt May, asking things like "who is this stupid old lady?"

How many Star Wars actors read all the novels?

"Aero was created for the Chinese market by the writer and artist team of Zhou Jiajun and Xu Ming and first appeared in the Chinese Marvel comic Aero (Chinese version) issue 1 (2018). Her first American debut was in War of the Realms: New Agents of Atlas issue 1 (2019). The original Chinese Aero comic would later be published or "reprinted" in the American Aero series."

Didn't know Marvel did original chinese comics. Is there any articles or databases of all the different countries who had their own official versions of DC and Marvel characters?

Something different: article about the studio of the most famous current Filipino comic artists. Not all of it is in english.
https://www.cnnphilippines.com/life/culture/2020/1/7/55-balete-studio.html

xp why would anyone read all the novels ffs

you write/draw a story, read all the works that are relevant to the story you're doing and let the corporate story group for your property figure out whether your shit is relevant and hitting the right notes

Even among big Star Wars fans I doubt many read much of the novels.

Ok, I just caught up with Snyder's Justice League, Year of the Villain - Hell Arisen, so I could be up to speed with Death Metal. These books contradict each other and it makes so little sense. Often they ignore each other - not to mention the Bendis/Superman-verse with Event Leviathan which was/is also happening at the same time? And the Batman/Superman title, which focuses on the Batman Who Laughs' infection plot, which is then stupidly resolved at the end of Hell Arisen. DC's editorial department has really gone to shit! (The Tom King run on Batman ignores virtually all of this as well, but I feel like this kinda thing has become standard procedure for Batman; see Batman Inc./New 52.)

Still, I do admit I like that Snyder is willing to goof it up with these ideas for the sake of fun - I mean, Jarro alone made his JL run much more enjoyable. And Death Metal looks like it's going to be more of the same silliness as Dark Nights, and I am down for that.

Realizing also that both Marvel and DC did that weird thing again where they came up with similar ideas around the same time (Justice League's Perpetua arc has a lot in common with Jason Aaron's ancient Avengers/Celestials storyline, though I'm further behind on that one, plus that one added vampires for some reason.)

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/night-parade-of-one-hundred-demons

DC's editorial department has really gone to shit!

― Nhex, Sunday, June 28, 2020 9:00 AM

Isn't it better when they give up trying to coordinate all the storylines?

https://www.comics.org/issue/407300/cover/4/

Felipe Smith interview at Kayfabe isn't finished yet (there's a third part forthcoming) but there's some great stuff in there. I knew most stuff about the manga industry but the sheer extent of the stress, health concerns and constant meetings with editors is incredible; I didn't know original art wasn't a real commodity and that some people have such a better life in doujinshi that I wonder why most people wouldn't prefer to work in that (you can make a good and legal living off fanfiction comics; if you can do Ninja Turtle sex comics for a big audience then are DC and Marvel characters viable?)
He said one Doujin author more or less laughed off an offer from a big time publisher because why would you want horrible deadlines and an editor as co-writer? I can only guess the main incentive not to doujin is you probably wont get a multi-media hit.

Smith's editor was amused shaking his head at the violence in Peepo Choo and Smith says that this is the country that shocked the rest of the world with things like Fist Of The North Star and the editor replied that that level of violence is mostly from a bygone era in manga.

Maybe I should check if Berserk gradually decreases the violence.

I knew that Berserk removed a chapter from the collected edition because it was deemed too much of a spoiler but Piskor says something like 100 pages were removed from the collected version of Akira.

Huh? Why was that?

I think he just wanted to omit and re-do some stuff because it was important to him. Apparently changes are made fairly often if the author has time to make these changes.

And the doujinshi printing services sound like a dream. It's not difficult to get all different kinds of paper and binding.

So glad I was reading Marvel and DC before all this online culture wars shit, it just looks like it would have sucked the joy out of everything.

anybody read Lewis Trondheim's (written not drawn) Infinity 8? I picked up a random issue and it seemed good, Dungeon-ish (in terms of complexity, not humor)

i've been waiting for enough backlog of it to give it a serious go; i think it's at issue #22 or so now? Probably ripe!

Read the first couple issues of Matt Fraction's Adventureman; it's just OK so-far storywise, but I might stay on just for the Dodsons' art.

Junji Ito's Lovesickness coming in April

I'm impressed how thorough the database is becoming, still a lot of smaller creators I can't find but there's even serialized magazine listings for the bigger creators.
Didn't realize the Violence Jack was quite long. I liked the look of some of this I've seen years ago but I've come to assume all the best Go Nagai art has a lot of help from assistants.
https://comicvine.gamespot.com/violence-jack/4050-48159/

https://i.imgur.com/EeKnCKc_d.jpg?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium

Just tried to read some graphic novel called Gang of Fools which is so bad I'm about to give up. (It takes a lot to get me to that point) Like, I get that it's fun to make a crazy alternate world and skip around a lot with the edgy characters/settings/dialogue, but the artwork is so bad it's unreadable at points.

infinity 8 is fucking amazing btw

Kurt Busiek is sort of producing a series of Marvels-themed one-shots called Marvels: Snapshots, each focusing on a different hero and done by a different creative team, covers by Alex Ross. This is sort of to hype up his new ongoing The Marvels series. Pretty slept on, though I'm sure they'll be collected when finished.

(Not to be confused with the also Busiek-related Marvel #1 one-shot, or the Marvels X series which is a prequel to Earth X, sheesh. All of these have Alex Ross covers for maximum confusion.)

They've all been pretty decent, but this one I just read was great - Marvels: Snapshots - Captain America #1, written by Mark Russell. Taking place in grimy old '70s NYC, focuses on a young black man whose life gets altered when a supervillain "madbomb" attack causes massive violence throughout the city. The other boroughs get "fixed", but not the South Bronx, and his neighborhood and family business go to ruin. As a result, the kid loses out on college and he ends up joining AIM to make ends meet. Good story. (Bleeding Cool review here, to see about half the issue.)

Never read any Ito. Anywhere good to start?

Uzumaki, probably.

Fanta's virtual comicon schedule

Thursday, July 7/23, 4:00pm — Teaching and Making Comics
Ebony Flowers (Hot Comb), Roman Muradov (Vanishing Act), Trina Robbins (Flapper Girls), and Sophie Yanow (The Contradictions) are four vital cartoonists who have taught classes on comics themselves. They speak with James Sturm (Off Season) about their teaching philosophy, and how teaching has transformed their perspectives on the comics canon and their own work.
YouTube: https://youtu.be/I6A6OT1xr6U

Friday, July 7/24, 11:00am — TragiComics
Tom Gauld (Department of Mind-Blowing Theories), Simon Hanselmann (Bad Gateway), John Pham (J & K), Walter Scott (Wendy, Master of Art), and Rikke Villadsen (Cowboy) tackle complex subjects–and they are funny doing it! These five cartoonists speak to Graeme McMillan (The Hollywood Reporter) about how they use humor to process and respond to the difficulties and oddities of life.
YouTube: https://youtu.be/UuQ66Yw7Td0

Friday, July 7/24, 2:00pm — I Am Not Okay With This: From the Page to the Screen!
Cartoonist Charles Forsman (I Am Not Okay With This, The End of the F***ing World), director Jonathan Entwistle (I Am Not Okay With This, The End of the F***ing World), and actor Wyatt Oleff (It, I Am Not Okay With This) trace the evolution of the critically-acclaimed Netflix series I Am Not Okay With This back to its beginnings as an original graphic novel! Moderated by the book’s editor and Fantagraphics associate publisher, Eric Reynolds.
YouTube:https://youtu.be/RhgZSUbXJE8

Saturday, July 7/25, 12:00pm — Spotlight on The Cloven: With Garth Stein and Matthew Southworth
This panel will spotlight the debut sci-fi graphic novel collaboration by author Garth Stein (The Art of Racing in the Rain) and cartoonist Matthew Southworth (Stumptown). These two pacific northwestern creators have teamed up to create a one-of-a-kind story steeped in its Seattle roots. The Cloven: Book One is the first installment of this dynamic, atmospheric, and wryly funny graphic novel trilogy by two bestselling and critically acclaimed storytellers. Moderated by the book’s editor and Fantagraphics associate publisher, Eric Reynolds. YouTube: https://youtu.be/KQ-qOo1rGZw

Saturday, July 7/25, 6:00pm — Fantagraphics and IDW: Classic Comics Reprints
Classic comic reprints give readers of all ages a chance to read comic classics in new and exciting ways. Join moderator Karen Green (curator for comics and cartoons, Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library) and panelists Dean Mullaney (The Library of American Comics creative director), Peter Maresca (founder and publisher of Sunday Press), and Eric Reynolds (Fantagraphics associate publisher) for a celebration of comic classics.
YouTube: https://youtu.be/7hoB7LgbjMU

Sunday, July 7/26, 6:00pm — Masters of Style: Woodring, Fleener, Muradov and Hernandez
The diverse but instantly recognizable styles of master cartoonists Jim Woodring (The Frank Book, Poochytown), Mary Fleener (Life of the Party, Billie the Bee), Roman Muradov (Vanishing Act), and Gilbert Hernandez (Love and Rockets) inspire many admirers and imitators. Join them for a discussion of line, color, abstraction, and the choice to hone (or not to hone) a single visual style of the course of a comics career. Moderated by Fantagraphics publisher Gary Groth.
YouTube: https://youtu.be/2ybAhDDsMvQ

https://hermespress.com/products/ditko-shrugged-the-uncompromising-life-of-the-artist-behind-spider-man-and-the-rise-of-marvel-comics-pre-order

I just found out about this. I'm very skeptical I'll learn much from it (and why so expensive?) but the decade worth of correspondence, new interviews with various creators and family involvement are probably enough for me.

This from the amazon page

“WALLY WOOD AND STEVE DITKO GOT ON WELL BECAUSE THEY SHARED A MUTUAL HATRED OF STAN LEE” - RALPH REESE

Ooft, shipping to the UK as expensive as the book.

Hideousness of the computer colours aside, lol that they have a special zoom-in function so you can see the super-janky zaggies on the terrible scan.

The cover on amazon has different coloring so I'm guessing one or both of them is not the final cover.

Also: it's only 208 pages, so where is the cost coming from? Maybe all the letters are scanned? I might wait for reviews before I jump.

https://comicsdc.blogspot.com/2020/07/quarantining-coronavirus-through-comics.html

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/dc-comics-dc-universe-hit-by-major-layoffs-1306743

^^ Pulled out of Diamond altogether, switching all their periodical distribution to two mail-order companies, no international distribution to comic shops.

In normal times, this would definitely be a case of pointing and laughing when, like Heroes World, the plan flops. This seems so much more speedily doomed to failure that the only thing that makes sense is that it's intended as a strongarm move to get better terms out of Diamond.

However, decisions from DC that make sense have not been a core business strategy for about the last 15 years.

― an, uh, razor of love (sic), Saturday, June 6, 2020 9:27 AM (two months ago)

This went well, then.

AFAICT they are (at least in part) paying for the sins of HBO Go? Such fun to be part of a big corporate family!

There was an interesting post about this from the comics writer/researcher Peter Sanderson on his Facebook page:

Back in the 1980s Warners apparently toyed with the idea of shutting down DC and outsourcing the publishing rights to Marvel. I was in a Marvel editorial meeting at which we discussed which DC titles we should publish if we got the rights. (I pushed for a "New Gods" book.) Now I wonder if it might come to the point that AT & T decides to outsource the comics publishing rights to DC characters. But who would get them? Marvel? IDW? Dark Horse? Would some characters end up at one company and other DC characters at another?

Shooter had a very brief opportunity to buy DC outright IIRC? And decided against it?

http://jimshooter.com/2011/08/superman-first-marvel-issue.html/

Ahh, yes. Thank you for that.

LOL, of course Shooter decided that one of the seven launch titles would be LOSH.

Wow, so it didn't happen because Marvel was fighting off an anti-trust lawsuit at the time. It would've been mindblowing to my child self to see that happen, I remember having such an interest in that X-Men/Teen Titans crossover story.

That story is incredible! I didn’t know DC was in such dire straits back then.

I dunno if they were in unusual dire straits, so much as adapting to shifting their business to full-sale instead of sale-or-shred - 1984 would have been the time of the first Baxter books, with New Teen Titans experimenting with One Year Later vs LSH trying out parallel stories on the newstand. Crisis was already in prep, and their creative renaissance was ramping up solidly by 1985.

A big boss at Warner Communications would probably have just been looking at some balance sheets, and not giving any shrift to. effectively, a brand new retail channel.

of course marvel filed for bankruptcy in the 90's
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1996/12/28/marvel-entertainment-files-for-bankruptcy-protection/73bb4597-3076-48eb-a113-1b5f8e654a6a/

that was because Perelman bought it for $80million and then ran up $700million debt on toy companies, sticker companies, trading card companies and... pulling out of the distribution market and attempting to run their own distro through a too-small shell company. HMMM

if DC hadn't done their version during a pandemic, they probably would have tried to open a national chain of DC Universe toy shops / theme restaurants as well

DC appointing a new General Manager from the eSports division instead of an Editor-in-Chief, starting Friday 18th September

the Director of Publishing Operations, a 28-year veteran of DC (one of their longest employees) is among the fired, and those laid off are required to work 2-3 months notice.

Odds on print publishing being shut down by Christmas?

No one with any decision-making ability has had any idea what to do with DC in a very, very long time.

Or, well, I guess driving the whole thing into a wall at top speed is a decision of sorts.

a very, very long time

it's only eleven years since Nelson replaced Levitz.

I guess that might feel like a very, very long time if I'd bought more than a dozen or so DC comics in that period tbf

It feels like a very, very long time to me BECAUSE I've only bought a (few) dozen or so DC titles in that period.

waitasec, Batman Inc. ran until 2013, I bought a few dozen too

Hope they at least finish Dark Nights: Death Metal

*looks that up*

Dark Nights: Death Metal #1–7

Writer Scott Snyder
Penciller Greg Capullo
Inker Jonathan Glapion
Colorist FCO Plascencia

Dark Nights: Death Metal: Multiverse's End

Writer James Tynion IV
(artist) Juan Gedeon
Colorist TBA

Dark Nights: Death Metal: Legends of the Dark Knights

Writer Scott Snyder, James Tynion IV, Marguerite Bennett, Joshua Williamson, Peter J. Tomasi, Garth Ennis, Daniel Warren Johnson, Frank Tieri
Penciller Tony S. Daniel, Jamal Igle, Joëlle Jones, Daniel Warren Johnson, Riley Rossmo, Francesco Francavilla
Inker TBA
Colorist TBA

Dark Nights: Death Metal: Infinite Hour Exxxtreme!

Writer TBA
Penciller TBA
Inker TBA
Colorist TBA

Dark Nights: Death Metal: The Last 52: War of the Multiverses

Writer TBA
Penciller TBA
Inker TBA
Colorist TBA

Dark Nights: Death Metal The Last Stories of the DCU

Writer TBA
Penciller TBA
Inker TBA
Colorist TBA

Dark Nights: Death Metal: The Multiverse Who Laughs

Writer TBA
Penciller TBA
Inker TBA
Colorist TBA

Dark Nights: Death Metal: The Secret Origin

Writer TBA
Penciller TBA
Inker TBA
Colorist TBA

would be a shame to miss out on this well-planned passion project for sure

it's fun!

^ TBC

Yeah, it's really not.

this was the year I went hard on Ben Passmore and bought a small pile of his work and joined his Patreon.
He's great! BTTM FDDRS is one of the best comics of the last five years.
https://www.radiatorcomics.com/creator/ben-passmore/
https://www.instagram.com/daygloayhole/
his new book, Sports is Hell, looks great.

yeah BTTM FDDRS is some wild stuff

Is there really, even theoretically, meant to be a thing called 'Dark Nights: Death Metal: Infinite Hour Exxxtreme!'. I would not expect sic to lie, but this seems unlikely, even for DC.

https://i.imgur.com/agTaBRa.jpg
Writers: Becky Cloonan and Frank Tieri!

After posting, I regretted not moving it to the end of the list so it would look like I had made it up

I am sorry for doubting you for even a half-second.

The director of the CBLDF was removed last month from his position, 14 years after police investigations into sexual assault complaints against him at conventions. TCJ subsequently reported on sexual harassment & bullying he enaged in at work.

An interim director was appointed today, an "attorney and ethics director" whose previous role involved "work on ethics issues ..advising government officials," and who is a member of the Ethics Committee at Kering Americas. In the press release announcing his hiring, he quotes 'my favorite comic book sequence of all time, the last issue of Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol: "There is another world. A better world. Well... there must be."'

The ethics-focused lawyer for the artists' rights org does not cite that Morrison was quoting Asleep by The Smiths.

Ugh. An ugly story

Axed at DC in the last 8 weeks or so:

Metal Men (mini)
Batman's Grave (mini)
Hellblazer
Lucifer
Books of Magic
Amethyst
House Of Whispers
Batgirl
Aquaman
Batman & The Outsiders
Justice League Odyssey
Red Hood: Outlaw
Teen Titans
Young Justice
Harley Quinn
Hawkman
Suicide Squad
Supergirl
The Terrifics
Shazam!
Manhunters: The Secret History (bumped & unpublished)
Event Leviathan: Checkmate (wtf) (bumped & unpublished)

Bumped from May publication but not yet cancelled:
Flash Forward
Generation Zero: Gods Among Us
Generation One: Age of Mysteries
Generation Two: Age of the Metahuman
Generation Three: Age of Crisis
Generation Four: Age of Rebirth
Generation Five: Age of Tomorrow

plus 18x $1 Comics reprints, 4x Facsimile editions, and 5 ongoing Giant Comics for Walmart, including a Wonder Woman 1984 movie tie-in.

They've also confirmed that the TV content on the DC subscription service will be moving to HBO Max, fwiw.

This leaves approx 15 titles still being published as of November; they also had an online "Fandome" (wtf) convention scheduled, but many of the panels are being cancelled due to AT&T firing the talent shortly after pre-recording the panels the other week.

Jim Lee, in a hilariously content-free, management-jargon-filled interview with the Hollywood Reporter, suggests that their publishing strategy going forward will mostly be unpublished inventory and foreign licences, released digitally.

Small note that Batman's Grave being shitcanned is because it's written by Warren Ellis.

I was reading (on and off) almost all of these.

Batman's Grave was okay, basically a compendium of Ellis-isms so your enjoyment is going to be predicated on your patience with his writing tics (which came across to me this time as Neal Adams-noir) and his repugnant reputation.

The current run of Books of Magic was readable. Spurrier's current run on Hellblazer was actually very good and very much worth reading.

I either don't have much of anything to say and/or I did not like the rest.

DC is fucked, badly.

i'm amazed at how they've frittered away the good will of so many characters. Aquaman and Harley Quinn and Captain Mar- er, SHAZAM are megamovie stars! Teen Titans are beloved cartoon hits! How have you fucked this up so badly that an audience that wants to see these books isn't buying them?

I was liking Batman's Grave and the current Suicide Squad run, wasn't reading the rest.
Was looking forward to that Event Leviathan series just to see an actual conclusion to the first story.
As surprised as you are that they're killing those properties (Harley in particular which always seems popular?)
All the Generation 0-5 stuff was DiDios' baby, I think, so not surprising that's kicked away

Legion of Bendis Heroes is surviving? It looks so bad.

Bendis-verse, HillHouse and Black Label all summarily shrugged away or will be shortly i guess

on the other hand, i have no idea how books like hawkman or red hood have survived anywhere near this long.
red hood particularly! who the fuck is buying that book!?!

from early May, which i think is the last time DC had sales figures released through diamond

123 - RED HOOD: OUTLAW ($3.99)
03/2015: Red Hood & Outlaws #40 -- 17,110
03/2016: Red Hood/Arsenal #10 -- 17,707
03/2017: Red Hood & Outlaws #8 -- 27,894
03/2018: Red Hood & Outlaws #20 -- 20,214
-----------------------------------------
03/2019: Red Hood: Outlaw #32 -- 18,389 (- 5.9%)
04/2019: Red Hood: Outlaw #33 -- 24,706 (+ 34.4%)
05/2019: Red Hood: Outlaw #34 -- 18,389 (- 23.2%)
06/2019: Red Hood: Outlaw #35 -- 18,067 (- 4.8%)
07/2019: Red Hood: Outlaw #36 -- 21,308 (+ 17.9%)
08/2019: Red Hood: Outlaw #37 -- 18,585 (- 12.8%)
09/2019: Red Hood: Outlaw #38 -- 18,425 (- 0.9%)
10/2019: Red Hood: Outlaw #39 -- 17,614 (- 4.4%)
11/2019: Red Hood: Outlaw #40 -- 21,864 (+ 24.1%)
12/2019: --
01/2020: Red Hood: Outlaw #41 -- 15,835 (- 27.6%)
01/2020: Red Hood: Outlaw #42 -- 15,419 (- 2.6%)
02/2020: Red Hood: Outlaw #43 -- 15,733 (+ 2.0%)
03/2020: Red Hood: Outlaw #44 -- 14,158 (+ 2.0%)
-----------------
6 months: - 23.2%
1 year : - 23.0%
2 years : - 30.0%
5 years : - 17.3%

Lowest sales ever for a Red Hood-fronted comic.

from the same source:

DC COMICS - TOTAL SALES
03/2005: 1,914,442
03/2010: 1,910,518
03/2015: 1,877,281
03/2016: 1,696,506
03/2017: 2,711,448
03/2018: 2,305,728
------------------
03/2019: 2,213,196 (+ 25.8%)
04/2019: 1,515,307 (- 31.5%)
05/2019: 2,177,609 (+ 43.7%)
06/2019: 1,787,229 (- 25.7%)
07/2019: 2,130,506 (+ 19.2%)
08/2019: 1,814,822 (- 14.8%)
09/2019: 2,145,167 (+ 18.2%)
10/2019: 2,764,956 (+ 28.9%)
11/2019: 2,089,383 (- 24.4%)
12/2019: 2,057,809 (- 1.5%)
01/2020: 1,855,544 (- 9.8%)
02/2020: 1,738,041 (- 6.3%)
02/2020: 1,560,269 (- 6.3%)
-----------------
6 months: - 27.3%
1 year : - 29.5%
2 years : - 32.3%
5 years : - 19.6%
10 years: - 18.3%
15 years: - 18.5%

If Instagram and Tumblr's tireless algorithms are anything to go by, Red Hood has a really dedicated cult fanbase, especially for a third-tier Batman spinoff (though, tbf, not bad at times). Lobdell's long run was set to end with 50 anyway as of the end of June

lobdell's popularity in the comic world is utterly confounding to me
i will admit to thinking Happy Death Day was a pretty good movie; kind of assume there's a lot of punch-up work doing the heavy lifting there.

ha, wow, did not realize he wrote that. that's gotta be the best thing he's associated with

the director apparently did a page-one rewrite on Happy Death Day, basically keeping Lobdell's premise

that sounds right. the premise is "groundhog day meets Friday the 13th" which any 14 year old could've come up with but the nuances and the lead actress are what make it worthwhile.

I kind of have to say that the way the last-year data on DC flaps around like a flag in a high wind renders the year-to-year comparisons kind of meaningless, like this May was worse than all the other Mays, but last October was better than all of them?

Guessing Rebirth was the cause of the massive sales jump from 2016-2017.
Also that list conspicuously leaves out 2011, the start of the New 52. Still interesting the sales reverted and decreasing within four years, though.

I agree that is bizarre the way sales will ebb and flow month to month in 2019. I would've expected stronger consistent sales during event periods.Heroes in Crisis wasn't good and Doomsday Clock was dribbling to the finish with the final four issues being a year late (started in Nov '17!). Year of the Villain was an incredibly loose thematic tie-in.

I would've thought Bendis-verse (Superman titles, Wonder Comics imprint, Event Leviathan) would've been a solid bump, and Black Label seemed to get a solid push from the my local stores. I'm guessing none of these did as well as they hoped.

Black Label has been pretty successful but the new leadership doesn't like the 'adult' direction, supposedly.

Watched the Cartoonist Kayfabe interview with Pat Mills. Space Warp is his attempt to do 2000AD again but with better creator rights and trying to get a teenage audience again (in addition to older comics fans). He made it fairly clear he likes to chase certain audiences and try to please them.
https://www.spacewarpcomic.com/

Space Warp looks interesting...

Batman's Grave #12 (the final issue) was in November's solicits published two days ago, so hopefully we'll still get the end of that without resorting to a future collection

I had never heard the story about a comic shop owner very loudly boycotting Mills' Marshall Law because a villain dropkicks a child so hard that it sends him for miles.

Bendis wrote some pretty good comics but I think whatever he had going he's kind of already mined out. It's not like the zombies were going to follow him to read Superman.

Bendis wrote some pretty good comics

citation needed

I really liked Age of Ultron, of all things. I don't think his "critically acclaimed" stuff like Daredevil and Alias holds up very well. But sometimes he hits the nail on the right amount of stupid, and he can be fun in small doses. Quite a few of his books have started well, but they always seem to go off the rails with unresolved subplots/bad writing within a year - his Iron Man and Superman runs are both pretty good/bad examples of that.

i like his extended run on the Avengers. Fanboys appear to have hated his run on Superman but I thought the elevation of Lois and Superman Jr was okay until the Leviathan thing got into full swing and that sucked.

The Superman Jr. stuff - I'm still waiting to see how it pans out; but I really liked Tomasi's work on the characters, especially with Super-Sons. The Action Comics / Invisible Mafia angle is also interesting but slow moving. Afraid you might be right that these plots will just go off the rails and forgotten, this happened a lot I feel towards the end of his otherwise-great Avengers run when he seemed to get bored of it.

I liked Leviathan in concept but was livid when Event: Leviathan ended with the villain reveal and then a note that there would be another Leviathan series next year to continue the story. Which of course, is now indefinitely delayed due to Covid.

the whole Leviathan thing had nothing at its core except a desire to be a big, universe spanning conspiracy because... well, because who watches the watchmen i guess? utterly pointless and i never gave a damn who the leader was. i think it's absolutely fated to be ignored by the next writer, so this was just so much filler.

I did like the idea that Leviathan was transformed from the Al Ghuls' crime cult to an opposing group of "good" revolutionaries who destroyed the world's spy networks to maintain a One World Order that would incorporate ideological superheroes, super-scientists, villains and intelligence agency survivors, and was interested in turning the population in their favor. But yeah... thrown away, it looks like.

They're basically QAnon but with lasers? Once I read it that way, it turned me off completely.

I thought QAnon was fighting the globalists? Eh, honestly i don't know

i read Q/leviathan as the evil SHIELD power-behind-the-throne but, again, I read his whole avengers/dark avengers run and this felt like that redux except not very good. a quick look around online supports my theory that this run doesn't benefit from close analysis.

I mean, I like a segment of the work he's done, but I think it's fair to say that applies across the board re: Bendis. It's not exactly deep.

i think he claremonts as well or (in his prime) better than almost anyone else and that's not nothing. Juggling character growth, group dynamics and long term impact for a team book can be fun to watch. obviously your ability to enjoy what he's offering hinges on your patience with his mamet for dummies dialogue.

I think that's a fair evaluation of his strengths.

In terms of his weaknesses (and an installment of 'things only Old Lunch cares about'): although the quality is variable and arguable, Marvel in the last decade or so has done an admirable job of sewing all of the components of their massive events into something resembling a cohesive whole, where all of the crossovers fit relatively well into the overall puzzle. EXCEPT that the weak link in every instance has been Bendis, who either just DGAF about being a team player or who worked under editors who were too dazzled by his star power to rein him in. But it drove me nuts every time. No, Brian, there's no way the thing you just wrote could've happened given the status of everything else going on atm, getcher head in the game.

(I do realize that his flippant attitude towards continuity is likely to earn him points among the contrarians up in this piece.)

i thought it was pretty good going through Secret Invasion/Dark Reign/Siege, but around The Heroic Age things petered out, but he kept doing Avengers/Guardians for several years after

Yeah, his ability to write team books at that point completely turfed out. His run on Guardians was pretty bad.

I don't think his "critically acclaimed" stuff like Daredevil and Alias holds up very well. But sometimes he hits the nail on the right amount of stupid, and he can be fun in small doses. Quite a few of his books have started well, but they always seem to go off the rails with unresolved subplots/bad writing within a year - his Iron Man and Superman runs are both pretty good/bad examples of that.

― Chuck_Tatum, Thursday, August 20, 2020 1:08 AM (one hour ago)

i like his extended run on the Avengers. Fanboys appear to have hated his run on Superman but I thought the elevation of Lois and Superman Jr was okay until the Leviathan thing got into full swing and that sucked.

― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Thursday, August 20, 2020 1:24 AM (one hour ago)

I enjoy that the general internet discussion tone of "oh yes his earlier stuff is rubbish but he's really become quite the craftsman now!" is a solid 24 years old at the point :)

eis

Have people ever agreed on Bendis? Feel like he's been hated and liked in equal measure as long as he's been around

I kept trying his stuff to no avail when readers and pros alike on Usenet were saying "ignore his full-screen all-caps shouting abuse / crying emotional injury at people on here, he's really good," and the left-hand-navigation message board era was wild over his superhero timestretch material

obv there have always been dissenters (hello), but the positive attention to his current work vs rolling acknowledgment of his earlier stuff's empty calories is totally a thing ime

In the 00s DC and Marvel, there was so much wannabe hip dialogue I just can't stand (it's probably still like that); I can't remember if Bendis did this particular thing, but a lot of writers did this with villains and gangsters, starting a sinister lecture about how the world really works "y'see it's like this..."
It made me so angry I wanted to bite my own nipples off.

i will take Bendis' convoluted Gilmore Girls wannabe dialogue over Ennis' high-school-kid-describing-Faces-of-Death-style anyday.

hah! I enjoy both but that is pretty otm

so weird how ennis has been accepted by the Fanta critic crowd
http://www.tcj.com/back-in-ussr-garth-ennis-soviet-tales/

I think Rifle Brigade was quite funny at times but he's really not my taste.

Tucker has been a huge enjoyer of Ennis as a maker of masculine adventure comics, in the way that people with highbrow tastes in other areas may enjoy action movies, for a long time, and he is now the editor of the online arm of TCJ. I don't know that instances of him commissioning an Ennis fan to review Ennis speaks to anything about a previous Fanta critic crowd.

(Though Ennis had plenty of positive and equivocal reviews in the Journal in the '90s.)

Ennis's writing has long seemed to me like the only safe outlet of a mind which might otherwise be disposed towards acts of deep depravity. It's either write about a grungy psychopath who wears a jacket made of scrotums or become that grungy psychopath, if you will.

my recent hard drive crash took my digital files that i would clip to share but some of the punisher max stuff is just straight up racist

right, here's a good example of the kind of objectionable tin eared shit ennis was writing for marvel in '07
http://i.imgur.com/DNmlpS1.png

Stay classy, Garth.

There's definitely a massive "giggling schoolboy" aspect to getting Marvel to print the N-word and the F-word and the S-word and the W-word, but it's an undermining that's not without value. Showing racist characters being racist is more in line with classic 1960s Marvel values. Obviously there's a danger of dipshit readers sticking on Ennis' delight & celebration in writing bad people being bad*, and not go all the way to the "bad" part, but I'd suspect that this danger is much higher on his war comics.

(bias: Barracuda was dumb & required a conscious shift to accept its tone but I read it once, war comics skeeve me out)

*also a big part of standard Marvel villain-writing tbf

my recent hard drive crash took my digital files

oh no forks

the difference, which seems obvious on the face of it, is that this isn't racist characters being racist so much as it is Garth Ennis ventriloquizing a big dick slinging black guy with a gun and a STREET ATTITUDE. it's less the sin that he's encouraging people to be bad and more that he's very literally saying "here's what they sound like" to a crowd of dipshits that are totally happy to eat that shit up with a cracker.

ennis' particular brand of misogyny, homo/transphobia and racism is of a particularly pernicious variety imo where he engages in the worst sort of stereotyping and bias but then plays it off as irony or contrarianism or exceptionalism by occasionally playing characters against type. even if you get a giggle out of the house of stan lee publishing the word "cunt", it's still garbage no matter how you cut it

an everglades attitude iirc

i dunno what that means

Ennis is karaokeing (multimedia) blaxploitation dialogue for Barracuda, in the same way he's karaokeing gangster movie dialogue for the white drug-runners etc. We agree that this ironic play-acting has the potential to have a pernicious effect on dumb readers, I just hope that the vast majority of the readers take it as cartoony dress-ups.


Like, the Punisher is an extremely toxic icon, but I doubt many cops and CHUDs dressing up as him are reading comedy miniseries on the Marvel MAX label

(For an author whose teenage works were largely about the societal damage and trauma caused by racism and guns, one would like to think that Ennis isn't maliciously racist, but then I avoid nearly all his post-Hitman work due to its apparent tone or ugliness, so...)

xp: just a joke about the setting of that character, to placehold while I typed some actual thoughts

i like to think i'm sophisticated enough to be able to tell the difference between pastiching tropes in service of casting a fresh and tongue-in-cheek take on problematic material vs showing your ass and calling it a metaphor.

There's not much nuance or cleverness at play in Ennis' mid naughties work, which he was churning out in Bendis-level bulk. It's undeniably pulpy - and, frankly, readable in the way that Pringles are edible. I get where it's tempting to draw a line between Trashman and Punisher if you're feeling charitable, but I re-read a lot of this stuff recently out of curiosity and it's pretty vile... it would be easy to post another 50 pages of clips like the one above without effort.

and it's not just the trappings of prejudice that make it objectionable; it takes real glee in mixing sex and murder in a way that's exhausting and boring and childish and stupid. I literally just opened a random issue to see if I could find an example and this is what jumps out on page three of punisher v5 #24 from 2005.
http://i.imgur.com/NzHldpB.png
maybe it's a question of "if you were 15 when you saw this, it was the coolest comic ever" which is likely why i have a soft spot for the Heavy Metal crew, but this is nothing special.

a fresh and tongue-in-cheek take

I definitely don't think Ennis believed he was bringing a revisionist take to the sort of dialogue he was emulating

re that last spread: see above about finding the tone and ugliness of his recent decades' work offputting. Right there I think he was bringing a revisionist tone to the early MAX Punisher, in the way that revisionist Westerns exposed the hateful bloodiness and sadism that was polished as noble in earlier works - aiming to alarm and repulse the standard Punisher-reading chud by showing "realistic" violence and crimes, and the Punisher character as a proper psychopath. But I get the impression that he became happy with how well that impacted the audience, once he'd developed the skill*, and just continued to mine the furrow to no transformative end.

* in his 1992-2000ish work, he had a variety of tones of comedic violence in different texts, like For A Few Troubles More, Hitman, Preacher, the Punisher mini w/ Steve Dillon where he punches a bear -- so maybe he has many nuanced tones of horror violence in his 2005-20 work. But none of it looks interesting enough in tone, topic, or style to my glancing eye to find out. (I did read the Hitman reunion/sequel minis, or one of them, and he didn't have the comedy down anymore, either.)

Here’s some panels from Ennis’s The Pro:

https://i.imgur.com/iMv92PF.jpg

These are Bendis comics I liked.

Daredevil
Powers (pretty much ground to a halt once he got popular)

Secret War/House of M - not bad.

New Avengers (first few arcs - build up of Secret Invasion good, actual series underwelming...)
Dark Avengers

Some of the later ones seemed like he knocked him out in an afternoon...

https://hcc.catsone.com/careers/4743-General/jobs/13069798-Consignment-Director-Comics-and-Comic-Art

??

go for it dawg

lol, not for me but someone on here certainly must be into it

Not sure if this is the right thread but absolutely astonished
1. to find myself watching a live-action TV Doom Patrol TV series
2. that is really good
3. and features the Beard Hunter

The Top 13 Most Valuable Comics Published Since 1970 (the year of the first Overstreet Price Guide)

https://13thdimension.com/the-top-13-most-valuable-comics-published-since-1970/

what does Overstreet list Slow Jams at?

That list prompted me to peruse lists of more recent material and discover the half dozen comics I own that are worth as much as the thousands of others combined.

Nothing quite in the realm of a Scooby-Doo #1 but still.

The only one of those top 13 I have ever owned was tmnt 1 but it was a 2nd printing

Thing I most regret selling for cash was my complete set of original
Dirty Plotte minicomics

i've owned several beat up Star Wars #1. What's the big deal about the 35 cent one? Lower print run? Collection completists are fucking weird.

my biggest regret was swapping my copy of Funny Aminals #1 for a complete run of Melmoth back in college. I have a digital copy though so no great loss.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funny_Aminals

Years ago, I found a complete run of Eightball (up through the late teens, I believe?) in the back of some musty second-hand bookstore that clearly had no idea what it was. I think it was like $20 total.

Just recently realized that they likely fell victim to a termite infestation a while back that led to me indiscriminately trashing boxes full of who knows what.

(At least I still have my complete early Acme Novelty Library collection, warped though they might be by my apartment flooding. I don't have the greatest luck when it comes to having undamaged possessions, it would seem.)

SW#1 was right on the cusp of one of their price hikes, from 30 to 35c iirc, and most of the print run was at the other price.

Same book in every other respect though! Just a shorter print run with a 5 where a 0 was and that accounts for thousands of dollars in value.
goddam ocd numismatic fever if you ask me

Which is just one of the many reasons I typically dngaf about the value of my comics. Like I saw that a very particular edition of Mad Love is worth quite a bit, and worth quite a bit more than other editions of Mad Love. Pretty sure it's the one I own. Do I really care enough to find out? I do not.

I used to have a GSXMen#1, wonder if it's still in one of the longboxes. I bought it and a copy of #94 for $2 each in Ft. Worth in...1976 or '77.

I have the early Zap! Comix, what are those worth?

some of the most-reprinted comics in history

But these are the originals!

Atomic Avenue guides:

#1/1st printing at $3000, 2nd printing at $600, 9th printing at $14.50

#2/1st printing at $540, 2nd printing at $210, 9th printing at $3.95

#0/1st printing at $300, 2nd printing at $190, 10th printing at $2.95

#3/1st printing at $32, 2nd printing at $48, 3rd printing at $72, 4th printing at $6, 5th printing at $4, 6th printing also at $4, 7th printing at $11.50

I haven't gotten to read them yet as the demo copies I bought initially are still circulating but the TKO GNs I started carry during the shutdown are getting a lot of good buzz from customers.

https://tkopresents.com/collections/titles

(The boxed set of individual comics is weird since they didn't release as monthly issues and I'm not carrying them.)

sic in revealing the diminishing value of reprints shocker

also the only new recent publisher that doesn't seem like a blatant attempt to sell a property to Netflix

are you being sarcastic?

Interesting, I didn’t know Zap #0 was the 3rd to be published

are you being sarcastic?

No - they might be that as well (I mean, if you can farm IP successfully it's probably a good business model) but the way they've gone about things feels less like that than Aftershock, AWA or Vault.

xp Intended to be first, but a publisher flaked out with the original art



diminishing value of reprints shocker

this is indeed a shocking reading of the prices on #3

TBF, I did not actually read that far before I decided to go full wisenheimer.

also the only new recent publisher that doesn't seem like a blatant attempt to sell a property to Netflix

Silver Sprocket and NYRB both launched since Vault and Aftershock btw afaik, and Floating World only started doing things that weren't one-off tabloids or art objects last year

There are all sorts of issues going for eye opening prices these days.

It probably started with the big Harley first appearance issue, but look at what those Batman cartoon related comics are going for these days. They used to be total dollar box stuff, but not anymore.

what does Overstreet list Slow Jams at?

I know you are joking but I really liked the first 2/3 of Slow Jams, the chapters that were serialized in NON. The last chapter was awful though, and I never could muster the motivation to read anything else he did.

Years ago, I found a complete run of Eightball (up through the late teens, I believe?) in the back of some musty second-hand bookstore that clearly had no idea what it was. I think it was like $20 total.

Since I was buying Eightball as it came out it is always a bit surreal to see how sought-after those individual issues are (were? is there still the same demand after the complete reprint?). They were always easy to find even in the more mainstream-oriented comics shops, which I can't say about a lot of other 1990s Fantagraphics titles (outside of the other 'hits' like Hate, Acme, Naughty Bits).

I have always had mild regret for not buying the earliest issues of NON, which were quite common in Boston at the time and which I knew were rare in other parts of the country, but honestly those early issues were pretty mediocre.

My biggest regret is not buying the copy of Mark Marek's NEW WAVE COMICS that was in the quarter bin at a local convention. 25 cents! What was I thinking??Clearly nothing.

I had a signed copy of New Wave Comics that I deeply regret selling in a moment of poverty. That and Hercules Among the North Americans seem like prime candidates for NYRB re-issues.

I know you are joking but I really liked the first 2/3 of Slow Jams, the chapters that were serialized in NON.

i don't even know what the joke would be

Oh, I thought you were kidding that Overstreet would list an obscure self-published title like that.

(Er, they don't list it do they? OK, I just looked on ebay and the cheapest copy, albeit signed, is $1000?? I probably gave away my copy too. Yeesh.)

for those who care, Keith Knight's semi-autobio magic realism show "WOKE" is up on Hulu. I've been a fan for awhile, glad to see him get this.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/08/909707072/in-woke-cartoonist-keith-knight-drew-from-a-real-life-wake-up-call
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYt5HEabwvM

I care! Like Morris and forgot this was related to Knight

It's pretty good! Some of Knight's issues with women still coming through but Morris is really comfortable carrying the high concept well.

fucking awesome
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/09/nyregion/christian-cooper-amy-comic-graphic-novel.html

Mr. Cooper said the graphic novel was deliberately not an exact recounting of his May 25 interaction with Ms. Cooper.

“I think that is the beauty of comics, it lets you reach that place visually and viscerally,” he said. “And that’s what this comic is meant to do: Take all these real things that are out there and, by treating them in a magical realist way, get to the heart of the matter.”

In the final pages, as Jules and Beth verbally spar, in Ms. Martinez’s images the woman’s words physically diminish.

“You see her words become smaller and smaller, and less important,” Mr. Cooper said. “Because it’s not about her, it’s about the ones we’ve lost and how we keep from losing any more.”

alternative view: that is hideous in an impressive number of ways

oh come on now.

why are the real ppl both greasy and glowing? why are there a dozen light sources in every panel, but/also the sun itself is in two different locations in the second one? why do the green-bronze metal binoculars reflect as clear glass in his spectacles? is there a page-specific reason why the leaves and the binoculars and the grass and the tree trunks and the main guy's hoodie and the highlights on his skin and the part of the blonde ponytail that's in shadow despite facing the sun all fairly similar shades of green? why have the ghosts of every black person this woman has ever screamed at been photoshopped in from different spectral realms, instead of either standing next to each other or passing through each other? using the same pre-installed "emphasis ellipse" border in black in panel 3 as you do in red in panel 1, but with smaller lettering, makes it confusing as to what tone of voice you're trying to communicate. &al.

Both 'fucking awesome' and 'hideous' are overstating the case here, imho.

why do the green-bronze metal binoculars reflect as clear glass in his spectacles?

The art is bad, but I assume those are meant to be bifocals of some kind(?) Those curves at the bottom of each lens appear even in the top panel (where there's nothing to reflect).

bifocals for only when you want to read things held to the left of your jaw

I'm not a fan of the art but it doesn't always pay to be realistic with lighting.

frankly the art is the least interesting thing by far about that and i would imagine that should be obvious?

sic will tell u what is obvious, in protracted detail

the art is what you read

are you maybe not familiar with the story behind this and that's why you're being so dismissive of it? trying to be charitable here.

Sic has a 20-pt list of insider facts and a complete timeline of the incident he's just putting together for you, ulysses.

Having said that, all power to the guy, but I can't imagine wanting to actually read this.

we’re going to be in real trouble if someone who is a better artist makes a more-competently executed version from her perspective

lol mh

As much as I laud the intention behind this comic, I gotta agree with Sic that the art looks awful, mostly because of the colouring , which looks like they're straight from the "now that we have them fancy computer colours, let's make everything shiny!" '90s school of comic colouring.

Also, on minor note, the writing on that NYT article really illustrates why replacing the word "comic" with Will Eisner's more respectable term doesn't necessarily work... A 10-page "graphic novel", huh?

frankly the art is the least interesting thing by far about that and i would imagine that should be obvious?

Then why make a comic, sorry Graphic Novel?

I sometimes think some people do comics to do things that probably would have gone mostly unnoticed (fairly or unfairly) in another medium.

okay, maybe you guys ARE unfamiliar with the details here? this was a huge story in NYC. Christian Cooper, the aggrieved birdwatcher in this situation, has been doing comics with Marvel since the 90's. Via wiki:

Cooper has written stories for Marvel Comics Presents, which often feature characters such as Ghost Rider and Vengeance. He has also edited a number of X-Men collections, and the final two issues of the Marvel Swimsuit Special. Cooper was Marvel's first openly gay writer and editor. He introduced the first gay male character in Star Trek, Yoshi Mishima, in the Starfleet Academy series, which was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award in 1999. He also introduced the first openly lesbian character for Marvel, Victoria Montesi and created and authored Queer Nation: The Online Gay Comic.Cooper was also an associate editor for Alpha Flight #106 in which the character Northstar came out as gay.

If you're completely unfamiliar with the incident:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_birdwatching_incident

why make a comic, sorry Graphic Novel?

Cooper got to rewrite himself as the hero in a story that put him in potential danger and, better yet, couch it in a way so that people who can't connect the dots between this kind of harassment and police brutality can see how one leads to the other. He got to do it in a media that was meaningful to him and then distribute it broadly to a mass audience without putting a price point on it. If your takeaway from all that is that the light sourcing is off...

It can be a great and noble and worthwhile project and still be shit.

Exactly. I was aware of the incident and Cooper's background in writing comics, so when I saw the link I got excited about what this comic could've been, and was subsequently disheartened to see the art. Obviously his intentions are laudable, and if the comic reaches a wide audience and has an impact on the US discourse on racism, that's fantastic, but I don't see why we can't also lament the fact that a comic with great potential was saddled with such substandard art?

gosh, i wonder why cooper or his editor may have picked Alitha Martinez and Mark Morales to do the "substandard" art on this book?

Forget it, forks, it's TCJ-town.

gosh, i wonder why cooper or his editor may have picked Alitha Martinez and Mark Morales to do the "substandard" art on this book?

Ronald Wimberly had a quiet, single-page comic about an experience he had the month after the bird-watching incident spiked by the New York Times: https://www.patreon.com/posts/40895750

Are you really trying to suggest that because of the comic's message and creators it's somehow above criticism?

Wimberly did get this run in the New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/22/greetings-from-the-new-brooklyn
Also LAAB #2 (actually #3 but whatevs) just got funded.

I'm fully aware of the details of the story, I just didn't think this was very good. But as I said, all power to him. Just because it's not my thing doesn't mean it won't do what it's meant to do.

Anyone else read Scioli's new Kirby book? Quelle surprise given the subject and creator, but it's really goddamn good.

Yeah, I picked up the Free Comic Book Day preview, which takes us up to the creation of Captain America and the first encounter with Stan Lee. Thought the use of first person narration was a bit of a risky move that mostly paid off, although if anything it made Kirby sound more... linear... than he tended to be in interviews - does the full graphic novel list sources? I'm hoping that this will at least nudge Evanier a bit into completing his Kirby biography.

I know I am wrong, but I have never been especially moved by Kirby's work. Handing in my ILC badge.

I mean, it's hell of al lot of work, in different styles and genres over 40 years, not to be moved by. Once Kirby hit his mature style in the 1950s almost everything he drew was pretty magnificent, and some of it could be surprisingly elegant. Even when his drawing chops declined in the late 70s, you'd still get glorious psychedelic pages that are genuinely visionary and have worn far better than some of the more 'relevant' superhero stuff, imho.

I think he's best when his dialogue and his art are working together towards a heightened affect - everything is urgent, everything is alarming, if people are sitting around at a picnic then you can only assume that their mental machinations are drowning out the shuddering squeals of monstrous machinery happening just out of the panel. (okay, the terrible alliteration was more a Stan Lee thing)

But both threads are definitely an acquired taste!

I think it's also easy enough to just not be able to get with non-modern superhero comics, or indeed superhero comics at all.

I'm sure it's a lack in me, definitely.

Again, there's lots of Kirby stuff that's in other genres apart from superheroes (although yes, the 60s Marvel era is what he's best-remembered for now).

I'd recommend his Fourth World stuff and his 2001 adaptation to those who aren't otherwise onboard. The closer you can get to unadulterated Kirby, the better.

Now I'm one of those 'wrong' Kirby fans who doesn't particularly like the Fourth World stuff, or at least doesn't hold it in such high regard as many (I prefer pretty much all of the other early 70s DC stuff - Kamandi, the Demon (Kirby's most underrated series imho), even The Losers. ) The early 4th World comics are marred by some especially poor Vince Colletta inking (talk about adulterated JK!) and the whole thing would have benefitted from stricter editorial control/advice, although not necessarily from Stan Lee-dialogue/captions. Kirby was so stuffed with new ideas he sometimes lacked the discipline and focus to stick with a consistent storyline - and sometimes he simply lost interest (I think the original plan with the New Gods was to hand over the three linked titles to other creators, something that DC were never go to play along with, having 'captured' their rivals' key artist).

Once Mike Royer came aboard as Kirby's main inker at DC, things obviously markedly improved visually and yes, it's a much 'purer' version of the Kirby aesthetic - although it seems clear that the general readership preferred Kirby inked by someone like Joe Sinnott, who smoothed out some of the rough edges in Kirby's pencilling. The 2001 Treasury edition was inked by Frank Giacoia, an excellent veteran inker who really preserved the power in Kirby's work while at the same time giving everything a nice crisp line finish.

Also, the pasted on Superman heads in Kirby's Jimmy Olsen books are so jarring and inappropriate that I find it hard to look at those issues.

FYI, the Scioli bio touches on many of the points in your post. I don't know exactly how fact-based it is (although, to answer your question upthread, there are a number of sources cited), but it gets pretty deep into the weeds.

I'll give Scioli's Kirby book a shot sometime; I was reading the early bits on Instagram last year and it was intriguing. It'll probably hit the local library system sooner or later.

I really, really like the unhindered, unedited quality of the Fourth World material. Kirby was such a fount of pure creative energy, at times it's like staring directly into the Source Wall. Overwhelming, bewildering, thrilling.

70s Kirby is my favorite Kirby, honestly

late 60's thor is prob mine

though new gods is hard to argue with

Apart from a couple years of FF and Thor I find him unreadable, but genuinely love him in separate panels

brings up the question of "readability" as it involves images. His stabs at copy, assisted or otherwise, tend to be unreadable but the images (and sound fx) alone tell more of the story than many superhero genre writers can.

It's weird but on a drawing level I prefer his work in the 40s and 50s but on a design (costumes, settings) and composition level I think he peaked in the 70s.

Yeah I like him an imagemaker first and foremost, so fwiw I don’t think his work would’ve been better (perhaps the opposite!) if he’d only been paired with a good writer

the less "other writer" there is, the more readable Kirby is. Simon & Kirby collaborating as a team: clear and coherent. Gerber writing something pitched exactly at Kirby's 1980s level of wackiness and rage at injustice: good stuff. Mark Evanier doing the odd tidy-up or copy-edit on Kirby's syntax: the balloons have the same spirit as the individual drawings and storytelling, just a great charge of the author's strengths. Stan trying to fill half the panel with entirely redundant enuniciations, or outright contradictions, of the action being powerfully depicted: gtfoh you jealous sad-sack.

Yes, I think this thing of Kirby as imagemaker is all well and good and true to some extent, but ignores his own commitment to narrative storytelling throughout his career. Again, according to Evanier, Kirby was surprisingly indifferent about inkers, because he felt it was almost impossible for any kind of professional to fuck up the panel-to-panel continuity - the story - established by his very complete pencils. Kirby only swapped Mike Royer for Vince Colletta as the Fourth World inker when he found out Colletta was showing the pages to people in the Marvel offices prior to printing - and Colletta was known for erasing backgrounds and other details in Kirby's Thor pages when it was too time-consuming to ink them. And when Stan Lee and John Romita and Roy Thomas and others instructed artists to 'follow' (ie copy) Kirby's work at Marvel, it was his especially dynamic way of telling a story that they wanted someone like John Buscema to imitate (it seems clear that Stan in particular favoured the more elegant, illustrative style of a Romita or Buscema while, ruefully or otherwise, knowing full well that no other Marvel artist could match either Kirby's inventiveness AND his ability to engage the reader and stir their emotions.)

Ward, the fact that you keep dropping knowledge that I only just learned from Scioli would seem to suggest that his book is fairly accurate + granular.

xxp good summary, sic

Didn't know this was coming out
https://www.blackgate.com/2020/09/17/fantasia-2020-part-xvii-feels-good-man/

I think it's already rentable VOD

Yep, just finished its digital "run" via one of the shuttered arthouses here.

Furie and the director were on Marc Maron's WTF a few weeks ago, and Furie kept referring to the original Boys Club issues as "zines," RIP Alvin

i saw it; it was okay? not deeply revealing and sorta necessarily overstructured to force a redemptive arc on it. Furie seems like a tremendously sweet guy.

Passmore is great
https://hyperallergic.com/586973/sports-is-hell-ben-passmore-koyama

one helluva title page

and Colletta was known for erasing backgrounds and other details in Kirby's Thor pages when it was too time-consuming to ink them

I saw a blog with a bunch of these compared to Kirby's pencils and the final product and it's shocking how much he just decided to not do

I'm curious about that notorious Colletta defender who was around several years ago. I often suspected he was a relation of Vince but I don't know if anything was found out.

I think Eddie Campbell and Walt Simonson have both defended Colletta's work on Thor - I think their main argument is that Colletta gave Thor a distinct feel that distinguished it from Fantastic Four, X-Men, Avengers, Sgt Fury etc. My counter-argument is that while that's sort of true about the earliest issues of Thor that Colletta inked (he's quite good on things like fur textures), the quality soon dropped off and by the end of the run the finished results are just ugly and slapdash, a travesty, even putting aside the business of erasing pencils. When Bill Everett (beautifully) inks the last few issues of Thor drawn by Kirby, the difference is obvious, throwing into stark relief the inelegant heaviness of Colletta's brushwork and cross-hatching.

Colletta's 1950s work, mainly on romance comics, isn't too bad at all, and he was a surprisingly effective inker on Alex Toth on occasion. But I've just been reading an Essentials volume some of the 1970s Englehart-written Avengers, pencilled by George Tuska or George Pere and, inked by Colletta and they're REALLY painful to look at in black and white, without colour filling in some of the absence of detail. Really wretched stuff.

Yeah I cannot get on board with any sort of vinnie colletta rehabilitation. A vandal.

I liked what he did until I found out what he didn't do.

there’s a lot of emphasis on getting product out the door and I got the impression Colletta was fast

the bosses like that, and artists handing in stuff late tend to forgive some lapses in inking/coloring, from what I’ve heard

the bosses like that

allegedly C0l3tt4 got lots of his work despite the quality of the output because he was allegedly connected to various low-grade mob guys and would allegedly supply call-girls to alleged editors

that might not hurt your career, either!

post Yeah, Colletta was definitely one of those go-to guys when a penciller was horribly late on a book. But again, when you compare his stuff to other last-minute deadline savers like Mike Esposito or Frank Giacoia, it's still just as ugly as fuck. Colletta was also apparently pretty canny when it came to playing office politics and the like, perhaps partly because he 'saved the day' so often for grateful editors - he was even DC's art director at one point in the 1970s (the late comics writer Martin Pasko once joked in an interview, "I was up at the DC offices, petting Vinnie Colletta's guide dog...")

And according to Roy Thomas, Colletta was popular with the readers; the issues of The Invaders that he inked over Frank Robbins' pencils sold better than those inked by the far superior Frank Springer - perhaps because he 'dulled down' the wonderful manic contortions of pure, unadulterated Robbins.(Roy is also the source of the call-girls story, iirc - he said that Colletta once tried to get him to appear in 'compromising' photos with some 'models' that Colletta had escorted up to the Marvel offices.)

It's hard to know if the mob rumours are just Italian stereotyping or basically true - the definitive history of comics and organised crime still needs to be written. It is a fact that Charlton Comics had mob connections (and Colletta got a lot of work out of Charlton in the 1950s) - and the mafia certainly had an interest in magazine distribution.

the issues of The Invaders that he inked over Frank Robbins' pencils sold better than those inked by the far superior Frank Springer

dunno what this is but I'm now imagining crime comics with car chases in, drawn by Robbins & Springer, and they look great

The Invaders was Roy's first extended foray into retro-necro continuity - it was set during WW2 and featured the original Captain America, Sub-Mariner, Human Torch etc.

https://womenwriteaboutcomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/07eee32bc373a77c2e360818760b8ec0.jpg

retro-necro continuity

lol

(the late comics writer Martin Pasko once joked in an interview, "I was up at the DC offices, petting Vinnie Colletta's guide dog...")

this is a fucking quality burn btw

It's hard to know if the mob rumours are just Italian stereotyping or basically true - the definitive history of comics and organised crime still needs to be written. It is a fact that Charlton Comics had mob connections (and Colletta got a lot of work out of Charlton in the 1950s) - and the mafia certainly had an interest in magazine distribution.

― Ward Fowler, Tuesday, September 22, 2020 12:47 AM

I vaguely remember there being a book about this, or maybe it was just part of the book?

I can't confirm it but there was a story claiming that the first Batman + Superman teamup was done for the mafia.

explains a lot

Glad to find out that Neal Adams's expanding Earth/Philadelphia Experiment conspiracy theorist side hasn't made him a Q/COVID/MAGA psycho. (I would still give most of the money I have to not have to spend a day driving him around again.)

Lol. I can only imagine how crazy he is from his recent Batman work. A likeable sort of crazy, though.

Ann Friedman, Ira Glass, & Tim Heidecker are each hosting an Online Screening + Live Stream Q&A of the 2020 Sundance-Award winning doc Feels Good Man this weekend Sept 25-27th! Only 250 tickets available per showtime at https://t.co/JPwTdcqnUx pic.twitter.com/1F8YGdku9v

— Floating World Comics (@floating_world) September 23, 2020

"For the love of Asgard, keep your Oversword sheathed!"

Every so often Stan puts down a line that gives me a chuckle.

i thought this was good
https://thenib.com/cryptozoology-conference/

Separately, Action Bronson has a song out called Golden Eye that includes the lyric "Twenty Kawasakis looking like wild horses on stampede / I look like a character that was drawn by Stan Lee" which is the oddest self-own

a presentation of comics that does not permit you to read any entire panel at a time is desperately incompetent imo

that doesn't? its your standard vertical scroll

in both firefox and chrome, at full-size or ILX-reading-size browser expansion, it takes three browser "pages" to read each panel. the speech balloon or narration in the top of the panel is frequently talking about a part of the panel that literally cannot be read without scrolling or pig downing

i'd rather have blown up images that can be easily shrunk down in the browser than lower-res files

if we're throwing that binary on it, sure, but that adds three clicks for viewing each panel to the three clicks it takes to progress to each panel

standing by this being an incompetent way of asking someone to read a sequence of drawings

rotate yr screen bruh

and what is this clicks, you gotta scroll the wheel

let's talk more about the formatting and not the actual comic please, this is fascinating

send us all $5,000 for a computer that has a rotating screen so we can read it, apparently, and we can talk about the comic

My crappy Dell monitor, date of manufacture January 2004, can do it.

I have not owned a desktop computer since 2002

I'm not sure what that has to do with anything - a monitor is not a computer (except in the most general sense that, say, a Tamagotchi is)

send everyone one of those setups where you plug an external keyboard and an external monitor (with a rotate function) into a laptop, with all the requisite cables, and a monitor stand thingy that sits over the laptop and behind the external keyboard, then, I guess? it's still an inconvenient way to read a comic whether you're shipping one box or four boxes of computer equipment to dozens of people around the planet in order for them to be able to read a whole panel at a time tbh!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHGJEdjCoeU

looked fine on my phone, fwiw

I was being kind of tongue in cheek, but the comic looked good on my phone and tablet. looks fine on my laptop if I change the scaling and they probably should set the scaling for computers so it fits better if they run a lot of comics!

to take ulysses' point and paraphrase

They tell me about families they're trying to start and real estate that they're trying to buy, and I tell them about comics on The Nib and what devices they display in while maintaining panel integrity -- one per screen. I'm posting about it on message boards. The exchanges left me feeling that the chickens I had set free when I was 23 were coming home to roost. I could have chosen to do anything I wanted, and this is what I chose to do.

loved the comic, especially the twists and turns and expressions as the narrator's stand-in reacts to the even-keeled scientific explorers as they explain their methodology and reject woo-woo claims and show more interest in big cats than the more esoteric examples. going out to listen to what you hope is weird stuff and finding a group of very methodical and, relatively boring, investigators. special guest appearance by Steve Bissette!

yeah, i liked that it went to some surprisingly personal places. somehow i did not know that bissette did gojira!
https://www.jimkeefe.com/archives/5585

The Bissette Godzilla comic also includes a pin-up page by Alan Moore

best thing about pinups is you don't have to scroll

steady

That pinup page looks crap on my knackered ipad, to whom should I complain?

Scans_Daily Artisanal Lithography

Been looking looking at Michael Deforge and Beatrix Urkowitz for the first time in years and I'm more impressed now than I was back then, so much good design. I remember the name Lale Westvind but jeezhus fookin' christ, some of this is amazing
https://www.instagram.com/lalewestvind/
There's a compilation book out in november called Grand Electric Thought Power Mother!

Did anyone ever read any Loic Locatelli books? It slightly annoys me that some of his characters look jarringly more manga than others but he's really good at drawing and design. Persephone and Pocahontas are both in english.

Loving the Tardi/Manchette collection, hard boiled Paris noir with a background hum of radical politics.

Also read Tom King's Mister Miracle, kinda dumb Vertigo fan fiction? Felt like a very surface level grappling with philosophy, and the winks to Kirby pretty cheap. But I'll admit I'm biased against ex-CIA agents.

Forgive some film talk for the subject matter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7MpVdZ9SXU

Tokiwa: The Manga Apartment - This lovingly wallows in sentimental nostalgia for 50s japan and the manga artists of the time who either worked in this apartment or passed through it. Period music, shots focused perhaps more on the settings than the characters, manga authors huddled together discussing their successes, insecurities, failures and the audience and business, and they sumo wrestle in their garden in one scene.

I had heard this was mostly a biopic of Hiroo Terada (he did baseball manga) but it's actually more spread out than that. Terada is quite happy being a slightly old fashioned storyteller for kids, Shotaro Ishinomori (Kamen Rider, Super Sentai) despairs and hasn't yet found his thing yet (his sister is a prominent character), Hideko Mizuno seems to have been the only woman there but didn't stay long term, Tezuka leaves the place quite early and quickly becomes an important figure, babies cry in the presence of Tsuge, Suzuki leaves for animation, Fujimoto's mother asks why everyone wears berets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokiwa-s%C5%8D

That looks really cool, thanks!

I initially found the nostalgia too gooey but eventually it won me over. I don't know how it has managed to stay so under the radar, I first heard about it when the star Masahiro Motoki was being discussed in the Tsukamoto book by Tom Mes.

http://www.magnetic-press.com/toppi/
Didn't know this series was happening. Publisher is new to me.

I believe they work as lion forge

Lion Forge bought Magnetic in 2016 (and Oni last year)

did not know about Oni!

any idea where their money comes from?

the owner's dad is the 745th richest man in the US, so it's anyone's guess rly


* (nb: second-richest black man)

huh, wild (some pun intended)

We never expected this to become a trend, but David Steward II is now the third son of a billionaire to launch his own animation studio, following in the footsteps of Travis Knight’s Laika and David Ellison’s Skydance Animation.

buy all the cinemas and make them $2 entry

the laika story is a huge bummer btw
https://priceonomics.com/how-the-father-of-claymation-lost-his-company/

Does anyone else remember a comic set in a graveyard or castle with superhero-esque characters, drawn in a Kirby style, probably from within the last decade and maybe from Image?

Re: Corben's death in the obituary thread. I think his last appearance in Heavy Metal should have been on the shelves by now, thankfully he got that finished. I gave up on the serialization and am waiting for the collected edition.
Dimwood was to be his next thing, his facebook says that he was working on the last page a while ago.
https://muuta.net/wp/dimwood/

He always experimented with animation and put them online occasionally (but nothing ever stays up for long on his official site) there's a video here of some recent works
https://www.facebook.com/Corben-Studios-Inc-193240777737358/

I heard several years ago that Fantagraphics offered to print his underground era work but Corben already had plans for that stuff.

I would have loved to read Martin Skidmore on Corben :/

My favorites by him are probably the second Den book (really shows off his skills and it's the most disturbing thing he ever did, probably), his House On The Borderland adaptation, some of the Warren comics (most of which is in Creepy Present Richard Corben), and the graphic novel length House Of Usher. I've heard Bloodstar is very good but I think I never got that because there are two versions and maybe it was too expensive. There's a ton of stuff that hasn't been printed in decades and his family is intent on keeping his works out there, so fingers crossed, I would buy a bunch of this stuff a second time but there's lots of odds and ends I never got, thankfully a great deal of his work was creator owned.

Just discovered this artist, really amazing but none of her comics in english yet
https://www.instagram.com/tamia.baudouin/
Claire Wendling has been around much longer, I think Lights Of The Amalou is her only graphic novel in english but there's lots of sketchbooks and some covers for Marvel and DC. I think her most recent drawings look like her best, some of it quite NSFW. I discovered her from youtube interviews but I probably seen her american comic covers when they came out.
https://www.instagram.com/claire.wendling/

Corben's Hulk was fun! I don't know any other artist whose weird approach to anatomy stayed so weird for so long.

I think he never stopped doing life drawing but when he got cartoonier it was this odd combination of long and short features.

yeah, the late era marvel and dc cartoony stuff could get mannered and sloppy.
no disrespect though! he was formative for me!

By cartoonist/illustrator standards, I don't think that was ever a real problem for him. It annoys and worries me how easily so many amazingly skilled drawers fall into cliche mannerisms, "overacting" and sameyness and I think he avoided that to a remarkable degree for someone who spent their life doing comics and illustration.

To focus on problem areas, I think he often struggled with smooth textures against rougher textures, he once said he makes his characters balder and shaved because "hair destroys form", I guess it's similar to when a lot of sculptors don't even bother trying eyelashes.

Although his writing and the writers he worked with were mostly very readable, I do wish he had some standout scripts because (unless my few unread Corben books surpass expectations) I wouldn't say he has any real must read books, but he had the skills to make one (true for so many great comic artists who never lucked out with a script).

if you're looking for "problem areas" I would point to the guy's consistent default body types: 0% body fat mega-schlonged double-jointed men and impossibly cantilevered gargantu-breasted and buttocked women, all sculpted from the same stippled putty. I loved him, I remember Fantagor being one of the first comics I ever saw, but he was undeniably working in a specifically pulpy milieu that came with certain limitations. But I hear you.

Everyone could use more body types but the women were one of the main draws for me and there actually was quite a bit of variety: the super muscled women, skeletal woman in Den, quite a lot of bald and balding women, lots of different faces but he seldom drew people with fine delicate facial features.

And quite a lot of grannies recently!

All his people looked made of plasticene

often they were

his distorto body types did often repeat over one phase in his career, but the stock shapes would change over time

(my impression based on reading a couple of things a decade, and glancing at a few more)

Much of this is NSFW but it shows a bunch of his models, including Gilbertson, who I think worked with him for maybe a decade. Love his Nosferatu pictures.
https://muuta.net/wp/miscs/photo-models/
https://muuta.net/wp/figure-gallery/
https://muuta.net/wp/articles/karen-gilbertson/

This is the Claire Wendling video I saw, there's way more of these with other artists, a few comics people but I think they're mostly concept artists. It's a fun series even when I'm not a fan of whoever is on and one of the hosts laughs at everything.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtfRoXTbbUc

those corben photo model images produce some of the least corben looking corbens i've ever seen!

wendling is great btw

Have you read her books? The reviews of Amalou mostly said it was disjointed and confusing on a story level but I want to check it out sometime.

I haven't! This thread is the first time I've heard of her!

I seen another interview with her and she said she was done with comics (or at least interiors) because she got tired of it and felt trapped, hasn't done comics stories since 2002.