So here it is the last Friday in the month already, and I didn’t do half the things I meant to do.  Didn’t dish the dirt on fellow creators, perform an online striptease or explain my personal conspiracy theory linking rockhopper penguins to the Bush White House.

But I’ve had a great time, and I want to thank the Newsarama team, especially John Parkin, for making me so welcome here and making the process so effortless.  And thanks, too, to everyone who went in for the competitions.  It’s been great.

But there will come a greater one after me.

I’m guessing…

This week, Manstream Comics posted some panels (please note that Manstream links can have icons or pictures which may be considered NSFW) from Fantastic Four #547

The complaint was not about the pencils and the posture (though there is a smaller debate on how she is drawn going on in the comments) but that Storm is upset that someone suggested her hair was not real. Many Manstream readers felt that it was a portrayal of a vain, frivolous woman and not the Storm they knew and loved.

Cheryl Lynn (of Digital Femme fame) had a different interpretation:

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Dirk over at Journalista received an email from Gary Groth about the end to the mediation of the Harlan Ellison/Fantagraphics lawsuit:

THE LITIGATION BETWEEN THE PARTIES HAS BEEN RESOLVED.

THE PARTIES ARE NOT AT LIBERTY TO DISCUSS THE TERMS OF THE RESOLUTION AT THIS TIME.

It’s hard to discuss feminism with regards to comic books online without encountering the Bingo Card, a tongue in cheek way of highlighting common responses to feminist concerns. (An explanation can be found here.)

Point:

Dick Hyacinth, in a post previously linked on Meanwhile, points out the problematic nature of the Bingo Card.

Excerpt:

Maybe you should give the bingo thing a rest. Yes, we might find it funny, but I think it alienates people who might otherwise be sympathetic to complaints about sexism/misogyny. The post which explained the whole bingo concept (which I can’t find right now) does a fairly good job in explaining everything, but I still think this is a fairly exclusionary rhetorical device–you’re for us or against us! You get it or you don’t! In the present landscape, I don’t think this is a useful way to frame the argument. People are much more willing to consider your perspective if they think you’re inviting them to do so, rather than telling them they’re too stupid to understand.

Counterpoint:

Lyle Masaki, from Crocodile Caucus, points out the rationale behind the Bingo Card.

Excerpt:

The thing about the BINGO post is that, yes, the point is that there are some people who just won’t get it and, frankly, aren’t worth attempting a conversation with. ‘You’re for us or against us!’ isn’t the point, ‘You get it or you don’t!’ is. Maybe you have to get stuck in a few dozen conversations with someone who truly believes that The Thing is a good example of a sexually idealized male superhero to counter Witchblade, to understand the feeling. But too damn many conversations that go on in comics fandom are like discussing global warming with someone who thinks a cold winter’s day is reason to start questioning if global warming happens. Sorry, the vast majority of people who bring up one of those BINGO points aren’t worth treating credibly for one who values their sanity — any of those arguments usually ends up in a circular conversation with someone who just isn’t listening to you.

So what do you think?

A selection of some of the funniest, most interesting and strangest quotes from the past week:

“He’s not a great actor. In fact, he’s pretty bad. But comic fans can’t help but appreciate it when he appears. ‘Nuff said.”

– Forrest Hartman of Gannett News Service, on Stan Lee’s cameo appearances in Marvel movies

“If they’d just been robots and talked and thought and acted like robots, it wouldn’t have caught on. But they were such Everyman characters that you treated them like they were a person, with flaws and imperfections and conflicted natures.”

– comics writer Simon Furman, on the appeal of Transformers

“It is extremely disappointing that Hasbro and DreamWorks would choose to promote a film to preschool children that the industry deems inappropriate for anyone under the age of thirteen. In their cynical attempt to wring every last dollar from one of this summer’s blockbusters, these companies have shown little regard for children’s well-being or parents’ desires to limit their children’s exposure to violent entertainment.”

– Dr. Susan Linn of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, on the marketing of the Transformers movie

“There are at least two different audiences for comics these days. What sells the best at Barnes & Noble isn’t what sells the best at a comic book store. They both think their market is the only one, and no one will buy what doesn’t sell in their kind of store. I’ve gone into a comic shop and asked why they don’t have kids comics. They say, ‘Kids don’t like Scooby-Doo.’ Of course kids like Scooby-Doo. What they don’t like is most comic stores.”

– cartoonist Kyle Baker, on the comics market

“I’ve had many conversations with creator friends of mine about the pendulum swing that happened in the wake of the IMAGE explosion back in the early 1990’s. The sort of ‘we don’t need no stinking writers’ attitude of the IMAGE founders resulted in what were nicely drawn comics with little story, for the most part. They became commodities and not comic books with good stories to go with the flashy drawings. The other major companies, in response, tried to emulate the initial massive success IMAGE had by doing similar types of books with crazy cover gimmicks thrown in for good measure … and the quality of the entire industry, for the most part, suffered. It drove many long-time fans away. In the aftermath of that sales bloodbath, the creative pendulum swung in the writers direction and away from the emphasis only on artwork as the selling point. It’s been that way for some 15 years or so now … and I think that pendulum swing may have reached its apex. My feeling is that in recent years, the quality of writing in comics has diminished. Maybe it’s not the writers’ fault … maybe it’s editorial edict that has replaced good story, plot and character development with the stunt … the event … to sell comics. Maybe I’m just a middle-aged fuddy-duddy who has lost touch with what makes for interesting comics.”

– artist Mike Wieringo, on the current state of superhero comics

Over at ICv2, American Born Chinese’s Gene Yang and First Second’s Mark Siegel talk about the success of ABC, and what’s next for Yang. Here’s a clue – it’s a collaboration with Derek Kirk Kim, and it sounds awesome. Mark?:

Derek Kirk Kim is [drawing] it in three really different styles. It’s not so much like a showcase, but it is this kind of virtuoso tour-de-force graphic project. Gene has these three stories that have in common this paradigm shift–turn everything on its head in three different ways; it’s a very exciting project to me. In some ways it builds on what American Born Chinese does in terms of the plot surprises, but it’s also very much in its own right a very surprising set of stories, and then there’s more beyond that on the horizon.

Iron Man teaser site launched

There’s not much to look at yet, but Marvel has launched a teaser site for the Iron Man movie at http://www.starkironworks.com/.

“Ironworks” brings up memories of Force Works, the bad 1990s comic that took the place of West Coast Avengers and was somehow tied into that whole “teenage Tony” storyline, IIRC. Y’know, the one where the real Tony Stark turned out to be a skrull sleeper agent for Kang?

Via

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This may mean absolutely nothing to the vast majority of people reading this blog, but Mark Millar reports today that Pete Root has died:

Anyone on the comics scene in the 80s would know Pete as the grumpy, but hilarious one when AKA [Books and Comics] first opened in the Virginia Galleries. I was 13 when I found the shop and got into town at every opportunity. He, John and Bob were an interesting mix and opened me up to a lot of material I’d never had known about, my own tastes basically being to buy any comic I could find with Superman on the cover.

As I grew older, I got to know Pete a little more as a guy and though I only really bumped into him a couple of times a year I really enjoyed his company. His back-issue business really took a hit when the market collapsed some years back, but he soldiered on selling collectables and in the face of huge internet competition just because he loved it. Selling comics was the next best thing to reading comics for him and, sadly, he had to give it all up last year when he had his first stroke.

Rest in peace, mate.

AKA was maybe the third comic book store I ever visited, and Mark isn’t overstating how great a store it was (and maybe still is, I haven’t been there in years), and how much fun the staff made it, in their weird way. It’s genuinely upsetting to read about Root’s death, and my thoughts go out to his friends and family.

Wow. Only TWO entries? Two very good entries, though – for which, Scott and Niels, many thanks. I don’t know whether I prefer the comic vision of Voldemort meeting Molly or the tragic drama of Lucifer chatting with Paul Muad’Dib, so what they hey, I’m going to announce two winners.

Same procedure as last week. To claim your prize, please send an email with your postal address to Apocalypse5(at)fsmail.net – replacing the (at) with an @ sign. This is a blind email address normally, but I’ll retrieve your email from it and send you a copy of the Crossing Midnight trade paperback collection, CUT HERE. Congrats, and thanks again!

Uh… hi. [edges nervously into blog spotlight thingy]

This is actually my first time blogging, so it’s hard to know where to begin. My job is made doubly difficult by the thought of all your stunned gasps of disbelief. “But she’s a teenager! How can she not have a blog?” is an exclamation that I am sure will feature.

Well, here I am, living proof that a non techno-savvy teen is not necessarily a contradiction in terms. I can truthfully say that I do not keep a blog: furthermore my Myspace is empty of pictures, I’ve never uploaded anything onto Youtube, and my MP3 player is still in its box, gathering dust under my bed. When I was invited to pitch for Minx with my dad, Shelly [Bond] said that the line would welcome ‘a teenaged perspective’ on things. Since I am in the core demographic for Minx, it was generally assumed that I would be able to provide inside knowledge into the mind of a ‘typical’ fifteen year old girl. No luck there though, I’m afraid, as I am probably the least typical teen I know of.

But it has been a fantastic experience writing Blabbermouth all the same, despite the frequent ‘artistic differences’ that came up between me and my dad. Actually, I think ‘artistic differences’ is a slight understatement (it was more like hurling insults- and unbound galley pages- across the room at each other).

Seriously though, it’s been fun, and I’m looking forward to pitching more ideas to Minx in the future. I hope no Minx editors read this though, or I might be forced to take a crash-test in basic technology before I dare show my face in their offices again.

Coming soon, this week’s competition winners.

But the next entry has been wrested from my hands by my daughter, Louise.

We’ve just written a book together – Confessions of a Blabbermouth – for DC’s MINX line, so now she thinks she can just walk into a major comics forum and blog like she owns the place.

Tchah. Kids today, eh?

A Hong Kong artist has won Japan’s International Manga Award — the “Nobel Prize of Manga” — honoring creators living abroad whose work helps to spread the artform worldwide.

Sun Zi’s Tactics, by 43-year-old Lee Chi Ching, beat out 145 other entries from 26 countries for the inaugural award, sponsored by Japan’s Foreign Ministry.

Lee and the three runners-up will receive a certificate and trophy at a ceremony on July 2, and will spend 10 days in Japan meeting with artists and publishers. The runners-up were Kai, 26, from Hong Kong, Benny Wong Thong Hou, 30, from Malaysia, and Madeleine Rosca, 28, from Australia.

Rosca is the creator of Hollow Fields, for Seven Seas Entertainment.

The submissions were judged by a committee that included manga creators Tetsuya Chiba, Machiko Satonaka and Takashi Yanase, and former editors of manga magazines.

On his blog, Jeff Smith teases the cover for Rasl #1, due from Cartoon Books in 2008. He’ll have a six-page preview ready next month for Comic-Con International.

MIT culture maven/expert Henry Jenkins has a three-part essay on the comics of Dean Motter up on his site:

This essay will build on this idea of science fiction as a mode of historical critique, re-reading the retrofuturist project through the lens of more recent theoretical work on the concept of residual media. In doing so, I will be focusing primarily on a series of comic books written and conceived by Dean Motter over the past three decades (Mister X; Terminal City; Terminal City:Aerial Grafitti; Electropolis), all operating within a shared fictional world which is built from early 20th century representations of the “city of the future.”

And it gets even more academic from there …

Josh Howard expresses his frustration with the lateness of his two Viper books, Lost Book of Eve and Dead @ 17, adding that they’ll both end this fall but return sometime next year:

So, in order to fix the problem, which has begun to adversely affect my sales, Lost Books of Eve will be ending with issue 4, and Dead @ 17 will wrap up with issue 7 this fall. Don’t worry, though…I won’t leave you hanging. The current story arcs for both books will be wrapped up in satisfactory ways. This is what I have to do in order to re-start and get things back on track. I’m going to take a much needed break, but I think it’s safe to say you can expect both books to return sometime next year in some form or another. In the meantime, please enjoy the rest of the series. There are still some really big things in store…and if you’ve read the current issue of Dead, you know I’m not kidding.

In addition to these two books, Howard’s other recent projects include Sasquatch, which came out in April, and the Minx book Clubbing, which comes out next month.

I know I’ve been linking to Same Hat a lot recently, but this latest post, a scantilation of “Abstraction” by Shintaro Kago, is too good not to share. Comparisons are difficult, but imagine a mash-up between Grant Morrison’s Animal Man, Chris Ware and Junji Ito. It’s academic formulism meets gory horror comic!

Needless to say, it’s not safe for work. Lots of blood and nudity. Still, that should only sweeten the pot for some of you right?

Dick who hates your blog compares super hero comics to metals, both heavy and nu:

-Nu Metal: I think there’s a case to be made that all superheroes as a genre are more like heavy metal than any other musical genre. Both are frankly ridiculous, especially to outsiders. Even mature, not-stupid fans struggle to apologize for some of the dumber tropes in each genre. Ever tried to explain Spider-Man’s origin to a regular person? Ever tried to explain Iron Maiden’s mascot Eddie to a regular person? Both activities will make you feel dumber than you probably are. And yet even non-fans will recognize something primal and compelling in a Black Sabbath riff or a Jack Kirby splash page.

Given this, the Nu Metal comparison is obvious. Nu Metal lyrics definitely tend towards whiny self-focus (what some might call “emo” tendencies). This brings to mind Crying Superman and the pervading sense of gloom which clings to modern superhero comics. (Seriously, is this something that appeals exclusively to whatever weirdos comprise the majority of Marvel/DC fans these days? The general public voiced its opinion on Crying Superman through its apathy towards Superman Returns, so this isn’t a larger cultural phenomenon.) Furthermore, Nu Metal privileges aggression over hooks; similarly, superhero comic writers increasingly rely on shocks and surprises rather than, well, all the things which one associates with writing as a craft. And then there’s the misogyny thing.

This analogy falls apart, however, when we consider the role of influence. For all its faults, Nu Metal bands broadened the appeal of heavy metal by bringing in influences from other, disparate genres. Nu Metal is not wed to the past; it is (was?) an inherently forward-looking sub-genre. Contemporary superhero comics, conversely, are aggressively antiquarian (some asshole might even call them culturally necrophiliac). Fans of Nu Metal rewarded bands which took risks, pushing them further from the traditional definition of “heavy metal.” Marvel/DC fans, obsessed with continuity, consider any break with the past as prima facie evidence of a comic sucking. Clearly, then, these similarities between Nu Metal and contemporary superhero comics are superficial; at their respective cores are contradictory views on the relationship between roots and fruits.

The heavy metal comparison could probably be taken further, but seems pretty spot on. As far as Nu Metal goes, I associate “crying Superman” more with emo … I think he has more in common with Dashboard Confessional than Linkin Park, but I don’t know if that would hold up if you took into account all of the genre.

Dick also goes on to try and make comparisons between comics and Dixeland Jazz … for all of the, um, Dixieland Jazz fans out there. Of course, I didn’t make it that far … I stopped reading after I realized he wasn’t going to make a comparison between Spider-Man and Jon Bon Jovi.

Jamie McKelvie has launched a blog dedicated to his next project, Suburban Glamour, which comes out in September. Check it out to see a six-page preview of issue 1.

Variety reports that Warner Bros. has signed a deal with Mattel, giving them the master license for all of DC Comics’ toys. Previously the two companies have worked together on toys for Batman Begins, the Batman cartoon and my personal favorite, the Justice League Unlimited line. Variety says:

…the new multi-year deal makes Mattel the master toy licensee for the complete DC portfolio, which includes characters such as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Joker, the Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman, Green Arrow and Justice League.

It also covers past and future films and animated properties.

Mattel’s brands such as Hot Wheels, Radica, Fisher-Price, Tyco and Mattel Games are expected to take full advantage of the deal.

Toymaker also plans to create a DC Superheroes-branded section in retailers’ toy aisles as part of the effort.

Hopefully this means the JLU line will continue, although I can only assume it’s getting close to its end since the show is long gone. And in related news, the Seattle Times reports on the overcrowded toy aisle this summer, as Spider-Man 3, Shrek, Pirates, Fantastic Four and Transformers all compete for toy dollars.

GoUpstate.com has a story coming out of HerosCon from a couple of weeks ago, where they spoke with Matt Fraction about the direct market:

“The direct market is a closed system, and it’s not built to accommodate new readers. Look at Barnes & Noble, look at Borders – there are aisles and aisles of manga and Top Shelf and Adhouse and everybody else. And the Marvel and DC sections are getting smaller and smaller. The direct market is going to have to realize that superheroes aren’t, in fact, the mainstream to the rest of the world,” he said.

“The party has already started, the revolution is already here, but we still have our capes and underwear on.”

Check out their video interview as well.