Comics Industry, activate! From Oliver Nome’s Deviant Art page:

Hello friends, this isn’t easy for me to say so I’m just gonna get it out..I found out last week that I have a brain tumor and it has to come out in the next week or so. Being a freelance artist I unfortunately have no health insurance. My art dealer Mike Alexander… Mga1wars@aol.com will be selling all of my art at discounted rates and he along with my good friend Ale Garza will be excepting donations. [You] can also find them both on my Facebook page. I’m scared but I will get through this but will be out of work for awhile. I hate to ask but anything helps…

Nome is an artist who’s done work for Aspen, DC and Wildstorm in his relatively brief career to date. This story is both sad and scary (I can’t imagine how I’d react if I found out I had a brain tumor that had to be removed within a week); I hope it ends well, with Nome healthy and not in piles of debt. His dealer Mike Alexander’s website is here, if you want to buy art to help out.

Admit it: You’ve always had a nagging suspicion that you’ve been doing this “comic fan” thing all wrong, haven’t you? Well, now iFanboy’s Ryan Haupt is here to… most likely confirm that suspicion, to be honest, with his 10 Commandments of Comic Fandom:

6. Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s stack

We all wish we could have reading libraries like our heroes Conor Kilpatrick, Jeff Reid, or Pat Loika. But in reality we probably can’t. Either we’re transient perpetual students, mom’s basement only has so much room, or the flood of 2009 destroyed the majority of our collection. At the end of the day, we should appreciate the comics we have, buy (within reason) what we want, and enjoy the spoils of our friends free from jealously.

According to Haupt’s list, I break a full half of the commandments without fear on a regular basis. I am a disaster as a comic fan, apparently.

That Warren Ellis, he’s a Smart Man who Notices Things:

Each “page,” each screen as Waid thinks of them, is roughly half the size of a regular comics page.  Creating a future print object, then, involves assembling two screens into one page.  Fitting them together, basically.  Which is not as easy as what I did, but pretty easy, and there are any number of ways to skin a pixellated cat.

What else do we notice about these three screens?  Two-tier storytelling.  Isn’t it strange how all three teams have gone to two-tier, independent of each other?

Maybe not.  You’ve cut the print page in half.  If you want each screen to make sense as a discrete entity, you have to respect the cut.  If you want each screen to contain enough information to make it worth reading, you need a strategy to maximise your panelling.  And if you want to be able to stretch out and get a big picture in there while still maintaining storytelling coherency, you’ve kind of got to go wide on the page.

He’s talking about the way that Mark Waid and Peter Krause’s Insufferable, Greg Rucka and Rick Burchett’s Lady Saber and the Ineffable Aether and Simon Spurrier and Javier Barreno’s Crossed: Wish You Were Here all opted for the same format, and how that notion of an “optimal” webcomic format may homogenize the medium if it becomes something that seems the accepted “way webcomics look” in people’s minds. Go read.

If you haven’t read Tim Marchman’s review of book-about-comic-creators Leaping Tall Buildings from the Wall Street Journal yet, you really should:

If no cultural barrier prevents a public that clearly loves its superheroes from picking up a new “Avengers” comic, why don’t more people do so? The main reasons are obvious: It is for sale not in a real bookstore but in a specialty shop, and it is clumsily drawn, poorly written and incomprehensible to anyone not steeped in years of arcane mythology.

In a much hyped series from Marvel Comics this summer, for example, the Avengers fight the X-Men for inscrutable reasons having to do with a mysterious planet-devouring cosmic force, a plot that makes no sense to anyone not familiar with ancient Marvel epics like “The Dark Phoenix Saga.” The story is told in two titles, one called “Avengers vs. X-Men,” with a big “AvX” logo on the front, and the other called “AvX,” with a big “Avengers vs. X-Men” logo on the front, presumably so you can keep them straight.

The people who produce superhero comics have given up on the mass audience, and it in turn has given up on them. Meanwhile, the ablest creators have abandoned mainline superhero comics to mediocrity.

Oh, that’s not all:

The first issues of “Before Watchmen” will be published next month. Among the writers working on it is former He-Man scripter J. Michael Straczynski, who once penned a comic in which Spider-Man sold his marriage to the devil. (This is the rough equivalent of having Z-movie director Uwe Boll film a studio-funded prequel to Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver.”) DC is promoting the project with a “Watchmen” toaster, which will allow you to burn the image of Ayn Rand-inspired vigilante Rorschach into your sourdough.

And!

For an industry that feeds on its own past to go 20 years without fresh characters or concepts is death. The most telling sections in “Leaping Tall Buildings” are thus those written about industry powers like Brian Michael Bendis, Joe Quesada, Grant Morrison and Dan DiDio. These are the men most responsible for the failure of the big publishers to take advantage of the public’s obvious fascination with men in capes.

Really? Really? Bendis and Morrison are two of the four men most responsible for industry’s inability to work outside of its Direct Market cocoon? I’ll give you – grudgingly – Didio and Quesada because they’re senior executives at their publishers, but BENDIS AND MORRISON? Here’s the thing: I can understand not liking either man’s work, or thinking that they prop up systems that regurgitate old ideas and familiar characters at the cost of something new. But “most responsible the failure of the big publishers to take advantage of the public’s obvious fascination with men in capes”? That’s just a lazy, nonsensical criticism that ignores how the industry works and vastly inflates either man’s importance or power at their respective companies, making what was a smart, snarky piece in a serious mainstream publication about the decline of superhero comics sound more like a message board post by someone who really doesn’t like New Avengers and thinks that Morrison has really ruined Batman, man.

Of course, maybe I’m wrong, and superhero comics were still going gangbusters in 1999, before Bendis started at Marvel.

Either way, go read the WSJ piece. It’s not perfect, but it’s interesting to see this counter-narrative to Marvel and DC’s “everything is great and comics are breaking new ground, look we have a gay X-Men and a black Spider-Man and, oh, Batman!” PR appear in such a high-profile organ…

Chris Ryall on a type of comic we don’t see much of, anymore:

Adaptations are kind of a weird thing now. When I was a kid and I was reading adaptations, that was the only way to revisit something like “Empire Strikes Back,” because there were no video tapes, there was no ability to watch things over and over. So an adaptation was this cool thing where you could replay and relive the story. But now, I don’t know that fans care about straight adaptations in these cases as much as they care about new content that expands or enhances the story.

When I was a kid, I loved movie adaptation comics. I’m trying to think when they seemed to become weirdly out of synch with pop culture in general – Dark Horse’s Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace mini, maybe…? But when movie adaptations are good – See the Goodwin/Simonson Alien, for example – then they’re a different-but-equal experience to the movie, not a second-best-or-maybe-third replacement. Maybe what movie adaptations need in order to work as comics are creators who’ll work on translating the movie instead of trying to recreate it? Now I want to see Brandon Graham adapt the next big blockbuster movie with a free rein to do whatever he thinks is necessary, just to see what happens…

So, I got a postcard about Double Barrel yesterday. Have you heard about Double Barrel yet? It’s this seriously under-reported project that is, well, awesome:

DOUBLE BARREL is a digital-only magazine that you can download on the cheap from Comixology, iBooks, iVerse, the Top Shelf app, and pretty much anywhere else you can get ebooks. During this 12-issue run we’ll serialize two complete graphic novels: HECK, by Zander Cannon, and CRATER XV, by Kevin Cannon.

Plus we’ll have lots of other content from us and some of our favorite creators.

“Download on the cheap?” you ask. “Just how cheap are we talking?” Well, each issue is going to be $1.99, with the pagecount varying depending on the chapters that month. The first issue, though…? That’s a whopping 122 pages. Which, you know: Awesome.

Also awesome is Crater XV by Kevin Cannon, because it’s a sequel to his Far Arden graphic novel that was one of my favorite books of recent years, and given Zander Cannon’s past, I think we can make a good case for Heck – which is about a former high school football player who discovers a portal to Hell, and had its opening serialized here a couple years back – is going to be equally good. Both books will be serialized for twelve issues before the title switches to two other creators for the next year.

I love this idea, and to say I’m looking forward to the launch – which is a week today – is an understatement. Find out more about the project here.

Worth checking out is the first installment of CBR’s new Sunday Conversation series, with Greg Rucka. It’s frustrating only in so far as it’s far too short – I love long, meandering interviews, I think it’s a wonderful way to get insight into the subject – and it’s maybe a little too Portland-centric for those of you who don’t live in this fine city, but still: Rucka’s a fascinating writer, one of the most interesting in mainstream comics, and interviews with him are always a good time.

Plus, you get this:

I just spoke with James Lucas [Jones] at Oni yesterday, and he said they’re going to solicit [the next Stumptown arc] for September. “The Case of the Baby in the Velvet Case” is the next arc. So that’ll be in September. And then there’s some other stuff brewing, but I can’t talk about it yet, unfortunately… The thing is, I’ve got a real bad record of announcing — with the best of intentions — something that I believe will be coming out and for one reason or another, it goes snafu. Frankly, I get nervous even talking about “Stumptown” right now, just because I would much rather wait until it’s solicited. I will say with “Stumptown” specifically, and I feel that in general about my work, we’re not soliciting anything anymore unless we’re sure we’re going to hit the dates. I just don’t ever want to get into a situation that we found ourselves in with the last “Stumptown” arc. I do not want three or four months wait between issues. We’re going to make damn sure that we have every one of these issues locked and loaded before we’re even going to tell people, “Yes, you may order them.”

I loved the first arc of Stumptown, and knowing that we’ll see another arc before the end of the year makes me very happy indeed.

Over at the Comics Journal, the wonderful Eddie Campbell talks about his new book, The Lovely Horrible Stuff, which is all about money:

Most people take a lot of things for granted, like what a thing is worth and how much they should get paid for an hour’s work etc., but for a few other people nothing arrives without a set of negotiations. Like agreeing on how much is to be paid then, when the time comes, having to phone up to make it happen, then having to shepherd the money through international exchange channels. Nothing is ever worth the same amount twice. I don’t take anything for granted. There was a time when I got two Australian dollars for one American. Now I get less than one. And I make all my income from foreign countries, so multiply the problem by Euros and pounds. So yes, I guess I see money differently from Joe Average. Explaining it to my wife is where the difficulty resides.

I’ve gone on about my love for Campbell before, I think; what little I’ve seen of this new book, it looks like this will fit in with his work on the How to Be An Artist and abandoned History of Comedy book. Like Guy De Lisle, Campbell is one of those cartoonists whose autobio works well when it had a subject to discuss and investigate, balancing out the personal and wider issues with ease.

First WonderCon is forced out of San Francisco by maintenance on the Moscone Center, and now New York Comic Con may be looking for a new home…?:

Events giants are waging a campaign to save the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York, which may be demolished under a plan proposed by New York governor Andrew Cuomo. A group of 21 events companies, including New York Comic Con and Bookexpo America organizer Reed Exhibitions, Freeman, National Retail Federation, and other companies doing business at the Javits recently sent a letter to Cuomo and 600 other state and city officials with the message that “Javits customers are adamant that the Javits Center remain open long term,” according to Crain’s New York Business.

What is the world coming to? And, maybe more importantly, which convention is going to be hit by this strange trend next? This is why someone needs to turn Donald Trump onto comics, I keep telling everyone…

The spectacular Tripwire magazine is 20 years old this year (I remember the first ones; I feel like an old man, now), and it’s looking to celebrate with a hardcover anniversary edition of its best material from that period… which is where you come in:

Over the last twenty years, TRIPWIRE has been covering comics, TV and film with interviews and columns by now-famous names like Grant Morrison and Warren Ellis. Still running as an annual publication, it continues to run feature-length articles and one-off artwork cover commissions.

2012 marks the 20th anniversary of TRIPWIRE, and to commemorate this milestone, Unbound are working with editor-in-chief Joel Meadows to crowd-fund a beautifully bound hardback celebration of the publication. It will be filled with the sort of content that has garnered praise from many of the biggest and best names in genre over its twenty-year existence.

Unbound is, essentially, Kickstarter for print projects, and so this hardcover is relying on donations to happen. But look what’s awaiting you if you contribute:

• Art from genre and comic geniuses Mike Mignola (Hellboy), Drew Struzan (Shawshank Redemption, Indiana Jones), Duncan Fegredo, Frank Quitely, Walter Simonson, Chris Weston, Howard Chaykin and many more

• Articles looking at the major trends and debates of the past two decades, including the best and worst comic movies 1992-2012, and which creators have come to the fore in the past 20 years

• Classic interviews and features that have made TRIPWIRE’s reputation, including Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Peter Milligan and Guillermo Del Toro

How could you resist? Go here to contribute.

And this is why I find myself wishing that Dan Slott would go further with his Spidey plans:

If I wasn’t afraid of losing the book, at the next Marvel Retreat, when going over Spidey plans for 2013, w/ a very straight face I’d say:

“Spider-Man gets a new sidekick. A parrot. It’s with him all the time. So make sure if Spider-Man appears or guest-stars in any of your books that he has his parrot with him. The parrot doesn’t have any powers per se, but it does cause extra complications. Especially, at one point, when Mary Jane says, ‘But what if they find out that Spider-Man is really Peter Parker?’ And the parrot keeps repeating, ‘Spider-Man is really Peter Parker’– everywhere they go. I really think this could work.”

I’d try to keep this up as long as possible. Partly to see how long it would take for people to kill it. And partly to see if any of the retreat regulars would say (and, from experience, these are my best guesses), “Does it have to be a parrot?” “Could it be a monkey?” “WAIT! I’ve got it! It should be the EXACT OPPOSITE of a parrot! It should be a… torrap.” “Logically, it should be a spider, right?” “I think that Mary Jane scene, where she says ‘Peter Parker is Spider-Man’ I think that works better if it happens over in my book. It’d be more organic that way.”

But the real telling thing would be the ONE person who’d say, “Parrot? That’s a GREAT idea. You should run with that!” Because THAT would be the person I’d have to keep an eye out for. THAT’D be the guy who’s ready to push me under the bus.

Spider-Parrot could be the Spider-Mobile of tomorrow.

… as an actor. The Hollywood Reporter cites the ubiquitous “sources” saying the Iron Man and Iron Man 2 director has joined the cast of Iron Man 3, reprising his role as Happy Hogan, though it is unknown has large a role it will be this time around.

THR is spinning his casting as indication as an endorsement by Favreau of new director Shane Black.

The film began principle photography in Wilmington, North Carolina earlier this week, and at least according to one report has received a $60 million dollar budget boost (from $140m to $200m) in wake of The Avengers global box office success.

In other Avengers-verse movie news, Mads Mikkelsen, perhaps best known as Le Chiffre in the James Bond revival Casino Royale, has been cast in a villainous role next to Tom Hiddleston (Loki, of course) in Thor 2. Games of Thrones’s Alan Taylor directs that sequel, which will feature most of the cast from the first film.

Speaking of which, Anthony Hopkins (Odin) is looking to carve out time in his Thor 2 shooting schedule to join the cast of Red 2, the sequel to the Warren Ellis-written comic book inspired film starring Bruce Willis, Helen Mirren and John Malkovich.

Hopkins would reportedly play a genius scientist who was locked up in an insane asylum, which wouldn’t be the first time the veteran actor has been fitted for a straightjacket for a big screen role.

Mark Waid talks about unauthorized filesharing of his new webcomic Insufferable, and why he’s not only in favor of it but actually helping out:

As you may have noticed, effective with yesterday’s installment four and retroactive back to Week One, we elected to make pirating INSUFFERABLE easy. No longer do uploaders have to go to the trouble of downloading the screen images and packing them into a file they can then share. Now you can read the installments online, as you have been…OR you can download them as PDFs and as .cbz files that you can read offline, upload, share, whatever. The links are right there underneath the comics themselves. That’s right, my pirating friends, I did the work FOR you. I didn’t muck with the comic itself, I didn’t DRM the images, I didn’t add anything to the downloadables that made them different in any way from what we give you online…

…EXCEPT for a stylishly designed credits-and-copyright page at the end that says “if you liked this, visit Thrillbent.com for more free comics!”

I can’t control the internet. I couldn’t count on uploaders not to “simply” unpack the Installment Four file I provided, excise the referral page, repack the file and upload that.

Except they didn’t.

Good stuff. Go read. Also, go read Insufferable; it’s also good stuff.

Oh, One Million Moms. How wrong can you be?

Children desire to be just like superheroes. Children mimic superhero actions and even dress up in costumes to resemble these characters as much as possible. Can you imagine little boys saying, “I want a boyfriend or husband like X-Men?”

This is ridiculous! Why do adult gay men need comic superheroes as role models? They don’t but do want to indoctrate impressionable young minds by placing these gay characters on pedestals in a positive light. These companies are heavily influencing our youth by using children’s superheroes to desensitize and brainwash them in thinking that a gay lifestyle choice is normal and desirable.

Apparently, the answer is very wrong indeed. Firstly, children don’t read comics anymore! Secondly, if they were reading Astonishing X-Men, they would likely have found things more objectionable than two people in love getting married – Hey, remember when Warren Ellis was writing the book with the threats of genocide? Genocide is worse than gay people, right? You can agree on that, right? And thirdly, shut up and stop trying to force your bigoted views on the rest of the world. Even if Marvel and DC were heavily influencing young minds by placing gay characters on pedestals in a positive light, that’s a good thing. You know what X-Men is all about? Tolerance and how wrong it is to demonize an unknown “other” based on nothing more than prejudice. The problem here isn’t that kids could read so much X-Men that it rots their brain, but it might be that you guys haven’t read enough X-Men.

One Million Moms wants people to email Marvel and DC to complain about the Northstar wedding and the upcoming outing of a DC character. It’s so tempting to say “We should email them to support those decisions,” but I worry about overloading servers and the poor people who’ll have to go through all those emails. Instead, just email One Million Moms and tell them that they should stop being so scared and hateful and open their minds just a little bit.

Oh, and probably learn to count. They seem to be somewhere around 98,500 short right now.

Spectacular comics that never happened, part 74:

Oh, man. Michael Chabon’s Fantastic Four really would’ve been amazing. Can we collectively agree that, if somebody does one day build a time machine, one of the first things that they’ll do is go back and ensure that this actually happened?

(For those who don’t know who Chabon is, go here.)

Jim Lee, on the way things work at DC:

I know it’s controversial, but we always felt that it was part of our books, to try to best reflect the readership and the entirety of people in general. It’s an ongoing thing, and not everything is dictated on a top-down basis; a lot of times storylines get to us from creators. We work with some of the best creators in the business, we support their creative initiative and that’s where a lot of this comes from.

I know, I know: I’m too old-fashioned and traditional in these ways, and I know that this is how these things work now, but “a lot of times storylines get to us from creators”? A lot of times? That doesn’t even sound like it’s the majority of times…

From Brian Michael Bendis’ enjoyable, meandering talk with Greg Rucka, the latter spills about future comic projects:

There’s two comic projects we’re still trying to get going. I’ve got an idea that I’ve been carrying around for almost two years now. The first two scripts are written on this thing, it’s just the question of getting the publishing side worked out and what those deals are going to be and finding the right publisher for it… the other one—I know I talked about this before—Rick [Burchett, artist of Lady Sabre & The Pirates of the Ineffable Aether – www.ineffableaether.com] and I still want to do American Soldier. We still want to do this historical record of the history of the country as told through this one family’s military service from generation to generation. We’ve got the preliminary stuff done for the first one. But again, we have to find the right publisher.  I think the way Rick and I have been looking at American Soldier, that’s not something you can take to Marvel nor DC or Dark Horse and make it work because this is a huge freaking graphic novel. There’s going to be a lot of time and lot of money put into it, and there’s got to be an advance on it. There’s got to be some upfront money on it if only to cover Rick’s side of the work, and finding a book publisher that understands how graphic novels are done, and this is a large project and is going to require some outlay at the start. That’s its own problem, and then you go to first publisher and they say how much do you need, and you say we need $30K to start. Most will say have a nice day.

Dear Comic Industry: I would love it if someone would find a way to make American Soldier work financially, please. The project may not have an immediate draw within the direct market beyond “It’s Greg Rucka,” but, people: You can’t tell me this wouldn’t have a market in the mainstream book world.

Michonne made her first brief, shadowy appearance in The Walking Dead‘s second season finale, with word following shortly after that she’d be played in season three by Treme‘s Danai Gurira. Courtesy of Entertainment Weekly, we have the first look of Gurira in character, looking rather closely to how she’s appeared in the Walking Dead comic book series — though Robert Kirkman says to expect some changes.

“The essence of the character — her personality, her motives, everything that makes Michonne Michonne — remains intact from the comics,” Kirkman told EW. “But like a lot of things on the show, there will be little tweaks and differences here and there. We saw that her introduction is slightly different from how it was in the comic, and her interaction with Andrea is really going to be a really cool addition to the character that I think will get television viewers up to speed, and they’ll get to know her a lot faster than comic book readers did.”

I’m always interested in Comics Journalism, so it’s unsurprising that Hope Beyond Hype appeals to me. It’s a free online comic – print copies are available to buy, too – about the discovery and development of stem cell research put out by the European Commission and created by sci-fi novelist Ken McLeod and artist Edward Ross.

McLeod talks a little about the project on his blog.

I’d love to see this kind of approach taken for more things; Jim Ottoviani and Jay Hosler really should be household names by now, dammit.

(Via.)

The distribution system for comics as it stands is an upside down pyramid with the creators at the very bottom.  In this upside down pyramid the creators are the last ones allowed to recoup from their work and they get the leftovers or scraps after everyone else is finished. (If there is anything left for them.)

The creators are the people who put in all of the time and energy into the very product that’s being sold.  Even if you heavily promote your book, you’re doing it to make other people money.

The distributor makes their money, the printers get paid, the publishers, and the retailers before the artist gets to make anything or recoup money invested into a book.  It’s easy to lose money even after everyone has been paid and very common.

Mark Andrew Smith has created a new “manifesto” for creator-owned comics, called The A to B Manifesto. The creator as retailer, and it’s an interesting read that suggests that creators take on more active role in the promotion and sale of their work, and that Kickstarter will be a gamechanging tool in that. I’m not convinced that I agree, entirely, but it’s definitely the starting point for lots of conversation. Go, read. Get talking.