A selection of some of the interesting, touching, funniest and strangest quotes from the past week:
“My big brother is gone now. And I don’t know what I’m going to do now that he’s not around to look out for me. I feel lost and alone and scared. Mike and I weren’t very religious. But I can’t believe that a soul as sweet and gentle and caring and generous as Mike’s just goes away. Today, I’m a believer. I believe my big brother is out there and he’s waiting for me. I believe he’s with Jack Kirby and Alex Toth and Will Eisner and they’re telling him how much they loved his work. And when my time comes, he’ll hug me and take me over to introduce me to his new friends. And then he’ll smile and say, ‘You just wanted to come up here because I’m here.’
“And he’ll be right.”
Matt Wieringo, from the eulogy for his brother Mike
“Jeff is a beautiful father figure in this movie. But you know the comic book. You know what the comic book is about. You know what has to take place.”
Terrence Howard, hinting at an appearance by Obadiah Stane’s armored alter ego, Iron Monger, in the Iron Man movie
“This is the sickest, most perverted piece of writing I have read in many a year. It is certainly the pervy-est thing I have ever drawn. God I love it so.”
Colleen Doran, on Stealth Tribes
“After more than fifty years of work, and nearly that many defending the 1st Amendment with my ass on the line–not merely sitting on my ass and distantly bluhbluhbluhblogging opinions to an equally culturally-amnesiac constituency–I am content to let Posterity worry about my ‘legacy.’
“As for your assumptions, since I am content to abide by the published terms of the settlement agreement, here is a trope that I pray will not be too obtuse for you to parse.
“You look at a small bump in the dirt, and you perceptively decide that it must be a Chinese leprechaun trying to burrow up from the other side of the planet.
“Dead brill, says I.”
Harlan Ellison, responding to Don MacPherson’s commentary on the Ellison/Fantagraphics settlement agreement
“…not everybody has access to comics, we live in a global community through the internet, but less not make the assumption everybody has a local comic shop, i have spoke to people from Iran, little cut off canadian villages, users from India… few examples that spring to mind, all ages, all walks of life all of us united by the love of art in a series of sequential boxes …”
Mr. Monkey, who received a cease and desist this week to stop linking to unauthorized scans of Marvel comics
“Adding more fuel to the fire, I am so pissed off about the number of tie-ins to 52 and Countdown that I am to the point of just wanting to stop reading comics all together. My positivity and good nature has crumbled in the face of the realization that the industry in general doesn’t seem to want me as a customer. The distribution chain doesn’t get my books to me on time. The publishers have no freaking clue how to market to me. My local retailer keeps screwing up my orders.”
Heidi Meeley, who would like your help in deciding if she should keep reading comics
August 25th, 2007 at 11:04 am
This is not a two-party party.
There are millions of pages of comics out there. Countless thousands added every year. And not all of it comes from meatgrinder superhero comics.
Your comics experience will not suffer without a regular/frequent infusion of Marvel and DC.
Additionally, this is not an industry under monopoly. If you can get to a computer, you can get to Amazon. Which means you can bypass spotty distribution to find the comics you want. This does not mean that you have to abandon your local comics shop. Unless it does. But then again: it’s your money.
There’s too much good stuff out there to abandon comics completely. But Comics isn’t going to think any less of you if your approach to the medium…evolves.
//\Oo/\\
(Christ on six bikes, do you have ANY idea how hard it was to resist typing “Meeleyons” of pages?)
August 25th, 2007 at 11:09 am
I was really kind of hoping that Jess Nevins or someone could explain the Ellison quote to me. I got that Ellison was taking issue/umbrage/whatever with Don MacPherson’s commentary, but no matter how many times I read “Dead brill, says I.” I still think “obtuse”.
In my own quest for closure, I enjoyed this wikipedia discovery, which informed me that Brill is not only:
–”a type of flatfish”
but is also:
–”a small village to the west of Constantine in the Cornish District of Kerrier, UK”
–”an algorithm in artificial intelligence to detect grammatical structures” (When used with the word “tagger”)
–”a New York City building notable music industry tenants” (when placed in front of a building)
–Slang in the United Kingdom during the 80s and 90s (an abbreviated form of “brilliant”) that means “exciting” or “interesting,” similar to “cool” or “sweet” in the United States and Canada.
–”a World War II era American Balao class submarine”
But best of all
–”a fictional character in the comic Elfquest.”
On a more serious note, I really appreciate Matt Wieringo sharing his eulogy for Mike with folks.
August 25th, 2007 at 2:54 pm
“Additionally, this is not an industry under monopoly. If you can get to a computer, you can get to Amazon. Which means you can bypass spotty distribution to find the comics you want. This does not mean that you have to abandon your local comics shop. Unless it does.”
We have looked into this. Even had a retailer friend of ours online look into this. It seem where we live is within Diamond Comics “berumda triangle” with getting UPS to delivery consistantly on time.
A lot of the other things you said were very well taken, but unfortunately, to get new comics, no matter who you buy from or what publihser they come from, you have to deal with Diamond.
This, IMO, is one of the biggest stumbling blocks to why the market seems to hardly be growing, despite such mainstream success for comic related movies and television. It doesn’t do much good to get people interested in these IPs, if the distributor can’t get the product out to market on time.
August 25th, 2007 at 3:28 pm
What about bookstores? Are they really that poorly served? I mean, even I could go into my (until recently, rubbish) local chain bookstore and buy a new GN every week for the next year (not including manga).
Blimey. No wonder you’re down.
//\Oo/\\
August 25th, 2007 at 5:03 pm
“Dead brill” does indeed mean “brilliant.” “Dead” in that context is British slang for “Absolutely.”
Hey, you gotta pick up something from all those years of editing HELLBLAZER.
August 25th, 2007 at 5:21 pm
I find it amazing that such an everyday phrase needs explaining.
We really are two countries divided by a common language.
//\Oo/\\
August 26th, 2007 at 2:04 am
“What about bookstores? Are they really that poorly served? I mean, even I could go into my (until recently, rubbish) local chain bookstore and buy a new GN every week for the next year (not including manga).”
But what if you aren’t a “wait for the trade” type of person. What if you have an actually enjoyment of the monthly comic format?
See, it’s not always as easy to just “wait for the trade.” Why should those who enjoy or prefer the “classic” comic format have to deal with such problems? Shouldn’t comic shops get the same kind of service that bookstores get from their distributors?
As I said, Diamond’s monoploy of this end of the market is something that needs to be ended. I just wish I saw a way to make that happen, that didn’t involve throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.
August 26th, 2007 at 9:27 am
“But what if you aren’t a ‘wait for the trade’ type of person. What if you have an actually enjoyment of the monthly comic format?”
Then you suck it up. Some people preferred to buy pop music singles on vinyl too. But not everything we want in life is readily available. That doesn’t really excuse piracy. You blame the companies for not servicing your needs, but your actions do just as much to hurt those creators that actually have some kind of a royalty structure in their contracts as they do to help the poor, war-torn orphans of Canada who can’t reach a comic shop.
If your local situation is so dire… document it. If you’re talking with other people across the globe who are dying for US comics, get them to document it too. Tell us your actual stories and don’t waste your time and ours with hyperbole. Use news outlets like Newsarama to show where there is true demand that Diamond doesn’t serve and push for solutions.
Once you respond to these situations with theft, you’ve undercut any point you could possibly have. Unfortunately, what we have seen time and time again with music and movies via file-sharing programs are people who feel entitled to get things for free. Regardless of how many other people worked their fingers to the bone for that.
If you have so much love for comics, show some respect to the people who make them.
August 26th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
Go with DCBService.com or MailOrderComics.com, depending on your geographic location. MOC is in Minnesota, I believe, while DCBService is in Indiana. I live in VA and get my DCBService weekly delivery on the Friday that the books came out. They both offer discounts that will likely mean that, even after shipping, you’re not losing any money by going through them rather than buying locally.
Mind you…I do largely prefer to buy locally. MacGuffin: A Graphic Novel Shop was a WONDERFUL place. I don’t think anything ever came out that they didn’t have at least one copy of. But my other local shops (now that MacGuffin is gone) seem to largely be DC/Marvel only. They’ll order whatever I want, but if I have to consult Previews all the time, I might as well do it through an online system that makes it easier on me and saves me more money.
August 27th, 2007 at 3:54 pm
“Then you suck it up. Some people preferred to buy pop music singles on vinyl too. But not everything we want in life is readily available. That doesn’t really excuse piracy. You blame the companies for not servicing your needs, but your actions do just as much to hurt those creators that actually have some kind of a royalty structure in their contracts as they do to help the poor, war-torn orphans of Canada who can’t reach a comic shop.”
Um… yeah, dude, whatever. I don’t think you get the point.
No one is talking about stealing anything. I’m not talking about getting for free, either. Actually, by preferring the classic monthly format, we’d be paying MORE for the stuff, not less (since most trades are basically repint material by the time they are collected, which is cheaper to produce than new work).
Perferring the classic comic format does nothing to hurt the creators or publishers. It obviously still makes them money, or they’d have done away with it by now.
This is an issue of a distributor being a monopoly and allowing that status to both let them ignore issues to the customers they service (i.e. the comic shops), as well as the damage being a monopoly is doing the the industry itself.
Diamond Comics doesn’t want an end to the classic monthly format. It is where they make most of their money from. Yet, by having no other choices open to them, retailers (and the customers they serve) are let helpless to the whims of this distribution monolith. That’s why there are laws against monopolies in the first place, so thing like that don’t happen.
My call for the end to the Diamond Comic monopoly, isn’t to mean that I want them gone or giving the stuff away for free. It merely means I want retailers to have more choices with where they can get their product from (product I and many others still enjoy buying). Diamond can still continue to operate, just not as the ONLY source. If Diamond can’t make it by having even a single competitor, then that would show they don’t deserve to be in business by their own hands, not mine.
As for “sucking it up,” Well, if you want to go that route, then why not just suck it up and not buy comics at all? In ANY format? We aren’t talking about a format almost no one buys anymore. Publishers and Diamond are still able to make profits off the classic comic format today, despite the presence of trade collection and downloading comics. As long as that remains the case, shouldn’t the product get to the places that service that end of the consumer base? But Diamond alone obviously can’t do that. This must change. That’s all I’ve been saying.