“It isn’t intimidating. It isn’t impressive. Mostly it just looks dumb”: That’s writer Daniel Way discussing Wolverine’s costume, noting he’s been in an elevator with guys dressed in Wolverine costumes at conventions before. It’s from a nice little Q-and-A with Way that the News Tribune did with him to promote a book signing. The interview is nice, but I’m not so sure about the headline, “Wolverine writer gives snarky hero his edge.” Is Wolvie a snarky hero? I’ve never really associated him with snark before.
More practical than a tiara in winter: The Wonder beanie.
Some more, not very helpful clues as to the identity of Batgirl: The other day, David re-posted DC’s teaser image of the new Batgirl, and now it looks like the company is doling out a little more info—the creative team. It will be written by Bryan Q. Miller, a Smallville writer who will also be writing July’s issue of Teen Titans, and drawn by Lee Garbett and Trevor Scott, while the teaser image itself was generated by cover artist Phil Noto. This reveal doesn’t do much to help one figure out who the new Batgirl is (and let’s hope it is a new Batgirl, because cancelling Cassandra Cain’s book to streamline the Bat-books a few years ago just to relaunch it when there are even more Bat-books seems a strange strategy), at least not as much help as it would be if the new writer were, say, Misfit creator Gail Simone or Spoiler creator Chuck Dixon.
“You look at super-heroine cheesecake, and you get a sense of a boys’ locker-room cluelessness so intense that it is indistinguishable from disdain”: The always link-able Noah Berlatsky pens an excellent, example-filled essay about the way the level of quality involved in cheesecake art can impact the level of offensiveness to it—or, in other words, the worse it is, the worse it is. In comparing recent works from Ed Benes and J. Scott Campbell to masters of illustrating the female form Jack Cole and Dan DeCarlo, Berlatsky makes a point I attempted to make about the work of Guillem March last week much more elegantly and effectively than I did:
In short, the artists seem to care about women enough to have looked at one or two of them at some point.
Not that I’d argue that good art can’t be sexist; craft and talent aren’t everything, or even necessarily all that much, in these matters. But they are something. Even if you’re pandering, doing a professional job of it implies a certain minimal level of respect not only towards your audience, but towards your subject as well.
Well worth a read if you’re intersted in the issue. And if you’re reading this, than I know you’re interested in comics and art.
May 9th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
I realize it’s probably just a typo, but you might not want to use the term “Bat-gooks” when referring to the only asian hero in the batclan.
May 9th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
Yes, yes that was a typo. It’s fixed now.