Greetings, Blog@teers — have we got some news for you!

For the past six months, a webcomic has been featured by Ain’t It Cool News and CNN, celebrated for its action, characterization, and respect for the blaxploitation films that inspired it. As its creator notes, it’s Super Fly meets The Equalizer, the step-child of Shaft and Rip Kirby, a love letter to the Black action films of the 1970s. For some, it’s street justice like you’ve never seen — and for those on the run, well, all that’s coming their way is a WORLD OF HURT.

And in keeping with our mission to deliver the best and the brightest to you, our readers, we are proud to announce that WORLD OF HURT will be making its second home at Blog@Newsarama, as the latest in our weekly webcomics series. We sat down with writer/artists Jay Potts about the comic, his blaxploitation inspirations, and what the future holds for Isaiah “Pastor” Hurt.

Newsarama: Jay, just to start out with, can you tell new readers a little bit about what World of Hurt is about?

Jay Potts: WORLD OF HURT is a weekly, black & white serial adventure webcomic that is my personal love letter to the Black action films of the 1970s and the Golden Age of newspaper adventure strips.  It is set in the early1970s in the city of Pointe Blanc, a fictional version of San Francisco and Oakland, and follows the exploits of a Black troubleshooter named Isaiah “Pastor” Hurt.

Nrama: In terms of getting to know you a little bit — what’s your background been in terms of comics? Is World of Hurt your first one, or have you been building up this?

Potts: I’ve been drawing since the age of four and have been a comic book fan for just as long.  However, it wasn’t until I entered the graduate program in Sequential Art at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, GA in 1997, that I received any formal instruction.  What I learned there about storytelling and composition, and the exposure to an incredible range of talent, was truly eye-opening.

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I have to say I sort of miss the days when Brian Wood did his own DMZ covers, but there was something about JP Leon’s cover to #45 that really struck me. I’m the furthest thing from an art critic, but there’s something oddly intense about the shadowy back here, the broad shoulders–funny how I never pictured Matty Roth looking threatening, menacing, but suddenly he does here, and it’s not just the gun.

I’m sure Hawkman and Hawkgirl would beg to differ!

Courtesy of Player vs. Player, August 10, 2009.

I took a little twitter poll today (you’re following us, right? If not, click on that link and follow us. Go on, we’ll wait), asking what people wanted to see more. Well, to prove that we’ll actually listen when we ask for these kinds of suggestions, here’s our first article born directly via comments on Twitter.

Let’s Be Friends Again is a webcomic about, well, I’ve read through their entire archive, and to give you an accurate list, the rest of this post would just be topics. Let’s just say if you’re reading this, chances are you’ve had a conversation not unlike Curt and Chris’s that they so generously share with the world here. It’s also a safe bet that if you read any one, 10, or 90 of their comics, you’ll be laughing out loud repeatedly.

Be warned, much of this is NSFW (EDIT: As readers have pointed out, your milage may vary on the label “NSFW.” Just know, it includes lots of swearing and the occasional bloody mess) content. Like this MKvsDCU sendup from last December, for example. The mixture of slice-of-life conversations, one-off topic strips, and some really solid comedic writing and art make this a great example of what webcomics can and should be. This is a continuation of the kind of storytelling comic strips in newspapers used to have, aged for readers who used to read them and are now adults. It’s webcomics for, frankly, people who are most likely to actually read webcomics. It doesn’t try to be too high brow, but is still intelligent, it doesn’t try to hard to be funny, but it makes you laugh.

This was one of the best suggestions I’ve ever received of a new webcomic to read. It now has a permanent place in my bookmarks, and I highly recommend you all go check it out as well.

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.

I’ve written about Persepolis and Marjane Satrapi in the context of the current protests in Iran, but someone took it a step further and rebooted (remixed?) Persepolis to reflect the current situation.

I have no idea if Satrapi is involved in this project, but I do find it interesting that a completely new story can be made by moving some panels around and changing the captions. Aside from my interest in it as a political document–and the way comics can carry a message more potently than a simple news story–it is also an exercise in figuring out the weight of the message carried in the images vs. in the text of a comic.

Look out, Dark Avengers, Hulk, and Secret Invasion: Wednesday Comics just jumped to the top of the pile.

DC Comics announced today that John Arcudi and Lee Bermejo’s Wednesday Comics feature starring Superman will be serialized in USA Today. The initial strip will appear in the July 8th print edition of the paper, with the following installments appearing online at USAToday.com.

For those of you not keeping score, this is the highest selling newspaper in America, with a circulation of 2.11 million, even narrowly beating out the Wall Street Journal. These strips will come out each week on USA Today’s site the same date as Wednesday Comics hits the stores, and the online strips will be promoted in the print edition.

“It just makes sense, no?” wrote Alex Segura in DC’s blog, the Source. “A weekly series created to remind readers of the joys of standalone comics and the newspaper strips many of us grew up on debuting in the pages of one of the most well-known and widely-read newspapers ever.”

The Mothership reported today about the latest news regarding the official summer release date of Green Lantern: First Flight on blu-ray and DVD.

Yahoo! Movies now has the first trailer for the animated film, I think it bodes well for the 2010 live-action film.

UPDATE:

Our home base at Newsarama has since added the First Flight trailer.

The Hollywood Reporter has announced that Fox will be pursuing a big-screen adaptation of Marmaduke.

While it’s too early to tell if the film will be live-action or animation, the studio is hoping it’ll cash in on similar revenues as Marley and Me and Alvin and the Chipmunks.

The gluttonous dog has also appeared on episodes of the Heathcliff and Garfield cartoons.

You may have experienced this in your neck of the woods, I know all of the sudden our local outlets are a little lighter. The Chicago Reader this week has addressed one particular medium in the dwindling newspaper industry that’s taken a huge hit, alternative weeklies.

While Matt Groening is set for the next several generations, thanks to The Simpsons, most creators of comic strips found in free weekly newspapers are finding less and less places to call home.

Readers, have you felt the hit in YOUR favorite local weekly?

Edit: The above comic is courtesy of Ben Claassen III. Thanks, Eden!

Washington City Paper Drops Syndicated Comics. All of them. This is the alt-weekly, which one would hope would be maintaining its interest in alternative and creative viewpoints like those brought by comics.

I hate to brag, but one of my local alt-weeklies here in Philly has a cover story about comics this week, and it’s a good one, gorgeously illustrated with art from Duane Swierczynski’s run on The Punisher. Swierczynski himself was the former editor of the other Philly alt-weekly, the City Paper, and the article is excellent even if, like me, you’re not a regular Punisher reader.

Swierczynski is as big as a Budweiser Clydesdale but not quite as pretty. And while he could crush your skull like an eggshell with his mighty fists, he almost certainly won’t. He lives with his wife, 6-year-old-son and 5-year-old daughter in a perfectly normal house in a perfectly respectable part of Northeast Philadelphia. His first job every morning is to make his kids breakfast (Coco Puffs, Special K and/or yogurt and frozen pancakes).

Finally, in case you thought I was just stuck on alt-weeklies, my friend just showed me this trailer and it kind of made my mind explode. So of course I had to post it here for you.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to a local bar to play Quizzo with a friend. One of the questions referred to an actor whose name none of us could remember. My friend said, “I know his face! Just not his name.”

We joked, “Draw him.”

But my friend, who is white, said, “I feel like when I draw black people it looks racist.”

Artist Ron Wimberly had someone tell him that he’d thought Wimberly’s art was racist, before meeting him and realizing that Wimberly is black.

Wimberly noted that perhaps it’s just that black features don’t look strange or exaggerated to him.

This story was passed on to me recently (h/t), wherein Washington Post comics blogger Michael Cavna points out:

An unnerving number of North America’s political cartoonists are bizarrely obsessed with President Obama’s lips.

You read that right. Barack has the mouth that soared to the top of many cartoonists’ fixations. Just what in the name of Jimmy Carter caricatures is going on here?

If you don’t believe me, scan dozens of current political cartoons. For every Steve Benson or Mike Luckovich who is zeroing in on a swell, spot-on Obama, there seems to be a cartoonist who invokes “caricature” in the most grotesque sense of the word. Obama’s lips have been rendered in such unnatural tints, and at such dimensions, that somewhere, even R. Crumb would blush.

And of course, this physical area of caricature — unlike, say, Obama’s ears — comes freighted with a legacy of ugly racism and cruel, blackface-era mockery.

Daryl Cagle writes:

I’ve gotten a lot of questions recently on drawing Obama; people want to know about racial stereotypes and whether cartoonists are being pressured to draw him a certain way. When I was working as an illustrator I was often given clear guidelines on how I was supposed to draw African-Americans: with small noses and thin lips. I was instructed to make any crowds of cartoon characters racially diverse, but only diverse in color, not in facial features.

It’s an interesting, and tough question. After seeing the Obama Spider-Man comic, and observing that the Obama in the pages looked almost nothing like the actual president, I wondered what gave. This is 2009, we have our first African-American president, are we still dealing with the “all black people look the same” mentality? Or was the artist worried about playing into racist stereotypes and ended up with a generic dark-skinned character (hell, even the skin tone was wrong).

A while back, there was a controversy about the New Yorker’s cover, depicting Obama and his wife in stereotyped ways. I weighed in back on my own blog, and there were thoughtful comments on both sides. But I wonder if the debate over the propriety of that image has contributed to the thoughts of cartoonists depicting Obama now.

Cagle’s point, that he was taught to draw African-Americans with Caucasian features, dovetails nicely into this post, from Girls Read Comics, and this one, from Seeking Avalon, on Vixen being portrayed as, well, white. And then I think of my friend’s comment, and Wimberly’s comment, and…

I don’t have easy answers here. I don’t think any of the artists mentioned above or linked in any of these places meant to be racist. I also think that sometimes, whether you like it or not, racism creeps in. This shouldn’t be taken as a sign that white people shouldn’t be drawing people of color, or that caricaturing the President of the United States is off-limits now because said President is black.

This is only the first month of Obama’s presidency; I have no doubt that this won’t be the last time we have this conversation. I guess about the only thing I can hope for is that we can discuss it like adults, and move forward from here.

John Barrowman, otherwise known as Captain Jack Harkness, will be writing a Torchwood comic strip with his sister and longtime collaborator Carole E. Barrowman.

The series will appear in issue #14 of the bimonthly Torchwood magazine. The art will be produced by Tommy Lee Edwards (1984) and Trevor Goring.

Carole explained in a press release that “When John and I were working on [John's autobiography] Anything Goes, we spent a lot of time together on the Torchwood set. In between our storytelling and moments of inspired silliness (maybe one or two), we decided we’d like to work on a project together that involved Captain Jack. The role of myth in a culture’s zeitgeist has always intrigued John and I (it probably intrigues all sci-fi fans) so I when I got back to the US, I sent John a short story I’d written, ‘The Tale of the Selkie.’ Almost immediately he called and said, ‘This should be our first Captain Jack tale.’”

According to the press release solicitations, Captain Jack will be facing a deadly menace on a remote Scottish island, as his companions are picked off one by one.

Torchwood the series spun off of the critically-acclaimed Doctor Who revival in 2005, dealing with an Earth-based organization that dealt with (and scavaged technology) from extraterrestrial encounters.

Switched has picked up on the story that the New York Times reported (and Caleb linked) a week ago: the death spiral of the print newspaper spells trouble for cartoonists.

Last month, I attended a lecture by Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism about the future of journalism. As in the linked essay, he pointed out that people are not turning away from news–that the top newspapers have more readers now than they ever did. Those readers just happen to be online.

One of the things Rosenstiel talked about was the “decoupling” of news and advertising. Why would you buy an ad to sell cars in the New York Times for a ton of money when you can advertise on a website about cars, where more of your audience will be interested in your product?

Targeted advertising is the wave of the future with ads. And news is suddenly driven by targeted searches, Google news finder, and Twitter feeds.

We’re seeing the decoupling of comic strips from news in much the same way. As the articles pointed out, comic strips are moving to the Web, to their own sites, and to different sources of funding.

Though we’d love to see a world where all artists were able to do exactly what they want for the love of it, the practical fact is that we’ve all got to eat. As the media deals with the shift to the Internet, one of the biggest questions is how to survive as an artist–or a journalist–when the Web has everyone expecting content to be free all the time.

We at Blog@ are going to bring you a bunch of stories about webcomics this month, and we hope to be able to help answer some of these questions.

As the brand New Year rolls in, it’s looking like the last vestige of the Spider-Marriage might finally be over.

While a number of fans were outraged at the events of Spider-Man: One More Day, in which Spider-Man chose to “undo” his marriage to Mary Jane Watson in a deal with the demon Mephisto, they still had a few outlets for that relationship fix.

But the last vestige of the marriage — the Spider-Man newspaper strip — may yet be seeing some major changes in 2009.

In yesterday’s Amazing Spider-Man newspaper comic strip, the year came to a close with an ominous announcement:

Attention, Spidey Fans!

Starting tomorrow, there will be a huge change in our hero’s life!

You’ll see the same Spidey surprise that Marvel Comics has given its countless readers.

It’s something we, too, must do because — with great power comes great responsibility!

Or, just think of it as our way of wishing you — a happy New Year!

And now, in today’s strip, Peter Parker is staying with Aunt May, with MJ nowhere to be seen. The comic ends with a teaser about Peter Parker’s new status quo, urging readers to keep watching to see what happened to our friendly neighborhood web-slinger. If speculation is correct, this could be a strange new tone for the newspaper strip, which famously coincided with the full-length comics during the initial marriage of Spider-Man and Mary Jane. However, if OMD has indeed crossed over into the daily strip, it would certainly work as a strange transition, with little build-up to what would be a radical shift in the series’ tone.

UPDATE: For those of you still wondering — it has been confirmed in today’s strip: a single, college-going Peter Parker is now the strip’s status quo.

SciFi put up an interesting interview today with Frank Miller, discussing The Spirit and Sin City 2. But here’s what stuck out for me:

“Will Eisner was my mentor, and The Spirit was so awesome a property that I at first thought I was not worthy to do it. And then I couldn’t think of anybody else who was, so I decided that I was the right man for the job.”

Now, I’m not quite sure how I feel about this. Frank Miller does have a reputation for making himself — we’ll say “larger than life” — when it comes to his already considerable skills as a comic book creator. (A debate might be whether his previous works, like The Dark Knight Returns, Daredevil, and Sin City balance against more recent works like All-Star Batman and Robin and The Dark Knight Strikes Again.) But part of me wonders: does this sort of comment belittle Eisner? Is this Miller acting presumptuous, taking the crown of comics’ master craftsman?

I mean, it’s true that Eisner was Miller’s mentor. It was the story of Sand Saref that Miller gleefully stripped “from top to bottom” to create the character of Elektra. But what sets off my Spider-Sense is the fact that this really isn’t Will Eisner’s Spirit. In my mind, based on what I’ve seen (and what I’ve read), this feels more like Frank Miller being Frank Miller, and just using these more-or-less sainted characters to act out his stylized (and one could argue, increasingly one-note) film noir repetoire. In other words: is this Will Eisner’s The Spirit? Or Frank Miller’s?

But one could also argue: as Eisner’s protege, even despite their arguments about how comics should work, could this be a legitimate passing of the torch? Is the Spirit a character that should be redefined by a master in every generation?

I’ll be honest. I don’t know. But I’ll bet you do. Let’s discuss.

Monica Gallagher, writer/artist behind Gods and Undergrads and many other self-published comics, has a webcomic strip that I’m loving.

Bonnie N. Collide is a roller derby girl, and the strip is based on her day-to-day life. And so, enjoy.

Lynn Johnston ended the original run of For Better Or For Worse with a Sunday strip detailing how the Pattersons’ lives went after the strip’s conclusion, but have you ever wondered what would happen in more of your favorite comic strips if their creators decided to show readers what futures the fates have in store for the characters once their strips end? Let’s take a look at some ideas for how some of America’s most popular comic strips should end:

Garfield: After coming home late one night after a date with his girlfriend Liz, Jon Arbuckle is shocked to find his loyal cat Garfield slumped face down in a plate of lasagna, dead of an apparent heart attack. Ironically, it is a Monday.

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For 40 years, Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury has been at the forefront of political and social commentary, often to much praise and controversy (Trudeau won a Pulitzer Prize for the strip in 1975, but has pissed off a lot of people over the years,  including the Roman Catholic Church). In 2004, Trudeau began a groundbreaking storyline that saw longtime character B.D., an Army lieutenant stationed in Iraq, personally face the  tragic consequences of war. That storyline is collected in 2005’s The Long Road Home.

The Long Road Home begins in Fallujah, shortly after B.D.’s Humvee is hit by a RPG (rocket-propelled grenade). B.D. survives, thanks to the quick actions of his unit and their field doctors, but not without losing most of his left leg. From there, the book tracks B.D.’s recovery, from Landstuhl in Germany for surgery; to Walter Reed and Fisher House in Maryland for therapy; and finally, seven months later, to his home in Walden. Throughout the book, Trudeau tells B.D.’s story with warmth, grace, and humor, and gives readers insights into the experiences of a soldier’s life as he comes to terms with a horrific, all too common injury, and tries to rebuild his life in the wake of profound changes.

The foreword to The Long Road Home was written by Senator John McCain, who, in 1995, denounced Trudeau on the floor of the Senate after Trudeau published a strip criticizing Senator Bob Dole for leveraging his war record in his failed presidential campaign against President Clinton. Proceeds from the sale of the book benefit Fisher House, a non-profit organization that provides housing for the families of injured soldiers receiving treatment at military and VA medical facilities.

– Tom Spurgeon interviews James Kochalka.

– The Chicago Tribune talks to the guy who models as Superman for Alex Ross.

– S. Clay Wilson is now out of the ICU.

– Tintin made Herge “sick” according to recently discovered letters.

– I enjoyed this LA Times piece on the legal battles surrounding the Watchmen film.

– Buy a copy of Stan’s Soapbox and get it signed by John Romita Sr.

– If you can read Polish, here’s an interview with Milo Manara where he talks about his X-Men project he’s working on with Chris Claremont.

– Finally, here’s Watchmen, the Condensed Version.