John Jakala has a bone to pick with the recent “Cartoon” issue of the New Yorker:

So let’s tally up what this special issue has to offer: something you’d normally see in The New Yorker anyway; a dense explication of some grand theory of comic strips based on just two thinly veiled samples; an all-too-short feature on a gifted cartoonist; a gimmicky attempt to “enhance” cartoons via color (and in the process hopefully refute something an old editor said decades ago); an all-too-long spread devoted to one of the magazine’s unfunniest cartoonists; a self-indulgent platform for cartoonists to express their irratation at being asked the same question over and over again; and a mind-bogglngly dull investigation into the boring world of tape dispensers.

And this is what The New Yorker passes off as their special “Cartoon Issue”? Where are the laughs? Where is the humor? Aren’t cartoons supposed to be funny?

While I enjoy wallowing in the misery and pointlessly of self-absorbed theory and in-jokes, the problem here, I think is that the history of great cartoons is full of the CONCRETE and that’s what missing from this special issue. When Charlie Brown tries to kick that football, but Lucy pulls it away from him so he lands on his back with a loud “THUD!” that’s funny. When Ignatz throws a brick at Krazy Kat’s head, that’s funny. When Garfiled eats a whole pan of lasagna, that’s funny.

That line about Garfield makes me think he might be a wee bit sarcastic … just a wee bit.

CafeBabel has a nice little piece on King author Ho Che Anderson, complete with slideshows:

Fantagraphics were looking for an author to start a biography on Martin Luther King. Anderson was chosen as the only cartoonist with black skin. He knew, that he wasn’t the most qualified – he didn’t know too much about civil rights, but he took the job on. He’s either too modest or tries not to overexaggerate his story. That goes for King too. The charismatic leader without any faults of the official iconography is presented as a ladies man with an inflated ego. Furthermore, it took ten years to complete the series in three volumes. ‘At first when I started, I was very enthusiastic about King. But after, wow, I just started to feel kind of burdened … and, what was my passion for it was replaced by burden and irritation.´

Being permanently broke at the beginning of his break meant he had to commit to various other projects. Frustration went hand in hand with this. Anderson experienced a crisis, and it took seven years to complete the second volume of King. But the final results speak for themselves. A hit with the critics as well as the public, in USA and in Europe, two markets whose taste he marks as being relatively similar. ‘I am surprised,’ he jokes. ‘I cannot expect the positive feedback I had. I was expecting some negative reactions!’

I’m having a hard time with this one.

It’s not fresh news that Academy Award Winning actor William Hurt has been cast to play General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross in the upcoming Hulk movie. The announcement was made last summer. I’ve lived with this for more than five months and I’m still having trouble with it.

I mean, really, William Hurt?

The same actor that played soft-spoken John Robinson from Lost in Space?

The guy who was the soft-spoken Macon Leary in The Accidental Tourist?

Soft-spoken Duke Leto from SciFi Channel’s Frank Herbert’s Dune?

Sensing a trend here?

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First Too Much Coffee Man the Opera, now this. Jimmy Gownley sent me a note earlier this week letting me know that his all-ages comic book series, Amelia Rules, is being made into a musical by Small Pond Productions, a theater group based in Marlborough, NH. The show was written and directed by one Michael Cohen and will have its debut Dec. 6-8:

Adapted from a Christmas themed story that appeared in the first Amelia volume, “Amelia Rules: The Whole World’s Crazy,” the musical relates how 9-year-old superhero-wannabe Reggie Grabinsky enlists his superhero crew to try to prove Santa is a fraud.

Music and lyrics for the show are by New Hampshire musician/composer Michael Cohen.

“As editor of the Amelia Books I’ve been with these characters since their inception, and watched them grow and mature over the years,” says Cohen. “Knowing them so well made writing the songs for this musical so much easier, more like writing songs for old friend.”

You can read the full press release after the jump. (more…)

Apparently the rising Western interest in Japanese culture, doesn’t sit well with many of the die-hard nerds, according to the Daily Yomiuri:

A dear friend of mine, a hardened Japanese otaku, says that the pressures of success have become oppressive. “Japan used to be a place where cool culture flew under the radar, but no more,” he tells me. “The government is taking us seriously, which means they don’t want anything unsightly or obscene happening. And that’s the death of creativity.”

This is all too much for writers to ignore. Patrick Macias, an American otaku and blogger extraordinaire, now bemoans the success of Japanese pop, even as he celebrates its expansion in the United States.

Macias writes: “Akihabara was the side effect of collective fantasy and private desire desperate to find expression through technology, through commerce, molded plastic, pixel, and drawing paper.”

For American otaku-types like Macias, Japan’s pop culture success has meant too much attention from outsiders. “Now,” he continues, “those [otaku] dreams are threatened by a dull and dreary reality.”

Plus, it’s harder to find all the good Harry Potter yaoi.

Warren Ellis launched a new web forum yesterday in support of his upcoming webcomic Freakangels. Whitechapel, he said, is “a little different from my two previous boards. It was conceived of as a discussion area for FREAKANGELS, and it’ll still serve that. But I decided I just wanted a place that reflected all of my interests. It’s not a comics-centric place, though there’s plenty of space for that. But I’ve also created space for Second Lifers, the steampunk/retropunk crowd, the people who like following the mad science and signs of the apocalypse, music and art etc.”

Go check it out.

As discussed yesterday, it’s widely held that the comics printed back in the 90′s were more flash than substance. Many in the hobby hold these books in contempt, but I? I bear a secret shame.

I loves me some 90′s funny books.

We’ve already reviewed my fondness of Milestone’s Icon. Today in part two of this week’s series of shameful revelations, I’d like to chat with you about a little series from Jim Shooter’s gone-before-its-time Defiant Comics, Warriors of Plasm.

Warriors of Plasm was the capital ship of Defiant’s fleet of six comic titles. It was the company’s first, and best, book. While the stories were always entertaining, it was the setting that grabbed me, still holding my imagination so many years later.

Warriors of Plasm is set on a living planet, the Org of Plasm. Like any living thing, the planet requires sustenance. The world isn’t solar powered. And it sure ain’t a vegan.

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Sigh. Y the Last Man is almost gone. Writer Brian K. Vaughn talks about where it all started:

“‘Y’ was really wanting to do a book about gender,” Vaughn said by phone while driving in Los Angeles. “It felt like comics had never really talked about gender in a sophisticated way. Whenever they talked gender it was always like … ‘Should Catwoman’s boobs be smaller?’ ‘should she be called the Invisible Woman instead of the Invisible Girl?’ I really wanted to talk about gender and it felt like this was sort of a sci-fi hook that would let me talk about gender.” With that in mind, Vaughn and artist Pia Guerra set out to create “Y.”

The 31-year-old author said that working with “Y” reinforced the premise that roles in society are not bound by gender. He said that history has proven that female leaders can be just as aggressive as their male counterpart.

“It didn’t feel like violence was something that was masculine. … Humans are really complicated and eliminating the men wouldn’t mean the end of things that were associated with men,” he said.

Shooting War creators Anthony Lappe and Dan Goldman will be in San Francisco this Saturday to benefit the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. Joining the authors are Miami’s The Waterford Landing, performing live music to accompany images from the chilling satirical graphic novel. Copies of the book will be available in exchange for donations to the CBLDF, defenders of the First Amendment for comics & graphic novels since 1986.

Details:

What: Shooting War Book Launch Party, Benefiting Comic Book Legal Defense Fund
Where: 111 Minna Gallery, San Francisco, CA
When: Dec 1, 5 PM – 9 PM
Who: Authors Anthony Lappe & Dan Goldman, with live music by The Waterford Landing
Sponsored by: Last Gasp , 111 Minna Gallery , SMITH Magazine , & JahFurry

The Bendis Board hates it when their friends become successful:

“I miss the old Ultimate Spider-Man where witty comments didn’t need a huge arc event. not that i dislike the big goblin and clone events, the book just doesn’t NEED them to survive.”

“I miss Bagley… Not that I dont love Stuarts stuff.. I do.. probably more than I love Bagleys.. but USM and Mark go hand in hand to me.”

“It’s like what happens with your favorite band (pick one)…the music that attracted you to them changes as the band grows, and suddenly it’s not the same band anymore, and you lose interest, and find something new to listen to…perhaps something that reminds you of what the old band was like in the beginning. Sure, you understand why a band grows and changes, but that doesn’t mean you’ve got to like their new style. Same applies to comics, tv shows, movie franchises, etc.”

“Yeah, Bendis needs to cut it with the schtick and stay with the original concept. When he goes off the original concept, it sucks.”

“I miss being a wide eyed and innocent young lad still thinking there was good in the world before I started reading and watching the news.”

“Is this thread filling some kind of ‘Bendis was good in the old days but now he’s sold out’ quota?”

Greg Rucka is doing something interesting over on Comic Bloc. In the Checkmate forum, posters notice that they’ve been “deputized” by someone claiming to be Checkmate’s White King’s Bishop, and then get notification of a special secret mission. That mission? Well, it may have something to do with Rucka’s Crime Bible miniseries, if this thread has anything to do with it:

You’ll recall that I recently submitted for review my personal analysis of the code and a proposed key to deciphering it. It appears that Montoya took a similar approach in decoding the numbers. While not definitive confirmation, the agreement of two investigators whose methods vary so widely is worth noting.

At the time we met, it was unclear whether my contact had shown the notebook to anyone else. However, it now appears that he has shown it to others and perhaps made additional copies in an attempt to find a buyer or buyers. I have since seen some of this material on the internet. He mentioned that he had already received a substantial bid from a news organization, but I suspect that that was another fabrication designed to create a fictitious bidding war. Having captured a substantial amount of data and knowing that Black Side was capable of obtaining this material should it prove to be legitimate, I made no offer but told him that I would need to consult with my superiors.

Of course, why make an offer when Douglas Wolk is offering some of the same information online for free…?

Despite Countdown, I do like it when artifacts that ought to belong to one world end up in another. Yesterday, Greg Rucka dropped off a document that had come into his possession while he was working on the Crime Bible miniseries (of which the second issue comes out Thursday): Montoya’s Moleskine, a bulging notebook that reminded me a bit of several Dennis Wheatley and J.G. Links volumes.

Expect to see more of this popping up across the internet over the next few weeks, I think…

From the Mothership’s Talk@ boards:

Today, “The Flying Friar” graphic novel ships in the USA. Low orders, less than 1 in 10 comic shops will stock it. Probably less than 1 in 20. And then only a couple of issues. MidTown Comics is a glorious exception.

So. Go into a comic shop and note its absence. Then complain to the high hills that they haven’t got a copy. Go here if you need some ammunition. If you fancy asking the retailer to order a copy for you, please do. It’s from Markosia. You may need order code: AUG073845. But either way, make some noise about it.

Then tell me the response you get. If you do choose to order a copy, tell me how long, or if at all, it takes to arrive.

The results of this experiment will form a Lying In the Gutters vodcast in the future. It may well change the comics industry. For the better as well, which is nice.

Is that the experiment that will change the comics industry? Or the vodcast in general? And is it changing the industry in the sense of any random crossover from the ’90s changing the world of comics forever, or is something actually going to change?

You, as they say, decide…

It’s a quiet week for Publishers Weekly Comic Week, but they do have a few manga-related gems, especially an interview with show organizer John McGeary about the upcoming New York Anime Festival:

PWCW: What kind of show is this going to be? Is it for the fans? Is it a trade show?

JM: It’s going to be several things; part professional, part fan. The day before the show [trade news Web site] ICv2.com is going to have [an anime and manga] conference. And the first day, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., is for professionals only: retailers, licensors, librarians, educators, producers. And we’re going to have sessions just for them—some of them basic. We see ourselves teaching the community—especially from the librarian’s standpoint. They understand what it’s all about. They see NYAF’s educational value and can recommend titles depending on what a reader’s interests are. We specifically want to be more helpful to that group. And to retailers as well. We consider ourselves as a place to learn [more about anime and manga] and where to sell it.

There’s also an interview with Milton Griepp about the ICv2 conference that will be taking place before the convention; an interview with Slam Dunk manga-ka Takehiko Inoue;  and a profile of author Christine Feehan, whose first manga, Dark Hunger, just hit the charts.

John Byrne’s Sensational She-Hulk were some of the first comics I got into as a burgeoning fan-girl. I actually made a Jennifer Walters costume when I was in 8th grade (complete with lawyer-riffic suit and gobs of green make-up). She’s been a constant source of Marvel-licious fun for me as a heroine who can do whatever she wants in life and chooses to do good in the most adventurous sense as well as the most mundane of senses as well. I mean, Daredevil’s a super-hero lawyer, but it’s a secret identity, it’s his chance to work the law both in front of and behind the scenes. She-Hulk just seemed to cut all that and get to the nitty-gritty. As Bruce Banner was wracked with guilt and torture over his transformations, Jennifer Walters embraced them and made the best of everything. Even Geoff Johns took a moment to explain her ‘gamma expression’, to coin a term; that while Bruce’s affliction worked off of anger, Jennifer’s worked off of self-image.

Dan Slott, despite a shaky middle story arc with Starfox, found the heart of the character, the humor and the humanity, so to speak and wrote a fantastic run of books that I was proud to give out to customers looking for a strong, self-confident and honestly fun super-heroine. Let’s face it, none of us could be Wonder Woman but, like a lot of Marvel characters, She-Hulk’s power really does come from within (plus a heapin’ helping of circumstance). Would any of us rise to the challenge after being shot at and receiving a blood transfusion from one of the most dangerous men on the planet? Let’s read She-Hulk and find out.

So, what’s the gamma gal up to now?

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Geoff Boucher with the L.A. Times has good things to say about Marvel’s Digital Comics Unlimited initiative:

Well, the archive certainly looks good. These aren’t photographs of faded old pages or unwieldy images that spill off the screen; Marvel has converted the glorious old artwork of Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Jim Steranko and Neal Adams into bright, burnished panels. To check out this e-resurrection, I went straight to an old favorite, issue No. 33 of “The Amazing Spider-Man” from February 1966, which has a classic Ditko cover of the despairing hero being crushed beneath machinery. The art now seems to glow from within, which is precisely what’s happening on a computer monitor. The website is easy to search and use and there’s a deftly designed zoom-in function and “smart reader” feature, too, so a reader gets a smooth progression from panel to panel that lets you follow a story in a natural flow.

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Our old friend and former blogging colleague Brian Cronin over at Comics Should Be Good has been running John Seavey’s excellent storytelling engine posts, which you can typically find on Seavey’s blog Fraggmented. The most recent covers one of those “guilty pleasure” series I used to dig many years back, Dazzler:

If the storytelling engine for ‘Dazzler’ doesn’t automatically seem familiar to most comics fans in the 1980s (when the series came out) or in the present day, that’s probably forgivable. After all, super-hero comics pretty much dominated the market from the 1960s onwards, and they still dominate it today, at least in financial terms. Looking at ‘Dazzler’ through the lens of super-hero comics, it stands out as something quite new and different…arguably so much so that the writers of the series weren’t quite sure what to do with it.

Alison Blaire, the Dazzler (she dropped the ‘Disco’ part of the name after a very short while) was a mutant with the power to absorb sound and convert it to light. But unlike every other person in the Marvel Universe, gaining super-powers didn’t make Alison decide that she needed to save humanity, or conquer the world. All Dazzler wants is to make it big in the challenging world of rock music, and to her, having super-powers is more of a hindrance than a help. It’s hard to make gigs if you’re getting kidnapped by Galactus, fighting the Hulk, or foiling the plans of the evil Enchantress, but despite her best efforts to be an ordinary rock star, she keeps bumping into the Doctor Dooms of the world and has to do her best to stop them. It’s an idea pretty thoroughly unlike any other Marvel or DC were publishing at the time…

Reading his description almost makes me want to move Dazzler from the “guilty pleasures” category to the “Wow, that really was under appreciated” category.

Zeus Comics has posted additional artwork from the recently completed Wonder Woman Wardrobe War contest. All of the non-finalist entries are on display.

I have to say, some of these are just stunning. I particularly like the one up above.

I likes my Wonder Woman with a little junk in her trunk.

Courtesy of Chris Duffy

“Mr. Media” himself Bob Andelman recently sat down with Schulz and Peanuts author David Michalis for to chat about the new biography:

ANDELMAN: Before we turned on the tape, we were talking, and I was telling you that I had done this biography of Will Eisner, another comics legend. And in doing that, I can still remember sitting at the dinner table with him one night when he started telling me about his children, something that he had never talked about before, and finding out — I don’t want to make this about my book or Eisner — at that moment that a lot of what had happened to him in the last thirty years had to do with the loss of his daughter as a teenager. I knew at that moment that that was going to be the electrifying moment of the book, and what I wondered about, was there a similar kind of an “a-ha” moment in researching Schulz and learning about Schulz, or was it a lot of things?

MICHAELIS: I think it was an accumulation, without question, but I had moment after moment where I was surprised to learn that Schulz was more complicated than I could have guessed and that I really was with everybody else, I expected a very specific kind of person, and my sympathies or my feelings about him grew and I became far more engaged with him as a man, as a person, than I had been before, because I found it fascinating. I found what I was hearing about him fascinating.

The whole theme of love, for instance. He had a very difficult time throughout his life, to hear the story told by those nearest him, to hear himself tell the story. Another great source for me was the interviews he had given to American newspapers over the years. He considered the newspaper his employer. He considered the managing editor of any newspaper who sent him a reporter to do an interview, he considered that person to be part of his job to respond to, so over the years, he made an account of his life. Sometimes it was day by day, week by week, and you could chart some of the changes in his views and his thinking as those went on.

Related: The Fantagraphics Bookstore has a Flickr set up of their new Unseen Peanuts exhibit.

It’s a widely accepted truth that there was a lot of crap published back in the wild speculator fueled boom (and subsequent crash) of the 90′s. You only have to visit your comic retailer’s 25-cent boxes to see examples of those trendy-at-the-time, but desperately awful books.

Many of us in the hobby turn our nose up at those years with open disdain for the work produced. But not all of us.

I bear a secret shame, you see. I’m particularly fond of a number of books that were published then. Over the next few days, I will be sharing some of those sparkling gems with you.

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