February 9, 2010
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* if you have the stomach for one last Angouleme report,
Paul Gravett's is one hell of a meal.
* I'm not sure how on earth I missed an interview with Joe Sacco that's as lively and thoughtful
as this one.
*
whoa, Jordi Bernet interview
*
Comics Comics gets into the teaser game, and I prefer their strategy of posting photos of the Pointer Sisters over pin-ups of superheroes. Speaking of which, there's like eight protuberances
on this thing that could be penises.
* my father lived for jokes
like this one.
* that first picture
could also illustrate an article on what happens to comic book company interns.
* everyone should be excited about the
New Yorker celebrating an anniversary with four kick-ass covers from top-of-the-line comics talent.
* not comics:
this list of comic book movies coming out in 2010 forgot
this one.
* not comics: sometimes it's easy to forget that one of comics' great advantages is that you don't read them in a room full of your ill-behaved fellow townspeople who can't stop talking to one another despite your intense mental projections of face-stabbing. I'm serious, if this whole planetary civilization thing takes a turn for the worse I think we can all take a few seconds of solace knowing that various things we saw at movie theaters and in lines at the airport will soon come to an end.
* I'm enjoying
these (the softcovers) right now, even though it didn't help me process a certain joke in the Joe Casey interview and I'm still not totally convinced the enterprise entire is any good. I wonder if 20 years from now comics readers will appreciate some of the really oddball mainstream comics machinations -- like giving the Fourth World to Jim Starlin and then taking it back again -- the way we appreciate some of the peculiarities of 1970s superhero pulp.
* finally, Alan Gardner of
Daily Cartoonist is giving away from comic strip syndication packages, and
you can be the beneficiary.
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Happy 48th Birthday, Sarah Byam!
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Happy 51st Birthday, David B.!
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Happy 54th Birthday, Tim Truman!
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Happy 56th Birthday, Jo Duffy!
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Happy 82nd Birthday, Frank Frazetta!
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Quick hits
Craft
Zombies
Broken Robot
Kevin Huizenga Draws
Sean Phillips Sketches
More Manley Marvel Sketch Cards
History
Peter David On Pro/Con (1992)
Industry
More On The Submissions Process At First Second
Interviews/Profiles
Mr. Media: Tom Wilson
Cartoon Brew: John Stanley
Not Comics
I'd Buy It
Cap's Last Supper
He Sings! He Dances!
So Happy To Live In NM Now
Publishing
Teasers Everywhere!
Sing, Disco Dazzler, Sing!
Batman and Robin #8 Previewed
Speculating On Future Marvel Events
Reviews
Paul O'Brien: Various
Ed Sizemore: Various
Tucker Stone: Various
Katherine Dacey: Various
Rob Clough: Wizzywig Vol. 3
Greg McElhatton: Walking Dead#69
Jared Gardner: The Original Johnson
Johanna Draper Carlson: Pluto Vol. 7
Christopher Allen: Weapon X: Wolverine #10
Johanna Draper Carlson: Ristorante Paradisio
Sean T. Collins: The Book Of Genesis Illustrated
February 8, 2010
CR Review: Smile
Creator: Raina Telgemeier
Publishing Information: Scholastic, softcover, 224 pages, February 2010, $10.99
Ordering Numbers: 9780545132080 (ISBN13)
Smile is a perfectly nice graphic novel that I'm sure a lot of young people and people who like reading works primarily aimed at young people will love. It tells the story of the author's adolescence, primarily through the massive amount of dental work she had done -- almost solely that way in terms of structure. As is usually with the case with autobiography, the parts I liked best were grounded in specific observation: Raina being offered a toy one last time despite being too old for her childhood dentist, for instance, the rocky recovery that a kid must undergo when eating habits are altered
and drugs are involved, or the subtle family politics that shimmer to the surface during this kind of ordeal. The same way that reading about Sally Brown's amblyopia gave me a better understanding as to why certain kids had an eye covered for weeks at a time, or at least normalized it for me, I can imagine that reading this stuff if I had been going through these things or had known kids with more dental drama than I happened to encounter would have been an overall good.
Although it may risk my appearing to be the guy who just pushed someone off a swing set -- the book is that nice -- I thought the rest of
Smile really failed to match the specific, focused and occasionally idiosyncratic work with the dental issues. The sequences about finding friends that respect you, or what happens when you stop liking someone you were
so glad liked you at one point, or the pages on the San Francisco earthquake, all of them failed to capture my attention for their accrued detail or for having anything of particular interest to say about what seem like pretty standard rites of passage. Their presentation felt hurried, devoid of significant conflict and in a few cases even contrived for a lack of verisimilitude the expectations of which were raised by the material about Raina's teeth. If there's some thematic connection between the high-concept focus of
Smile and the broader life portrayed in the unpacking of that concept, I never caught on. I also thought most of the side characters one-note and predictable, which was odd in that I imagine they're based on real people. I'm aware that this book was aimed at an audience younger than I am and will be of specific interest to a group of readers whose experiences I have not shared; like I wrote, I'm confident a lot of people will like to love it. It just didn't feel memorable to me in the fashion that the best comics work for younger readers can cut through differences in perspective, time and place.
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Another Week, Another Convention Purchased by Shamus/Wizard Nexus
This time it's the North Coast Comic Con in Cleveland, which will be relaunched as the Cleveland Comic Con Wizard World Convention. As has been the case with some of the previous shows purchased, the person from whom this show was purchased will both consult on the now-bigger show and retain the freedom to run local events of their own.
This brings to 11 the number of shows now offered under the umbrella shared in some manner by Gareb Shamus and his Wizard brand, as well as bearing the words "comic" and "con" in the title. While some critics see this as Shamus dangerously overstepping his investment into such shows after a strategy of bigger, quarterly show fairly crashed and burned (or at least crashed and smoked a bit) over the last three years, I suspect they've hit on a model that's at least very hard not to keep in the black and are trying to lock in a kind of continual convention presence business that should be a place to rest their brand as print publication continues to vomit blood and they work through whatever investment capital might have all by itself been able to get a web site over and profitable 10 years ago.
I could be wrong, and usually am.
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Go, Look: Great Wolverton Comics
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Maus Becomes In-House German Federal Agency Offering, Curriculum Component
I could be looking at
this story all wrong, but it seems to be saying that
Maus has since 2008 been an ingrained part of the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, an educational institution seemingly designed to support a certain kind of democracy-underlined civic discourse. In terms of its educational mission, it seems to available as a stand-alone -- kind of Scholastic-style take-home books program, only with a bureaucratic stamp of approval -- and as a part of a wider educational program more generally about the issues it confronts. I'm not sure why that resonates beyond the obvious, but it's not a joke to suggest that Semitic issues of any kind are difficult to parse through governmental agencies regardless of the history involved. Also: I wasn't sure that
Maus could become any more of an institution as a work of art, but this suggests I was wrong.
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Go, Look: Eraklis Petmezas' Blog
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Zapiro Brings Back The Shower Head
As many expected, a recent international news story of South African President Jacob Zuma
linked to a 20th child has resulted in longtime critic Jonathan "Zapiro" Shapiro breaking out his most devastating visual cudgel:
a showerhead attached to his head and to certain figures related to the political powerhouse. The showerhead was initially put atop Zuma's head to remind readers of his statements regarding taking a shower after sex to remove himself from the possibility of catching AIDS -- a statement widely castigated in light of South Africa's general struggle against the ravages of the disease. It has since become shorthand for Zapiro's general attitude towards the elected official at any one time.
The showerhead was put on top of babies in the above cartoon -- a direct reference to the 20 children issue, of course -- and reportedly is back on Zapiro's head in the most recent, showing the president giving his state of the nation address. One assumes that cartoon will eventually show up
here.
The Zapiro/Zuma relationship is likely the world's most pointed and brutal cartoonist vs. politician stand-off right now. It is certainly its highest-profile such relationship. The cartoonist has been criticized for the nature of his coverage of the South African President, while at the same time the severity of the portrayal has brought the already-popular cartoonist an extended wave of international media interest.
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Go, Look: Fantagraphics Newave! Launch Party Pictures At Midnight Fiction
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IFJ Backs Sri Lankan Media Protests
The International Federation of Journalists
has expressed solidarity with Sri Lankan journalists who are calling for worldwide attention to what they believe is intense suppression following the recent presidential election. Cited among their leading items of concerns is the missing cartoonist and journalist Prageeth Eknaligoda, who disappeared in the run-up to the election and whose publication was shut down immediately afterward. A
lengthy statement by the Asian Human Rights Commission about Eknaligoda calls for increased police transparency into an investigation of what they believe is clearly a politically motivated act.
[I believe both links may activate a loud audio message, so please be warned]
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Go, Look: More Barney Google
warning: unfortunate racial stereotypes
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Changing On-Line Ad Landscape Ends Jen Contino's Run At The Pulse
Rick Veitch
has fully confirmed on the message boards hosted by the site he shares with Steve Conley, Comicon.com, that they've go let full-time reporter for that site's
Pulse news organization, Jen Contino, after eight years. The issue had been raised on those same boards after a period of inactivity at the long-time independent news site, and
had been addressed by Heidi MacDonald at her blog including initial confirmation by Veitch and Contino.
"Ever since the Great Recession hit, Internet advertising has taken a nosedive," explains Veitch in his posting. "And it cost real money to get real talent like Jen's." Veitch went on to explain that both Contino and Steve Conley had been unsuccessful in finding new advertising in the tough current market, and that one of the site's previous advertisers had stopped paying the site owing "a rather large amount of money." Veitch complimented Contino on eight years of service to the
Pulse site and publicly recommended her to anyone that might be hiring.
In addition to the changes with the well-liked Contino and to the long-time Internet news source for which she worked, the story's also notable for being one of maybe a half-dozen industry moves to directly cite outside economic pressure since December 2008 and the first major one in a while. There were a flurry of personnel moves at Diamond, DC, Dark Horse and Viz between January and April of 2009 that directly cited the current recession as a partial or outright cause, but not many if any outside of already-plagued enterprises (newspapers, alt-weeklies) since then.
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More Kids Ads Should Involve Gunplay
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Go, Look: Amateur Boxing Night
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Go, Look: More Annie's Li'l Orphans
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Go, Look: More Cartoonists' Exchange
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Go, Look: Gang War In Brooklyn
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Random Comics News Story Round-Up
*
another plea for
Giant Robot, including news that they lost their Diamond listing in recent months.
* my friend Gil Roth reminded me I never ran a link
to this AV Club interview with Terry Gilliam from a few weeks back that has stuff about Harvey Kurtzman at the end. I read it, I just never posted about it.
* things I didn't know, episode #1,857,912:
there's a German Free Comic Book Day.
* not comics:
congratulations to Drive Thru RPG for a fine result to their well-conceived Haiti fundraiser.
* with the help of a list of famous cartoonists' addresses linked-to from this site a while back, Dave Kellett of
Sheldon fame
writes in to say he was able to track down one of George McManus' Los Angeles homes.
*
Mike Sterling has re-launched (sort of) his Progressive Ruin.
* I sort of missed
this update on the MacMillan/Amazon.com thing. I don't think MacMillan mostly winning that tussle ends the idea of the $9.95 book, it just ends Amazon.com being able to force it directly. I also don't think it's going to take any book publisher to perceive that they're losing sales to illegal downloads for another price point to be considered -- I have to imagine they'll have pretty good information about what they're selling and if the figures suck, there will have to be a reconsideration of price point. I also don't know why this sort of range of prices and hashing it out in the marketplace is such a bad thing.
* I'm not sure where this came from:
Andy Rooney on Bill Mauldin. Yes, he writes just as he speaks.
* Fantagraphics has
a nice run of random imagery up in a post.
* Ken Parille
looks at frozen images in a Pete Morisi comic.
* Paul Gravett completes his year in review posts by
releasing a list of top reprint and collection projects for 2009. They are:
1. Great British Fantasy Comic Book Heroes, Phil Clarke & Mike Higgs (Ugly Duckling Press)
2. The Toon Treasury of Children's Comics, Art Spieglman & Françoise Mouly (Abrams)
3. From Headrack To Claude, Howard Cruse (Nifty Kitsch Press)
4. L'Eternaute, Hector Oesterheld & Solano Lopez (Vertige Graphic)
5. Poem Strip, Dino Buzzati (New York Review of Books Classics)
6. The Brinkley Girls, Trina Robbins (Fantagraphics)
7. The Collected Doug Wright: Volume One, Doug Wright (Drawn & Quarterly)
8. Antonio Rubino, The Italian Maestro of Children's Comics, Antonio Rubino (Editions de l'An 2)
9. The Sandman, Joe Simon & Jack Kirby (DC)
10. The Best of Simon & Kirby, Joe Simon & Jack Kirby (Titan Books)
11. The Fat Freddy's Cat Omnibus, Gilbert Shelton (Knockabout Comics)
12. Tarzan, Jesse Marsh (Dark Horse)
13. Blake & Mortimer Vol 6: S.O.S. Meteors, Edgar P. Jacobs (Cinebook)
14. Arman & Ilva, The Tjong-Khing & Lo Hartog van Banda (Sherpa)
15. The Misadventures of JaneDon Freeman & Norman Pett (Titan Books)
16. Four Frightened Women, George Harmon Coxe (Pure Imagination)
As always, Gravett's reviews are 98 percent of the fun, so please hit that original link.
*
this post comparing the guest list for the Reed and Wizard shows is mean and hilarious.
* wouldn't some decade
in there Bruce Wayne be tempted to go with a different animal, maybe something that hunts during the daytime?
* finally,
here's another lengthy gaming industry interview with the writer Matt Fraction. I can't decide if I've quite grown accustomed to seeing writer's names in newspaper headlines like that, but it's nice.
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Go, Look: Three By Richard Thompson
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Quick hits
Craft
Ugh
Aieee!
I Like This Panel
Dino Draws The Thing
Theo Ellsworth Can't Stop Drawing
Exhibits/Events
Go See Amber Albrecht
History
Gross
Dueling Beavers
Milestone Forever
Bring Out Your Dead!
Hawkeye's HIT Squad
Rare Jean Grey History
I Would Visit The UN Were This True
What's The Opposite Of A Cliffhanger?
Industry
Dustin Harbin Art Giveaway
Interviews/Profiles
CBR: Jeff Lemire
Daily Yomiuri: Stan Sakai
Broken Frontier: Brendan McCarthy
CBR: Marc Silvestri, Robert Kirkman
Comic Book Geek Speak: Brian Hibbs
Not Comics
John P. Tattoo
Hopscotch: Not Real
Congrats To Drew Brees
Real-World Super-Villain Alert
He Only Had To Buy 85 Comics
R. Fiore Re-Watches Watchmen
Todd Klein's Latest Print For Sale
Tell Hibbs About '09 Comics Movies
Cerebus Going Cheech Wizard Route To Cultural Memory
Publishing
This Nearly Made Me Laugh
Zak Sally Updates His Blog!
OTBP: Mike Lynch's Sketchbook
Book Is Awesome, Declares Publisher
Marvel Releases Another Goofy Teaser
Reviews
Jason Green: Path
Chris Sims: Various
Sean T. Collins: Mercury
Don MacPherson: Various
Jason Green: Joe and Azat
Todd Klein: Blackest Night #5
Johanna Draper Carlson: VB Rose
Tom Crippen: Alpha: Fall Of The Hulks
Frank Young: Thirteen Going On Eighteen
Johanna Draper Carlson: Garden Dreams
J. Caleb Mozzocco: Aladdin: Legacy Of The Lost #1
Greg McElhatton: Nightschool: The Weirn Books Vols. 1-2
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