I apologize to anyone who was on pins and needles waiting for today’s installment of my thrice-weekly linkblogging. I try to get these up earlier than, like, halfway through your work day, but I was pretty discombobulated by the Labor Day holiday (Although I am proud of myself for remembering that new comics wouldn’t be on the racks until Thursday this week before driving to the shop this year).
Anyway, here are some things you can read when you’re not reading Newsarama, if you’re so inclined…
Ha how cool would it be if Ant-Man ended up being the best superhero movie ever made?: Because if Pixar did make an Ant-Man flick, it would have a pretty good shot at the crown. Apparently Entertainment Weekly reported that the studio was looking at the least bad-ass sounding Marvel character, and folks reacted here, here, and here. Josh Tyler, who wrote the piece on Cinema Blend, lead off with this observation about the reception of the Disney/Marvel news: “the internet went into one of those all to [sic] frequent fanboy panics, in which nerds ran to their blogs and predicted a world where Marvel would be forced to make Donald Duck the newest member of the Fantastic Four.” Maybe he and I just read different comics blogs, but did anyone predict Donal Duck would be joining the Fantastic Four? Anyone who wasn’t joking, anyway?
“The comparison here is made more pitiful by the fact that Miller’s script for Born Again is hardly perfect… Yet he clearly understood the visual and structural aspects of a comics page as well as the creation of tension and suspense”: On Monday, The Comics Reporter ran an excellent essay by Ng Suat Tong regarding the disparity between the fame and influence of today’s prominent mainstream comics writers versus their artist collaborators, and the general weakness of many of those writers. The essay has sparked some sharp disagreements from other people who tend to know what they’re talking about, including Heidi MacDonald of The Beat and blogger Sean T. Collins.
I’m afraid I don’t know enough about some of the particular examples cited in the original essay—I haven’t read enough of either Brian Michael Bendis’ Daredevil run or Ed Brubaker’s Captain America run to rate the former greatly superior to the latter, for example—to really argue with Ng Suat Tong or those that argue with him. But I think it’s hard to disagree with some of his broader points. Like, yeah, DC and Marvel often shaft the artists when it comes to collections and promotion, for example, and I’ve always believed the best comics stories are the ones that can only be told in the comics medium. So if Bendis’ Daredevil scripts and Brian K. Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man scripts read like they could be HBO dramas, then they’re pretty obviously not the pinnacle of the comics medium…although they are likely to be very popular and successful .
Anyway, check the piece out if you haven’t already. It’s definitely a well-written, example-filled thought-provoker and conversation-starter.
“What happens when Direct Market retailers can’t trust Diamond to keep them stocked?”: Blogger and retailer Christopher Butcher has an excellent—and kind of alarming—post about an incident in which a faithful regular Beguiling customer requested a particular manga from “an imprint of the single largest publisher of books in the world” and he then realized that Diamond had never even solicited it. Butcher talks a bit about his experience as a retailer and the changes in the market he’s seen, and he realizes that the direct market likely won’t collapse over night, so much as gradually disappear:
With Amazon best-seller lists, and New York Times Graphic Novels Bestseller lists, and the popularity of manga, and graphic novels, and the big movie tie-ins and the rapid-fire collection of superhero stories into graphic novels, and THE INTERNET in all its forms (pirates especially), one day we’re going to look around and realize that no one really cares about the notion of a “Direct Market.” Everyone else will have moved on to the idea of graphic novels as a mass-market medium, available in all kinds of formats, from all kinds of venues.
Much more at the link. Give it a read.
Of course, one advantage or waiting until the middle of the day to post this, is it makes it easier to just steal other people’s links: For example, the aforementioned Heidi MacDonald linked to Becky Cloonan and Hwan Cho’s excellent-looking webcomic KGB (Yoink!) and an extensive Wired feature on the Covered blog (and yoink again!).
Is “decidedly different” even a dramatic enough term to describe Bob Burden’s Flaming Carrot?: Speaking of Wired, their Jonathan Liu lists “6 Cool Comics With Decidedly Different Heroes,” ranging from Astro City to The Flaming Carrot.
“Megan Fox Loves the Three Comics She’s Ever Heard Of”: I love (looking at, listening to the voice of) Megan Fox as much as the next guy, who also loves (those things about) Megan Fox, but Laura Hudson’s challenge of Fox’s geek cred at Comics Alliance was pretty funny.
And on the subject of attractive actresses and comics: Apparently there’s a Kate Beckinsale shower scene in the Whiteout movie:
One scene that did make the transition is U.S. Marshall Carrie Stetko (Kate Beckinsale)’s shower scene. To Hollywood critics, it may seem like a gratuitous moment to show off Beckinsale’s body, when the rest of the film would have her bundled up. Rucka jumped to the film’s defense.
“There was actually a story reason,” Rucka said. “It led to a flashback. There was an issue for the character of Carrie, between the cold and the heat. And you get to see her in the shower.”
Yes! Shower scenes that are there for a story reason are the best shower scenes!
