For April Fool’s Day last year, The Great Curve crew did a series of posts “written by” various comic characters, like Dr. Doom, Bizarro and Delirium. Below is one of Tom Bondurant’s contributions, as he took on the guise of Zatanna. Yojne!

Gib ecnartne!

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen! Zatanna here, taking a break from magic and superhero stuff to talk a little comics.

You might think it’s been a rough couple of years for ol’ Zee, after being Miss Mind-Wipe 2004, but thanks to my new best friend Grant, I’m back in the high life again. I now have cred with the mega-crossover crowd and the hipsters, without the editorial hassle of going back and forth across imprints! How great is that?

(Big ups to my manager for putting together that deal, by the way. I didn’t know if DC would go for it, but he just said “Hey, I’ll ‘ekam ti neppah!’”)

(With finger quotes.)

(Sigh.)

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Point:

Over at livejournal community scans_daily, Wonderfish explains the awesomeness of Jaime Reyes.

(Warning, since it is Scans_Daily, one can assume that there will be many many spoilers and it is not particularly designed for people on dial-up connections)

Excerpt:

I’m a mathematician and a liberal arts student to boot, so we’re going to do this proof-style, with examples.Claim: Jaime Reyes, the third Blue Beetle, is wicked awesome.

Support:

Fact: I’m just going to get this out of the way first - Ted did not die so that Jaime could be the Blue Beetle. Don’t believe me? Check out this word from the writer himself. Long story short: DiDio said to Keith Giffen “We’re killing Ted Kord. You want to do anything with the scarab, or should there just be no more Blue Beetle?”. It’s never been about Jaime or Ted; it’s Jaime or nothing.

Fact: The kid fought Guy Gardner on his first day as a superhero. That’s pretty awesome.

Counterpoint:

At his livejournal, Jarodrussell elaborates why he has no interest in Jaime Reyes.

Excerpt:

This isn’t to say, “OMGWTFBBQ they made someone teh Blue Beetle!” Maybe Jaime’s a good Blue Beetle. Maybe he’s the best there will ever be. I don’t really care about Blue Beetle. It was the industrialist, inventor, goof-ball Ted Kord that I liked. I bought the entire run of old the 1980’s Blue Beetle series and issue #5 of the old Charlton book, not because he was Blue Beetle, but because he was Ted Kord. Jaime Reyes isn’t an industrial, inventor goof-ball, ergo he’s not interesting to me, ergo I’m not going to spend the time, effort, and money getting his book.

Both posts have particularly interesting discussions in the replies.

Even Barry Lyga was impressed with his latest interview by the Syracuse Post-Standard’s Laura Ryan about his most recent book Fanboy and Goth Girl, his coming-of-age novel about a teen creating a “secret graphic novel” in hopes of escaping daily beatings and suburbia.

I’ve been meaning to read Lyga’s more-auto-biographical-than-not book, that’s been mentioned in the same conversations as Gene Yang’s awesome award-winning American Born Chinese.

By the way, Zack Smith’s extensive interview with Lyga for the mothership also mentioned his next book Boy Toy set to debut in the fall, featuring a few of the characters from Fanboy and Goth Girl, but not a direct sequel. Check out the Chapter 1 of Boy Toy, available as a free PDF download.

I’d ignored some of the rumor chatter yesterday about Sarah Michelle Gellar joining the Batman movie sequel The Dark Knight. That is, until the Los Angeles Times mentioned the same rumor posted yesterday on Cinematical.

I checked two of the more reliable sites about movies, Dark Horizons and, specifically Batman movies, Batman on Film for confirmation. No go on Dark Horizons, but the latter mentioned a similar grain-of-salt rumor popped up a few weeks ago.

So until it’s announced — if ever — you’ll just have to be satisfied imagining the Buffy star as a dangerous assistant to Heath Ledger’s Joker…

Webcomic collective Girlamatic celebrates its fourth anniversary next week.

“It’s a street fight. Both Fantagraphics and Ellison have contributed a lot to comic literature and science fiction and speculative fiction. Everyone admires the work that both do and regrets the fact that they’re in this very public, unpleasant fight.”

– ICv2 Publisher Milton Griepp, on Harlan Ellison vs. Fantagraphics

“The discussion turned to the overseas market and transplanting foreign talent. I asked whether the success of titles in the States and Europe are making them cater to different audiences. The answer was, quite frankly, no. Japan is such a big local market, they are the first readers they aim to please. In the end, foreign volumes don’t actually make them much money anyway after rights and costs, etc. so it’s considered a small bonus on top of regular J-sales.”

– artist Takeshi Miyazawa, after talking about the manga industry with editors of Japan’s Comic GUM

“Comics readers sometimes aren’t so much appreciators of an art form, but more like sports fans. You know, the guys who will never be baseball managers and sit in the stands or on their living room couches and chew out baseball managers from afar for their failure to use the hit-and-run. Sports fans do this, I think, because they have a personal investment in ‘their’ team. They speak about their favorite team in the first person plural; their emotions often depend on the success or failure of their team. Fans often carry a sense of entitlement, too. An ‘I’m the fan; therefore you must do all you can to please me’ attitude. Comics fans feel this way about the companies who publish their superhero books.”

– Jennifer de Guzman, editor-in-chief of SLG Publishing, on fan entitlement

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The Seattle Times has a handful of articles tied to this weekend’s Emerald City ComiCon, which is expected to attract some 8,200 attendees to the Qwest Field Event Center:

A brief overview that mentions that Ed Brubaker, “the writer who killed Captain America,” will be there: “He says the Red Skull did it and he just wrote it, but don’t put up with any nonsense.”

A summary of Harlan Ellison’s lawsuit against Fantagraphics, with quotes from Ellison and Gary Groth.

A Q&A with writer Tom Peyer about Stephen Colbert’s Tek Jansen comic.

A Q&A with comedian and comics writer Brian Posehn, who discusses The Last Christmas, his role in Fantastic Four 2: Rise of the Silver Surfer, and getting to meet Stan Lee.

If it’s, well, any month, really, then Paul O’Brien provides his regular analysis of Marvel’s sales figures:

fter months of hype and a midnight launch, DARK TOWER is finally in the stores, and on the charts.

But it’s far from being a one-book month. February saw the final issue of CIVIL WAR, complete with a few more crossover issues - though even by the end of the month, there were a couple of stragglers still to come. And as one event finishes, two more begin. The Spider-Man books entered “Back in Black”, and the wider Marvel Universe began shipping “Initiative” titles. The Initiative isn’t a crossover so much as a branding exercise for books with lasting effects from the Superhuman Registration Act. But it’s helping to keep up the interest as the Marvel Universe moves past CIVIL WAR.

All this contributes to Marvel giving DC a complete thumping in market share - 42% to 33% in dollars, 47% to 35% in units. Not even remotely close.

Arionhunter of Livejournal offers an interesting thematic theory of the Selected Works of Frank Miller:

Martha Washington is in an interesting place as Miller’s first/only explicit political satire. The satire itself reads as dated, decrying Reagan, the growth of corporations that suppress creativity, nationalized health care, and has an uncomfortable relationship with environmentalism. The government itself is either oppressive or incompetent. Yet everyone who challenges the government is a parody of a cause. The Calvinists, militant feminists, the “gay white racists Nazis.” All of these groups have forgotten “the ideas of America,” themselves embodied by the Captain America figure.

Now, there’s really no way to continue without addressing what seems to be Miller’s evolving politics. What Miller is proposing a kind of ethical moralistic Nationalism. Miller is an authoritarian whose authority comes from one’s strongly held morals, which should always align with those of one’s nation. When the nation deviates from what you hold as the nation’s morals, then you must hold to your morals first. This follows into Miller’s hero, who almost always fights some form of decadent deviance.

I say this because DKR/DKSA leaves no other option. Superman is the figure blindly following the nation in DKR, and in DKSA he is trying to negotiate. At the end he becomes an embodiment of the Nietzscheian idea, using his moral authority to become part of the oligarchy. And I think that’s evident of the evolution aspect. Martha Washington has no “gods and heroes” oligarchy. The God is the nation’s ideals. This is bolstered by the “Captain America” figure; this is the only time you see such a figure pre-9/11. However, by DKSA we (collectively) gone so far that we must have Gods (IE Superheroes). And over time, stronger and stronger “moral” authority figures are required by Miller. 300 is Miller’s love letter to his ideal society, where everyone is willing to give themselves over to the state.

Much more at the link about those three series.

Observations from the Legion of Doom:

Of the two, I liked Williams’ Aquaman effort much less. It went far too cutesy for me. Maybe Williams didn’t know what fans had come to enjoy about the renovated title. A part of that was an abundance of “clever” little visual gags, many of which were repeated and lost what little impact they initially had. Wonder Woman #6 shared that fault. Picoult included ten or more references to Wonder Woman not being as popular anymore (i.e. the Wonder Woman milk shake now being the Black Canary Milk Shake). I caught the first one, so each additional gag came across like the creative team shouting, “Hey, you stupid reader! You’re so dumb we have to kick this dead horse until its guts explode!” I know that’s not their intent, but part of writing comics is having a thorough understanding of how your writing looks when it’s conveyed with art, not words.

That plays into the other main problem, which is that both authors don’t seem to understand their audiences very well. Now, I don’t know the census figures on average DC readers, but I’m probably not far from the norm. The books, though, are aimed at either a far younger audience (I’ve compared Aquaman to a remake of The Little Mermaid) or people with little familiarity to comics. We’re a demanding bunch to write for, I know, but the bar is set. If a big-time talent comes on, I expect them to clear it, or at least come close.

John Byrne reminisces about days gone by:

Now, me, I am a big fan of “author’s intent”, and I think that whenever possible writers coming to characters after the creator has departed should keep in their minds what that creator meant the characters to be. Likewise stories. Little is served by digging into some old story and turning it inside out. “Everything you know is a lie” is a solid approach, but only if used sparingly.

Anyway — where my mind ended up drifting as I looked at this particular commission piece was back to the days when Ms Marvel was only a glint in Stan Lee’s eye — and the character was intended to be Jean Grey! (Logical, right? Marvel Girl becomes Ms Marvel.) Thoughts about resurrecting the X-Men’s title put the kibosh on Jean getting her own book, but her presence in UNCANNY X-MEN leads to another divergance. Roger Stern has told the story of interviewing Chris Claremont back when he was the new kid on the block who had only just picked up the X-Men assignment. Roger remembers having to correct Chris from time to time, as he spoke of his plans for the characters and kept mixing up Jean and Lorna.

Elsewhere, Madrox, the Multiple Man was originally going to be called Xerox, until Marvel’s lawyers decided the name had not become quite that generic. Frank Miller, in BATMAN: YEAR ONE, was setting up a gag in which Jim Gordon waxed rhapsodic about his unborn “son”, the punchline being the birth of Barbara — until someone up at DC did the math, and noted this would mean Barbara was younger than Dick Grayson! This is how Barbara suddenly ended up being “adopted”.

It’s stories like this that make me chuckle when some fans get just a wee bit too intense about the “creator’s intent” — like the ones who wrote in to ask if MAN OF STEEL was “what Seigel and Shuster intended”. So much of what we “intend” never gets anywhere near the printed page.

I love that the anecdote starts with “I love author’s intent” and ends with “Fans who love author’s intent are dumb!” But at least I now have slightly better understanding of where Madrox’s name came from - That always bothered me when I was a kid.

Over at Manganews.net, Floating Sakura has posted a response from Libre regarding its current dispute with manga publisher CPM:

The license agreements for translations of the publications between BIBLOS Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “BIBLOS”) and Central Park Media Corporation (hereinafter referred to as “CPM”) became invalid after April, 2006 when BIBLOS filed for bankruptcy protection.

Any and all translations of our publications by CPM are based upon the above-mentioned terminated agreements.

Moreover, CPM unilaterally continues to publish translations of our publications without performing any obligations of that Agreement, because they insist that they have no obligation due to the fact that BIBLOS is a bankrupt entity.

Lots of folks have offered their two cents on the matter, including Simon Jones (images NSFW), Dirk and Tom. Plus there’s some interesting debate in the comments section of David Welsh’s blog,

For those worried about poor Steve Rogers, a poster at the Comic Book Resources forums has some good news for you:

So, today my friends and I went to Universal Studios Hollywood and lo and behold, we see Captain Amercia drive by on an ATV. We just had to follow him and ask the obvious question - “Aren’t you dead?” He literally lept off his bike, landing in a perfect Cap pose and unstrapped his shield. The dude was at least 6′5 and dwarfed us completely. He addressed us sternly without hesitation or anger. “Don’t believe everything you read, especially in the Daily Bugle.” he said. Following up with “The Civil War. That was a good story. I’m sure there’s more to come. I’ll certainly be reading. Perhaps it really did happen in some alternate universe.” I was totally impressed cause you know he’s been getting that question a lot. Then my friend asked him how many Avengers he could name. First he asked “Classic, new or mighty or underground?” My friend said to just name as many as he could. He started rattleing off names left and right, and he pretty much did it in the order they became Avengers. It was a blur but I remember him saying the likes of Silverclaw, Dr. Druid, Dr. Strange and even Ultra Girl. I wouldn’t be surprised if he named them all. We were totally impressed, which is hard to do with my friends. Then the Green Goblin interruped us. Cap easily got him in a headlock and continued our conversation, asking us if the Goblin has a purse or a man-bag, eventually throwing him towards a trashcan, which the Goblin fell over. So, rest assured, Cap is alive at a theme park near you.

Not everyone has been so lucky, however:

See the time I went, the Cap at Universal Studios didn’t know who the Red SKull was.

Last month, if you recall, Marvel teamed up with DaimlerChrysler to launch an online campaign called “Choose Your Adventure” to help promote the Jeep Patriot. That doesn’t sit well with the company that owns the rights to the Choose Your Own Adventure series of children’s books.

On Tuesday, Chooseco LLC filed a lawsuit for trademark infringement against DaimlerChrysler, Marvel Entertainment and two other companies, alleging the two slogans are too similar, making them virtually indistinguishable. The publisher, which recently began reissuing the R.A. Montgomery books, charges that the car maker is aiming its campaign at men in their 20s and 30s — the very demographic that would’ve grown up reading the series.

“What we feel is that Jeep is trying to piggyback on the really positive associations of adventure and opportunity and choice that the former fans — the original fan base — had associated with Choose Your Own Adventure,” Chooseco President Shannon Gilligan told The Associated Press.

The “Choose Your Adventure” campaign, which launched in early February, invited customers to submit dialogue and plotlines for an online Jeep Patriot-oriented comic, produced in conjunction with Marvel Comics. According to Media Daily News, the winning submissions will be collected in a 28-page comic, due sometime this spring and shipped to some 100,000 people.

According to the AP article, a cease-and-desist request was sent to the Chrysler Group on March 16. However, the campaign’s website remains active.

“Obviously, they’re looking for money,” Chrysler spokesman Jason Vines told the AP. “We’d offered to link our site, which gets nine katrillion times more traffic, to their site.”

Besides DaimlerChrysler and Marvel, the lawsuit also names as defendants BBDO Detroit, the auto maker’s marketing agency, and Organic, Inc., an online marketing and design company.

The Onion’s AV Club sits down with famed Mad and E.C. editor Al Feldstein for a great interview about the glory days of comic book publishing:

All I worried about was how my income was going to be affected. I was a professional prostitute back then, and my services were writing and drawing comic books. I was Rosie The Riveter with a brush in my hand. That was my attitude: I did the best that I could, and wrote good stories that I was proud of. But I didn’t think one way or the other about whether I was contributing to juvenile delinquency. When they called me in closed session before the Kefauver Committee, I said exactly that. I told them, “The way to solve this problem is, if you don’t want your kid to read Tales From The Crypt, tell them, ‘If I catch you reading that, I’ll beat the shit out of you.’ You don’t have to censor the books and put us out of business. That’s not going to solve anything. Kids are going to find their outlets and their emotional releases in other places.”

Via Superhero Hype, here’s the complete track listing for the upcoming Spider-Man 3 soundtrack:

Snow Patrol — “Signal Fire”
The Killers — “Move Away”
Yeah Yeah Yeahs — “Sealings”
Wolfmother — “Pleased To Meet You”
The Walkmen — “Red River”
Black Mountain — “Stay Free”
The Flaming Lips — “The Supreme Being Teaches Spider-Man How To Be In Love”
Simon Dawes — “Scared Of Myself”
Chubby Checker — “The Twist”
Rogue Wave — “Sight Lines”
Jason Schwartzman (featuring Kirsten Dunst) — “Summer Day”
Jet — “Falling Star”
Sounds Under Radio — “Portrait of A Summer Thief”
Wyos (Wasted Youth Orchestra) — “A Letter To St. Jude”
The Oohlas — “Small Parts”

The soundtrack comes out May 1, just a few days before the film opens.

My favorite opening to any article on the internet right now. It’s all in the last line:

As any Spider-fan will tell you, Peter Parker’s battle scars courtesy of the Lizard and Venom pale in comparison to the emotional damage of seeing his lady love Mary Jane walk out the door—or worse, watching his beloved Gwen Stacy fall to her untimely death. Emotional problems are just a heck of a lot more relatable to a reader than running out of web fluid.

That fact might make writer and artist Adrian Tomine the Stan Lee of psychological drama.

(From Wizard.)

I blogged about Eric Poulton’s steampunk versions of Star Wars some time ago; now he’s turned them into desktop image. Cool stuff.

On the Horhaus blog, artist Karl Kerschl discusses the Case of the Disappearing Superboy in the Teen Titans origin story that appears in 52 Week 47:

I did a two-page Teen Titans origin story in the latest issue of 52 (issue 47), and there was a change on one of the pages. Superboy had to be removed from the Young Justice scene for legal reasons (DC is in a rights dispute with the creators of the character) and in this case the most elegant solution was to replace him with a similar shot of Wonder Girl. It worked out fine, but I thought I’d post this for anyone wondering where the heck Superboy was in the pages of history.

He was there! We all saw him!

On a related note: After seeing Kerschl’s art in that backup story, I’m really looking forward to Teen Titans: Year One.