One of these days, I’m going to go look at the comics that come out that week and there will be no mention of President Obama. And then I will be thrilled.

On the upside, there are plenty of great comics coming out this week that aren’t set anywhere near the White House. I’m fairly sure that neither the cast of Madame Xanadu nor Northlanders have ever heard of Obama, and while Unknown Soldier might be present-day, I think he’s got more pressing concerns than a guest spot by the President.

So besides those three, what else is worth reading this week?

Because I still think it’s disgusting.

From Kotaku:

Let’s play this down the middle, as much we can. “Costumed representatives,” are there to make a physical appearance, both sides would agree. But Iola is right: Neither Comic-Con, nor E3, nor any other convention, is a strip club. It’s no more appropriate to assume she’s there for casual opposite-sex companionship than it would be to think a well dressed public relations professional – who’s also there to promote a product and likewise is expected to look good on the job – is after the same thing.

The problem is that EA’s promotion projected just that image – not only on their own reps, but reps of other companies as well, whether or not it was consistent with the spirit or tradition of Comic-Con, E3, or any other show. That’s the reason for the furor, and that’s why you got an apology.

The whole post is worth reading, as it includes comments from a self-proclaimed costumed rep who’s suffered through much obnoxious behavior at cons.

The comparison to a strip club, however, struck me as particularly apt. Because it’s NOT what Comic-Con is supposed to be. Yet by projecting the idea that cons are for boys, the corresponding assumption that any girl who is there is there for the sexual gratification of the male attendees (and thus the attendant reaction to the Twilight-fangirls who are there for their own damn visual sexual gratification, thank you very much) is not only prevalent among attendees, but played to by just this sort of promotion.

I find it interesting that the most egregious examples of this stuff came from video game companies. Am I strange in noting this?

It struck me this week that one of my favorite bits of the Phonogram comics is the extra content at the back. I love the glossary of music referenced in the issue, the ramblings, the little view inside of the creators’ heads. I realized that several of my other favorite comics include this bit of backmatter–Local, any number of Warren Ellis books. The Vertigo Voices in the back of the Vertigo books are great fun.

It’s almost like the liner notes on a CD–one of the reasons I still buy CDs in solid format is the little booklet that comes along with it, with lyrics and pictures and other little treats. It’s a reason to still buy the solid artifact. The whole package. In a digital age, when there’s any amount of free media available on the Web, buying something you can hold in your hands has to have extra value. I get annoyed at CDs that come packaged in a simple cardboard folder and go buy the songs on iTunes instead–I don’t need the clutter if it’s not really worth having (I live in a studio apartment!).

The double features in the backs of comics are a great little bit of added value as well. I’m enjoying the resurrection of Manhunter in the back of Streets of Gotham, and the B-sides in Phonogram are fun as well. They can be experiments with shorter stories, or complete in themselves, or just choppier fragments of an ongoing tale, but they’re mostly just an added value to something you’re already buying.

As print becomes rarer, people are going to expect more and more for their money, and they’re going to expect something that won’t be the same in digital form. All these additions are a good start to experimenting with this idea.

Wow, this is pretty low even for the kinds of things we’ve already seen floating around Comic-Con.

I know all about the “booth babes” and my own feeling on the subject is pretty much meh. Maybe I’ve just been inured to the use of women’s bodies to sell things, and I’m used to the idea that comic conventions are “for the boys” even though I’ve been fighting that notion in this here blog. It’s kind of funny to me, too, that “booth babes” are still used to lure fanboys, who then turn around and complain about Twilight fangirls squealing over Robert Pattinson. Still, way to take the whole idea to a new low, EA Games. Rewarding guys for committing “acts of lust”? With no definiton on what that entails?

So now the girls standing around awkwardly at various booths are not only going to be stared at and groped a few times, they’re going to have boys trying to do so and document it on photo to try to win a chance to–hang out with more girls?

Sounds like EA Games needs a quick lesson. Hey guys? Women aren’t like your video games or comic books. We’re people, too. We get to choose with whom we commit “acts of lust,” and sometimes we don’t like it on camera. We certainly don’t like being bought and sold for the price of a video game.

Someone keep these guys away from the Twilight fans, please.

Also, if I never hear another joke about a “chest full of booty” it’ll be too damn soon.

(thanks to Blog@’s own David Pepose for setting me off on a rant at 9:30 on a Saturday)

Um, hello.

A debate about “female power icons in pop culture”?

With Signourney Weaver on a panel with Eliza Dushku, Zoe Saldana, and Elizabeth Mitchell of Lost? All it would need would be Sarah Michelle Gellar and I’d be in heaven.

From the Guardian, some highlights from the panel.

Weaver:

“Science fiction is an investigation into what it is to be human,” she said at one point. “A lot of the roles I have played, they’re not trying to create a female action figure – they’re trying to create a fully-functioning human being; a character comes first.”

Saldana:

“It’s about how long I have to stand fighting a room full of men about why I should do a fight scene in trousers, where I’m required to run across a floor and leap on to a moving elevator,” she argued, “They’re confused because they’re convinced I should be just as good at doing that in a leather miniskirt and Gucci boots.”

Dushku:

“I asked Joss for the most kick-ass multi-dimensional character he could think of, and he delivered … this character, it’s just a lot like me.”

Mitchell:

“My roles have been far more adventurous, far more interesting, once I moved beyond 30; my roles are juicer, and sexier, and more powerful – we’re allowed to do all those things, be all those things, once we pass 30.”

Anyone at SDCC and catch this panel?

Good morning, ‘rama readers. For those of you, like me, stuck at home while your friends and colleagues get into trouble at enjoy Comic-Con, I bring you a whole bunch of linkage that has nothing to do with Comic-Con! Well, mostly.

From the New York Times, a piece on India’s sliding comics industry, and its turn to animation to save its fortunes.

Inside Out, at Girl-Wonder.org, wants Marvel to can the lip gloss and make real products for women.

Via Comics Worth Reading, Classics Rock!, a blog about songs based on books, is focusing on comics this week. So far we have Green Lantern, Ghost Rider, Magneto, and more.

Blog@’s own David Pepose sent me this to giggle at, and I’m sharing it with you: Twilight-themed tattoos. Actually, some of them aren’t bad, but I feel for the person living their life with a portrait of Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen inked on their arm. But hey, some people I’m sure think my tattoos are ridiculous too…

NPR’s Marketplace interviews Joshua Dysart about comics.

Finally, in case you are going to SDCC, Racialicious has some recommendations for panels to hit, and will no doubt have some thoughtful coverage of the whole shebang once it’s over.

Robot 6 has an excellent roundtable up about girls and fandom and the drama over Twilight “invading” comic-con. I’m posting a few excerpts here, with my thoughts, but you really should read the whole thing.

Robin Brenner: I find it especially distressing that the SDCC crowd, made up of fans who have been typically dismissed and marginalized by the larger culture including comics fans, fantasy fans, and sci-fi fans, seem to think it’s perfectly warranted to dump on fans who you would think they have a lot more in common with than traits to divide them.

I’ve seen this over and over again, though, in groups gathered around everything from punk rock to politics. When you’re marginalized from the larger culture, in part by choice but in a much larger part than we’d like to admit, not by choice, it’s easy to try to police your boundaries. Maybe it even gives you a better sense that you ARE different because you choose to be and not because your peers don’t understand your passion for the Misfits/Dennis Kucinich/Superman/Twilight. In other words, maybe enforcing the “no girls allowed” clubhousey nature of certain parts of comic fandom makes comic fans feel more special. Groups often define themselves by what they aren’t, after all.

Kate Dacey: The other thing that bothers me about these statements is that many of the folks dissing Twilight have never read it or watched the movie, yet they feel perfectly qualified to assess its merits solely on the basis of who likes it. Teen girls love it, ergo it must be junk.

I’ve taken this on myself, and I still believe it’s true. Listen, ain’t no one arguing you have to like Twilight. But if you haven’t read the damn thing, how do you know it’s crap? It sounds entirely too much like the people who go “You read COMIC BOOKS?” at my day job(s).

Eva Volin: The librarian half of my brain wants to sit the fanboys down and explain to them about the birds and the bees, about brain development, and the statistics on reading patterns and buying habits of girls vs. boys. To remind them that teenage girls have expendable incomes, too, and ask if they’d really rather the girls spend that money somewhere else, like at a chain bookstore, or Hot Topic, or on eBay. Or at the booths in the dealers rooms where they sell cell phone charms of Naruto characters or the twins from Ouran High School Host Club. The librarian half of my brain wants to reason with people who would rather stomp their feet than get with the program and embrace this new generation of fan—a generation who, if encouraged, could save the comics industry.

Um, what she said.

Volin, cont’d: That because I have two X chromosomes I need to have sequential art explained to me in small words and if I’m in a comic book shop it must be because I’m there to buy books for my son or nephew. And to all of that I say, “Bite. Me.”

I’m going to SDCC. I’m going to line up to see the panels I’m interested in. I’m going to cheer for the artists whose work I enjoy. I’m going to ask questions and get autographs and maybe even do a little cosplaying. And I’m going to spend money at booths that have the merchandise I’m interested in. Lots of money. And if you don’t want my business, don’t worry. Call it women’s intuition, but I’ll be able to tell. And I’ll remember. And I’ll take my business, as well as my nieces’ and their friends’ business, to someone else’s booth.

Exactly this. Over the years, I’ve grown exceptionally good at navigating comic shops and the varied reactions of the employees/owners. And I remember each clerk who was condescending, who was rude, and I took my money elsewhere. I’m still here, reading and writing about comics, because I love them and I believe in the medium AND the industry. I am quite certain there’s a place for me in this world. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that some of the most overt sexism I’ve ever dealt with in my life has come my way through comics. And I don’t mean Wonder Woman’s costume.

So, con-goers and fans, think about all of this when you’re at SDCC and you roll your eyes at the squealing teenage girls (and trust me, I don’t like listening to squealing either). Those girls have money and just as much right to be there as you do. And it couldn’t hurt to be nice to them.

So I’m quite jealous of all of you going to SDCC this week, picking up art and sketchbooks and other fun things. I’m stuck with my regular comics-buying spree, which this week includes Gotham City Sirens #2, and Wednesday Comics and…and…and that’s it?

Man, you con-goers really do get all the fun. It seems every now and then that the comics-universe conspires to put everything I like out in one week and leave me fairly barren the next. But it follows that someone else is having an excellent week with tons of books they love coming out. So if that’s you, please share!

Click through for a 5-page preview of Phonogram 2.4. Because Jamie McKelvie, Kieron Gillen, and I all love you.

Happy Monday.

A couple of weekends ago, a friend and I wandered down to the New York City Zine Fest in Brooklyn. Like me, my friend is a journalist and a product of the 90s punk-rock/riot grrl scene in which making zines was, in those dark pre-blog days, what you did with your angst and anger and more importantly, your sheer love of the music that kept you sane.

The zine fest featured a surprising number of comic creators–surprising to me at first, anyway, though when I thought about it, it made sense. Comics still work best in print, despite some good innovation in the digital forum. Zines, meanwhile, seem completely archaic–they were always artfully not-artful, badly photocopied, self-consciously printed in that same retro-obsessed typewriter font (Courier) even though few people made them on typewriters. Meanwhile, the Internet can assure faster distribution of and greater connection through ideas The zines we saw at this fest were no different than the ones we used to read in the 90s, which says something about the death of the medium. They seemed more an attempt to cling to a period in time that is past, an attempt to find a community that no longer exists. The point of the zine was the ideas, the community, not the medium itself.

So whither a zine about a comic?

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Via Warren Ellis, click for full size. By John Cassaday, natch.

Posy Simmonds’s critically-acclaimed, Eisner-nominated comic Tamara Drewe will be turned into a movie by director Stephen Frears, The Guardian reports.

The director of The Queen and The Grifters is reported to have cast former Bond girl and St Trinian’s graduate Gemma Arterton as the title character, a newspaper columnist whose recent nose job transforms her into a seductive flirt, to the chagrin of the quiet village’s womenfolk. Tamsin Greig and Roger Allam are also said to be attached to the project.

Simmonds’s strip ran in the Guardian’s Review section between September 2005 and October 2007 before being collected in a graphic novel. The tragicomic story was inspired by a piece of classic fiction – Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd; likewise her earlier serialised cartoon, Gemma Bovery, took Flaubert’s Madame Bovary as its template.

Frears’ most recent project was also based on a popular work of French literature: Colette’s Chéri novels, which he turned into a film starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Rupert Friend.

Frears was nominated for an Oscar for The Queen and The Grifters and has shown admirable range as a director. Just another indication, I suppose, that the words “comic book movie” don’t have to be synonymous with “big dumb blockbuster,” but can also be linked to “serious film with art-house creds.” If The Dark Knight didn’t completely kill those stereotypes, perhaps a Tamara Drewe movie will put another nail in their coffin.

My choice of image here probably gives you some idea of what I loved about the latest Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. And yes, watching Ginny Weasley turn into a confident, proactive woman is a treat–especially in a world that while created by a woman author, provides very few standout heroines.

I adore Hermione. I can relate to the girl who knows the answer to everything in school but feels left out by the attention paid to her male friends, who brushes off the male attention she gets because it’s not coming from the one person she wants. But the rest of the girls in the Potterverse are cackling villains like Bellatrix Lestrange–watching Helena Bonham Carter chew scenery here is a treat, but she’s a one-note character–or giggling girls like Lavendar Brown or Romilda Vane, who serve mostly to teach us that our heroes are indeed desirable, despite their endearing adolescent fumbling. (Molly Weasley’s moment of vengeance in the seventh book is sublime, but until then she’s largely relegated to worrying at home about her family.)

So Ginny Weasley, effortlessly skilled at Quidditch and Bat-Bogey Hexes, popular with the boys, who chooses Harry, not the other way around, is a wonderful character. I find myself for the first time hoping for a change from the books for the seventh installment, because Ginny was cruelly underused in Deathly Hallows.

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I haven’t seen Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince yet. I’m just too old for a midnight screening at this point, so instead I have tickets for tonight and will no doubt be writing my response tomorrow. For now, to get myself (and all of you) into the proper state of mind, how about some reviews from around the Interwebs?

From the BBC:

Those wanting noisy spectacle and endless action will be disappointed. This is a talky Potter.

It feels long – but not in a bad way. The main characters and the complex plot get a chance to breathe.

Writer Steve Kloves sensibly excises the padding from JK Rowling’s novel – adding new scenes such as the opening attack on London’s Millennium Bridge.

But Death Eater attacks aside, relationships are what interests Yates.

Even when we first meet Harry in a cafe at Surbiton station, he is effortlessly catching the eye of a waitress.

“Harry, you need a shave my friend,” says Dumbledore later, as if we need reminding that the boy Harry is becoming a man.

The Chicago Tribune:

The Potter series has sustained itself because it no longer seems to be concerned about roping in the widest possible global audience. Instead, it’s trying to treat Rowling’s characters with the care and class they deserve, and in spellbinding sequences such as the “liquid memory” flashback to Tom Riddle’s childhood—in which Ralph Fiennes‘ nephew, Hero Fiennes Tiffin, plays the Dark Lord in training—Yates proves he’s the man for the job in cinematic terms, not merely transcriptive ones.

The San Jose Mercury News:

Previous installments played out in a supernatural bubble bearing little connection to our ordinary little Muggle world. “Half-Blood Prince” brims with authentic people and honest interaction – hormonal teens bonding with great humor, heartache that will resonate with anyone who remembers the pangs of first love.

Drop the magic act, and Hogwarts could be any school of self-absorbed geeks, jocks, popular kids and outcasts trying to maneuver through the day. Even the class bad boy provides insight into the behavior of bullies.

From the New York Times:

There must be a factory where the British mint their acting royalty: Hero, who plays the dark lord as a spectrally pale, creepy child of 11, is Ralph Fiennes’s nephew, and Frank is the son of the terrific actor Stephen Dillane (Thomas Jefferson in the HBO mini-series “John Adams”). The younger Mr. Dillane, who plays Voldemort at 16, conveys the seductiveness of evil with small, silky smiles he bestows like dangerous gifts on Jim Broadbent’s Horace Slughorn, a professor whose trembling jowls suggest a deeper tremulousness. When Slughorn, the fear almost visibly leaking from his body, shares the secret of immortality with Voldemort, you feel, much as when Ralph Fiennes raged through “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” in 2005, that something vital is at stake.

If that sense of exigency rarely materializes in “The Half-Blood Prince,” it’s partly because the series finale is both too close and too far away and partly because Mr. Radcliffe and his co-stars Emma Watson and Rupert Grint, as Harry’s friends Hermione and Ron, have grown up into three prettily manicured bores. Unlike the veterans, notably the sensational Alan Rickman, who invests his character, Prof. Severus Snape, with much-needed ambiguity, drawing each word out with exquisite luxury, bringing to mind a buzzard lazily pulling at entrails, Mr. Radcliffe in particular proves incapable of the most crucial cinematic magic. Namely the alchemical transformation of dialogue into something that feels like passion, something that feels real and true and makes you as wild for Harry as for all those enticingly dark forces.

And of course, from Newsarama’s own Lucas Siegel:

It’s amazing to see just how much the actors have grown over the course of 6 films. Here we have a truly breakout performance by Tom Felton, in the role of troubled Draco Malfoy. Draco is intensely conflicted in his mission throughout the film, and plays a much deeper character than the one-note foil of the previous chapters. It’s a remarkable transformation for Draco and a fantastic performance for Felton, as you can clearly see his agony in many dialogue free scenes.

The other standout in a field of solid actors was once again Alan Rickman in possibly the best casting choice in movie history. As Professor Snape, he has a slightly smaller role for the majority of the film, merely popping in here and there (until the end, that is), and the dry wit and ambiguous morale nature comes off perfectly, maybe even better than the previous movies. The other principle actors are all very clearly comfortable in the roles they’ve been playing for years now, and it gives a great sense of realism to this world of fantasy.

Well, I’m ready for my workday to be over so I can head to the theater…

Valerie D’Orazio makes some excellent points over at her blog.

Truly, my heart weeps for those fanboys inconvenienced by 1,000s of Robert Pattinson fans. It is so unfair. And they’re “not even really supposed to be there,” right?

[snip]
Where was this whining when people were going freakin nuts over “Watchmen?” Or when I couldn’t even get through the fanboy phalanx to meet up with friends because of the Hellboy roadblock?

Fandom and conventions are big enough for EVERYBODY. And instead of complaining about “Twilight” fans, maybe somebody should figure out how to get these legions of fangirls to buy more comics.

Seriously. The headline she links–”Female Fans Prepare to Trample Men“–is hilariously ironic because it reflects perfectly the fear in so many articles. The implication that ZOMG WOMEN ATTACK is just so darn Freudian it’s hard for me to unpack it without giggling.

I’m a female fangirl. I have been for years. And I’ve absolutely been trampled at cons–and punk rock shows, and even sporting events, all areas with typical male fan bases that certainly didn’t seem to think anything shocking about being in a room with hundreds of boys and a few girls.

I came to comics through a subculture that, if it had existed back in the day, would certainly have embraced Twilight. As a somewhat overeducated adult, I read the books and saw the movie and thoroughly enjoyed both, if occasionally with the very adult pleasure of laughing at all the wrong moments. I both defend the right to have something like Twilight that is so unabashedly girly that it inspires tons of squealing girls to unload at Comic-Con just for its panel, and despise the tendency to split fandom into two worlds: the comics are for boys, the sparkly vampires are for girls.

Leaving out for a moment the teenage boy sitting next to me at a subway stop reading New Moon on his iPhone (yes, I can recognize the story from a glimpse over his shoulder. What?), why the heck can’t we admit that comic cons were packed full of people fighting for seats before Twilight was thought of, that Hollywood has been trying to find ways to tap into the zealous–and zealously consumerist, willing to buy tons of movie-related merch–comic con audience for a good while now, and that the only thing different when it’s Twilight is that the fans are teenage girls (and their moms, the fear of whom brings up a whole other level of Freudian analysis that I’m REALLY not qualified to do).

So really. Do these guys need to keep Comic-Con a He-Man Woman Hater’s Club that badly, or can they learn to embrace the girls and cross that invisible line between Twilight fans and comic fans? Because who knows, maybe if they dropped the defensive act and realized that more girls in their fandom does not mean less stuff for them, that pop culture is not a finite commodity, maybe more girls WOULD buy comics. And far from that being a problem, it would create more money for comics creators, and thus…MORE COMICS FOR ALL. Win-win.

It is, in fact, Harry Potter week. I’ve been geeking out about the posters that speed by on the side of buses, the cast lined up with wands raised (why does that sound so dirty?) for weeks, so will I even find the time to read comics this week?

Well, in a week when Air, DMZ, Young Liars AND Scalped are on deck, I’m pretty sure I’ll find the time. Because I am a Preacher obsessive, I really want the new hardcover, but I should save my meager funds for books I haven’t read yet. And so, as usual, I ask you: what do you think I should be reading?

So as print media and especially print newspapers are dying, DC comics decides to put out a print comic that mimics newspaper funny pages. Is this brilliant, or ridiculous?

In this case, it’s brilliant. The comics are high kitsch, pure throwbacks to the heyday of newspaper comics. Highlights for me include the hilarious double entendre-a-line Metamorpho scripted by Neil Gaiman, Superman with Lee Bermejo’s utterly stunning art, and Ben Caldwell’s hallucinatory Wonder Woman. Really, though, there’s not a miss in here–and this is coming from a girl who is lukewarm at best on superheroes and has little to no healthy nostalgia for the days of yore.

But the media theorist in me wants to take this a step further. Wednesday Comics seems like an epitaph for newspapers in general and newspaper comics in particular, a tribute especially pulled together for a dying medium. The very fact that DC puts out something like this, on newsprint, is as loud a signal as any I’ve seen that we probably won’t be seeing comics in newspapers much longer. If we still had a vibrant newspaper culture, no one would find it deliciously different to buy comics printed this way.

I regret the death of the broadsheet print newspaper as a cultural artifact more than I do as a personal choice–I’ve never liked getting ink on my fingers and have never really been able to read a paper cover to cover. By the time I started jonesing for news, we already had the 24-hour news cycle and the Internet. But like most people, I remember reading the funny pages as a kid (Garfield was always my favorite).

Superhero comics carry that same kind of reassuring nostalgia for most of their audience. People grow up with Superman–life might change, fall apart, but there will always be Superman. The characters chosen for Wednesday Comics are those same classic characters, and the writers and artists are some of the biggest names in the business. The message of the whole project seems to be: Newspapers might be dead, kids, but Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman? They aren’t going to leave you.

It’s a well-done project, though, and the pure joy and love for the medium shines through and tosses some residual afterglow onto the newsprinted page. It won’t slow the shift to digital media, but it will certainly be an artifact worth keeping.

From G4, Blair Butler has a look inside Warren Ellis’s new Avatar series, Captain Swing and the Electrical Pirates of Cindery Island. I’ve been a wee bit obsessed with this title–because I mean, the title! What’s an Electrical Pirate?

Well, the preview doesn’t really answer that question, but it still looks cool.

I’m particularly happy that it’s Friday this week–I’ve got an exciting weekend planned. To kick things off right, though, here are some stories from around the web.

Splash Page is speculating about Twitter rumors that Nathan Fillion and Rainn Wilson had a meeting with DC Comics.

Daryl Cagle‘s been posting videos from the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists Convention. This one’s an interview with Mikhaela Reid and Jen Sorenson, two female editorial cartoonists.

More dirt on the terrible idea know as The Crow remake, which maybe isn’t so much a remake? Um, what?

To celebrate the release of The Nobody, Jeff Lemire has some lovely art and linkage over at Standard Attrition.

Since Neil Gaiman is off to accept his Newbery Medal for The Graveyard Book today, check out video of him reading from the book on his tour.

Finally, if you have a spare $20,000 or so, you can get a second-tier Twilight star at your party. No Robert Pattinson or Kristen Stewart, sadly.

Joss Whedon might not be directing a new Buffy movie, but he will be directing the season 2 premiere of Dollhouse.
From Chicago Now:

Fox is pushing back the second season premiere of Joss Whedon’s “Dollhouse” by one week this fall. The premiere now will air at 8 p.m. Sept. 25, the network announced Wednesday.

It’ll probably be worth the wait: series creator Joss Whedon will write and direct the episode.

You know you’re thrilled.

Also, there will be a Dollhouse panel at San Diego Comic Con where attendees can see the episode, and attend a Q&A with Whedon and series star and co-producer Eliza Dushku.