The Glyph Comics Awards Committee once again offers fans the opportunity to vote for their favorite black comics story in the 2007 Glyph Comics Fan Award. The 2007 Glyph Comics Awards ceremony will be held during the East Coast Black Age of Comics Convention in Philadelphia, May 18-19, and the Fan Award will be among the honors given out to those who represent the best in black comics. This year’s nominees are:

• Black Panther: The Bride, Reginald Hudlin, Scot Eaton & Klaus Janson
• Crisis Aftermath: The Spectre, Will Pfeifer & Cliff Chiang
• Firestorm the Nuclear Man #28-32, Stuart Moore, Jamal Igle & Keith Champagne
• New Avengers #22, Brian Michael Bendis & Leinil Francis Yu
• Storm, Eric Jerome Dickey, David Yardin & Lan Medina and Jay Leisten & Sean Parsons

Fans can vote at the ECBACC website, www.ecbacc.com, for any of the above five nominees. Alternate choices not on the official ballot can be e-mailed to rich.watson@gmail.com. Please note that this e-mail address is ONLY for write-in choices not on the official ballot. Any write-in ballots with any of the five above nominees will be discarded!

The deadline for the Fan Award voting is April 15, 2007.

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by Rich Watson

Jimmy Gownley has become one of the top creators of children’s comics this decade with his critically-acclaimed series Amelia Rules. With his new venture, the organization Kids Love Comics (KLC), he has rallied other like-minded creators to the cause of producing and promoting quality children’s comics. In an industry that has increasingly favored adult subject matter in comics historically created for the youth audience, a group like Gownley’s comes at an opportune moment. On March 3, a week after the KLC banner flew at the New York Comic-Con (the first of many stops this year for KLC), Kids Love Comics Day was held in Gownley’s native Harrisburg, PA, to an enthusiastic crowd of families interested in what KLC had to offer.

In a 2004 interview with me at Comic World News, Gownley outlined, for the first time, the genesis of his plan for what would eventually become KLC. Through Amelia, he arranged a fund-raiser in which he offered original art, signed comics, and other material. Then, through a partnership with all-ages publisher Harold Buchholz, the groundwork was laid out. “[O]ne of the first ideas we came up with was we wanna partner with an existing online retailer, a big established online retailer, and essentially have a website that’s a part of their website that’s just kids comics, that you could order from,” said Gownley in 2004. “So if you could place an order of four different books that are published by four different publishers, you wouldn’t have to track four different orders. It would all come from this one place, it would be reputable, it would be able to be kept in stock, and that way, when we do interviews like this – and we’re gonna try to get a lot more media attention in terms of radio, television, newspapers – we’ll be able to say, go to this site, and all these comics are available. And also we’ll be able to give recommendations, free samples of the books to read, and also an age guideline.”

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This year’s Small Press Expo was held in a new location – the Marriott Bethesda North Hotel & Conference Center in Bethesda, MD. It’s the one show above all others that means the most to me. I’ve gone to every one they’ve held for almost a decade, as a fan, an exhibitor, and as a reporter. Selling comics was always important to me, but SPX was and still is all about the people; the friends I’ve made, and the creators I’ve met. In that spirit, this week I’ll share three brief interviews conducted at this year’s show with three highly influential creators.

The first is with Scott McCloud, author of the recent how-to graphic novel Making Comics, the third in his series of books about the nuts and bolts of the comic medium and industry, following Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics. He and his family are currently on a year-long, 50-state tour promoting the book.

Rich Watson: So what do you think of the new location?

Scott McCloud: I think it’s alright. It’s cool to have everything in one room; I do like that. I feel a little bit like the hotel is maybe a little set off. I thought things were more accessible and walkable, although it’s not too bad, walking between restaurants and what not here in this place [Marinelli Road]. But I liked the fact that you can stay in a couple of different hotels in the old location [Wisconsin Avenue, also in Bethesda] that were near each other. You get used to certain restaurants and things and you get spoiled [laughs]. But at times, I thought the dumpy Holiday Inn helped keep SPX’s flavor, but it’s cool.

I think there’s a pretty positive vibe here and there are a lot of people, and as I say, it’s great to have it all in one room. It’s hard not to have walls, though – I didn’t bring any stuff with me, but if I really was exhibiting and I had a lot of art and stuff, it’d be frustrating to have no place to put it up. [His table was part of one of the eight islands in the middle of the room. There were more tables along the perimeter, against the walls.]

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There are a number of musicians who do comics, and comics artists who play music, but I can’t recall ever seeing the two mediums combined the way I did last night at the Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan. PANIC – Punk and Indie Comics – was a venue for both cartoonists and musicians simultaneously. The small downtown lounge – just a stone’s throw away from the Puck Building, home of the MOCCA Art Festival – played host to a mini-comic expo; one room in the back with two rows of local self-publishers along either wall. There was also a bill of local punk rock acts that periodically took the stage at the rear end.

As a result, what you had was patrons chatting with the cartoonists, buying their work, then suddenly a band would take the stage and everyone’s attention was focused on them, for the length of their set. Then it was back to talking to the cartoonists again. If I had worked a show like this back in my more active self-publishing days, I’m not sure how I’d welcome the idea. It’s hard enough to get patrons at a con interested in your comic without competing with a bunch of bands, performing literally in the same room with you.

The impression I got last night, though, was that it wasn’t much of a problem. It was a very diverse crowd, as interested in the cartoonists as the bands. Many of the comics mirrored the punk rock aesthetic that set the tone for the night, from madcap anarchic humor to politically-charged social commentary. There were even a number of zines on display, a seeming anachronism in today’s digital age but still very much alive and well in the underground.

The band I saw perform was called World War IX. Either the sound system was perfect or the singer was atypical of most punk bands, because I could actually make out some of the lyrics. At one point it looked like a couple of girls attempted to get a pit going, but succeeded only in spinning each other around the front of the stage. The band included a Black Flag cover in their set. They sounded great.

Check my column at Comic World News this Wednesday for reviews of books from the show.

“It was obvious that Aaron would not be able to meet his original six-month target of returning ‘The Boondocks’ to newspapers… His Sunday strips needed to be in by mid-September to meet newspapers’ deadlines of publishing ‘The Boondocks’ by the end of October. We had to consider the newspapers currently running ‘The Boondocks’ reruns and expecting its return. It was unfair to keep them guessing any longer.”

The story.

My father has heard of Aaron McGruder, and he knows absolutely zippo about comics, so you can imagine the kind of impact a creator like Aaron McGruder has made on the comics landscape. McGruder has been extremely fortunate in that his success has come at so relatively young an age, and with a full season of the animated series under his belt, he’s in a position where he can call the shots as he likes. If he doesn’t want to return to the newspapers at this point in time, I’d say he’s earned the right, though I hope we get to see him in other, different projects as well. A new animated series, perhaps, say, at BET?