Mark Millar is explaining where his head is at this year:

I prefer the Millarworld books to just be radical from an idea point of view. Nobody’s ever seen a superhero comic like ‘Kick-Ass’ before, and I want the Quitely project and the Dave Gibbons project to each be very unique and very new. People just want something different. You can see it in the charts. I feel creator-owned is where people’s interests are shifting. The vast majority of what I’m picking up comes from Icon and Image and, as we saw with ‘Nemesis’ or ‘Kick-Ass 2′ or whatever, these things can hit the top ten or top twenty, even in the middle of massive events or company-wide relaunches. we did 125,000 copies of ‘Kick-Ass 2′ #1 over five or six printings. The appetite for something new is enormous.

This seems to be the same feeling for 2012 that Image Comics seems to be tying into with their new ad campaign, the idea that this will be the year where readers look for new ideas and new characters. I really hope that’s the case, but in a year when Marvel are going to be pushing Avengers Vs. X-Men and DC likely has a second wave of New 52 in the wings, I have suspicions that old ideas will end up doing just fine…

Discussing the upcoming Supercrooks, Mark Millar gives away the secret to his success:

We’ve got two underground cage fighters, because I love the idea of fight clubs for supervillains. You’ve got this idea of wrestlers with super powers fighting illegally and using their powers against each other. These two brothers are in there. Then, you’ve got the main character’s girlfriend, who is pissed off because she doesn’t want him to be a villain anymore. She’s an ex-supervillain who’s trying to go straight, and he hauls her back in for one last job. Then there’s his best friend who became a real estate guy because he was fed up with the superheroes taking him to prison so often. It’s a bunch of guys who were trying to go straight getting back together for the biggest job of their careers. I love that idea, which we’ve seen in crime heist movies before, but never seen it done with superheroes.

It’s that last line that’s the most important, and the idea of selling people something by going “It’s this thing you’re really familar with… but with superheroes!” Where Millar succeeds in his high concepts, I think, is by presenting things that readers are comfortable with, with one major change – normally one that is also very comfortable for readers (Civil War is “It’s post 9/11 America – with superheroes!”, Nemesis is “It’s Batman – as a bad guy!”, Kick-Ass is “It’s superheroes – but they’re fanboys!” and so on), something I hadn’t really realized until he explained Supercrooks as this movie we’ve seen countless times before, and then added “with superheroes!” at the end. It’s kind of genius, in a way, and I look forward to seeing if I have similar success with my own pitches to Hollywood, which will include “It’s a romantic comedy starring Katherine Heigl – but she’s a superheroic ghost!”, “Have you ever seen Drive? Well, this is just like that, but the car can talk like in Knight Rider,” and “Think Star Wars, but it all takes place on Earth and in feudal Japan.”

Well, this is just plain lovely. Chris Ryall previews Darwyn Cooke’s next Parker book for IDW:

To anyone who loves comics and hasn’t picked up Cooke’s two Parker adaptations to date, The Hunter and The Outfit, you are missing out far more than you could imagine. Just amazing stuff.

For followers of comic history, the Comics Journal website is reprinting a Gary Groth interview with Kevin Eastman where he talks about Tundra, his well-intentioned-but-ultimately-doomed publisher from the early 1990s, and it is a must-read, if only to see just how the best intentions can end up going so horribly, horribly wrong:

I believed I was armor-plated and unstoppable. I thought I would have all the resources I needed with some of the finest work from some of what I thought were some of the best creators in the field, and that this would be the “comics company” that would break down some of those barriers. By the time I arrived at the cold “reality” of my “fantasy,” I’m killing myself for something that’s never going to work: it’s too late! This whole time, as long as I’m physically awake, I’m working. Either related to Mirage or related to Tundra: In a bed that I made myself, for sure… I really thought that Tundra would be something. But it was ludicrous. I thought I would spend a year forming this brilliant company that would break all the rules. I’d bring all these talented people in and then expect them to climb inside my head, read my mind, and try to make these impossible things happen. At the same time I’m a poor leader crippling them.

It’s fascinating, occasionally breathtakingly ludicrous, stuff. A must read.

Warren Ellis considers what will happen to comics in 2012:

This year should be the year where a wide swathe of established comics creators go “digital-first” with a broad variety of projects.  However, that should also have been last year.  Which leads me to wonder whether or not there’s really a taste for it among the creative community.  (Aside from me: but I’m not certain I’d have the time or access to the artists that’d really make it work for me.)  So I’m going to go ahead and say this isn’t going to happen this year, and won’t until it’s really too late – and just hope I’m completely wrong about this one.

This year, at least three groups will offer indie comics creators a “roll-your-own” digital service allowing them to ready and upload their own comics into storefront apps.  It will be absolute chaos, and will create the sort of curational crisis you see when you browse for Kindle books by genre.

A corollary to the above, though: I expect to see more new comics creators bypassing the standard model of comics publishing entirely this year, and going straight to book publishing houses and crowdfunded self-publication and direct-to-digital using one of the services mentioned above.

On that last point, I think we’ve already seen the start of that with creators like Bryan Lee O’Malley, Hope Larson and Craig Thompson go to “mainstream” publishers with their latest projects, and creators like Tony Harris and Camilla d’Errico using Kickstarter (not to mention Womanthology)… But I worry that Ellis is right about his first two suggestions, depressingly.

Colorist extraordinaire Matt Wilson explains how he approached a scene from Wonder Woman #4 in order to clarify what was happening:

The first [challenge] is that we have our group of characters split up, and in different parts of the club, and I knew that I could use color help the reader understand which part of the bar each character occupied. There are also quite a few panels with a lot of people drawn in them, and if I were to do my job poorly the art could flatten out and become hard to read. I had to make sure that I did a good job of separating planes (foreground, middleground, background) to properly show the depth of space in the club. In this case coloring different areas of the club with different color schemes solved both problems. These different colored “pools” of light include the blue-green seating area, the yellow bar area, the red stage area, and the crowd being a transition between red (stage) and blue-green (seating area) ending up a pink-ish/purple.

To further explain, he creates a simplified take on certain pages, as well as offering the finished colors:

It’s a really nice look into the thought that goes into coloring, as well as how important it is to the final page – Look at how differently the two versions of the same page above read on first glance.

Mark Millar is lowering expectations for his plans in 2012, as he normally does:

It’s me, DAVE GIBBONS, FRANK QUITELY, STEVE McNIVEN, JOHN ROMITA JR and LEINIL YU… six little tykes with a plan for a comic book revolution not seen since… well, six little tykes set up Image exactly 20 years before. I can’t even BEGIN to describe you the stuff you’re about to hear over the next two weeks.

Between the mention of the creation of Image Comics and the “The Big Two Just Became The Big Three” advertising slogan he’s adopted for Millarworld this year, I keep finding myself wondering whether or not Millar’s planning to switch up existing plans and launch MW as an actual publisher this time around. I tend to doubt it – At least three of his upcoming projects already have publishers announced, right? – but it’s not impossible; with Millar no longer writing for Marvel, I’ll be interested to see how long Nemesis and Kick-Ass remain Marvel Icon titles, after all. Perhaps Titan will extend the Clint publishing agreement to a wider Millarworld line…?

Elsewhere in the same thread, Millar teases his project with Quitely a little bit more:

This stuff is on a whole new level. Seriously. The Quitely project in particular has potential to be as big as Civil War, but still creator-owned superhero. Nobody’s ever done anything like this before.

Typical Millar hyperbole or hint at something people should get excited for? We can decide for ourselves soon; the reveals are due to start coming at the end of this week.

While Bryan Hitch’s high-profile departure from Marvel has been grabbing headlines lately, he’s not the only artist whose exclusive contract with a publisher has just ended, as Jamal Igle has announced that he’s no longer a DC Comics exclusive creator:

Frankly, this has been a long time coming,While I was very happy for many years to be exclusive, There comes a time when you’re ready to move on. There’s no animosity, in fact just the opposite. I’ve never been calmer or more centered than I have since I made this decision. I was forced to turn down a lot of outside opportunities while I was exclusive because I was so busy that I couldn’t take them on or contractually unable to do them.

So what does this mean?

Well, for one I already have a some comics work coming up, which will be announced soon, as well as securing other work in and out of the industry. I’m also available for work as well. I’ll be taking private commissions and developing some projects and pitching some of the creator owned concepts I’ve been working on over the last few years.

He adds that this doesn’t mean he’ll never work for DC again, although he adds that he’s not been offered anything beyond the end of the current Ray series. Weirdly enough, I was just wondering why we’ve not seen any Igle work at Marvel recently… Perhaps it was some strange premonition; I can see him paring well with Mark Bagley on an Avengers book or something.

Talking of Robot 6, the blog also premieres Image Comics’ ad campaign for 2012, emphasizing creativity over intellectual property:

According to Eric Stephenson,

We’re doing one of these a week over the course of the year, each focusing on a different creator, and there will be some video components to the campaign as well.The message is pretty simple: Our business thrives on creativity.

Everyone else throws their weight behind characters, behind IP. We put ours behind the people create those characters and develop that IP. The men and women who write and draw comics are Image’s–and this industry’s–most valuable resource. It takes a certain amount of bravery to create something of your own and share it with the world. We support those people, and we salute them.

Considering some recent commentary by Stephenson, this definitely seems to be the Image branding for the year: Creation versus Maintaining Intellectual Property. It’s a bold, and smart, idea that definitely sets Image apart from Marvel and DC, even if it fudges some truths (Vertigo may not be creator owned, but with the exception of Hellblazer, all the series there are younger and more “newly created” than, say Spawn or Savage Dragon. And isn’t the revival of the Extreme line the kind of intellectual property development/renewal that this campaign is quietly condemning?), and I hope it pays off for them; anything that pushes the importance of new ideas and new stories is always a good thing.

Tom Brevoort has started a Tumblr filled with all sorts of ephemera and artwork from early Marvel Comics, including these amazing pencils from John Buscema for an Avengers pin-up spread. For those who’ve wanted to see original art, the hidden Spider-Man logo or just lots and lots of great stuff, it’s a must-read and something akin to a public service. Now, who can we get to do a similar one for DC…?

This, from Moritat’s interview at CBR, is just plain great:

The idea of comic books [as a medium], as we know it, is escapism. The stereotype is a child reading it hidden between his or her textbook. All over the world a common sight is a commuter train and an unexpected double take as you notice a nun, or sumo wrestler, reading a comic book.

More common now, is a shell of a human being with a tablet or device playing a video game. If you observe the focus, the concentration, is on the urgency of the laser sight lining up with the zombie’s head or the timer ticking down in the race for collection of gold coins. This is counter to escapism. It is regulating the brain to more calculations. With a comic book your brain is taking time off from left hemisphere of the noggin.

With comics, you are participating with Asterix and Obelix as they set off on a journey through rolling art scape of Uderzo’s countryside. You are breathing the foul vapors of Apokolips as Desaad wanders the halls seeking his master. You are not initiated by digital sounds and perfect visual mimicry of a F1 cockpit when starting a journey with a Tezuka character in a convertible sports car, but rather a sense of a tingle and twinge in the spine of what happens next when you turn the page.

To settle the matter by third party meditation: How many good comic book movies are there and how many good video game movies are there?

Okay, so maybe we shouldn’t consider movie adaptations as a good arbiter of quality, but… Man, you can tell that Moritat believes in comic books, can’t you? I love the passion in the above quote so much.

Over on his Deviant Art blog, Sean Murphy – One of Newsarama’s 10 Creators to Watch for the past two years – considers the five different “levels” of a comic book artist’s career:

LEVEL 2
While not as well paid or popular as Level 1 artists, these artists are consistently fed with work throughout the year (many of them are under contract) and manage to carve out a comfortable salary (assuming they can stay away from drug addiction or bad financial planning).  Most of the books they work on are mainstream Marvel/DC staples that most people are aware of.  But you can also find a few of these guys on large Dark Horse and creator owned Image books.  I think that there are a few “artist’s artists” in this category whose cult following has brought them very high up, but their distinct style of drawing often excludes them from larger “event” books.  Some Level 2 artists are happy to stay at this level because they have no interest in being a marquee player.  Some were marquee players but decided to drop down to Level 2 in exchange for more control over their careers.

I’m not quite convinced by his breakdown of the different levels – I feel as if there’s a missing level between levels 2 and 3 – but it’s a fascinating look at how a professional sees his field, and the different ways he believes an artist can progress.

Peter David considers the subtext of the Fantastic Four:

The leader of the Fantastic Four is “Mr. Fantastic.” Why, we wonder, does he hang this fairly immodest name upon himself? Well, when one says that a man is “fantastic,” the nature of what we are referring to is fairly obvious. It’s sexual performance. And just how fantastic is Mr. Fantastic? Again, it’s fairly obvious. He can stretch at will, enlarge bodily portions however he wishes. Truly his is a case where size doesn’t matter, because his size can accommodate whatever lustful tastes women might have.

And who is his best friend?

“The Thing.”

The Thing, as in, “Baby, gimme that thing. Baby, you got the thing I want. Lemme have some of that love thing. What is that thing? You call that a thing? I got your thing right here.” And other lustful, smutty phrases that one would hear coming from the lips of today’s hideous youth.

Yes, it should be no surprise that Mr. Fantastic’s best friend is a big hard Thing. Isn’t that always the case with any man who fancies himself a “Mr. Fantastic.

No, he’s not serious. But now I can’t help but think about this accidental subtext when it comes to these characters (David goes on to point out that, of course, Sue Storm is invisible in this team, and in the comments following the post, someone points out that Johnny Storm’s “flame on” clearly refers to his closeted homosexual side). Oh, Stan and Jack, did you know what you were creating…?!?

Jim Shooter is thinking about sex in comics:

Think about good (or at least well-crafted) movies you’ve seen. Raiders of the Lost Ark, for instance. Every time Spielberg and Lucas show you anything, it is relevant to the story. Think about what they show you. Indy has a fear of snakes, demonstrated in an early scene. Later, trying to retrieve the Ark, he is surrounded by…snakes! Also, think about what they don’t show you. Maybe Indy is an expert ballroom dancer, but it’s irrelevant so they do not establish it. There is not a drop of fat on that film. Everything shown serves a purpose relevant to the story at hand. Same with Rocky. Or The Wizard of Oz.  Or any story written by a skilled professional.

If it’s not necessary, leave it out.

In Body Heat the sex was absolutely germane. So it was there, and done with steamy effectiveness. In Cat People sex is the core of the conceit.

In comics…? I’m trying to think of good examples. Hmm. Jaime Hernandez did some sweet, elegant, usually brief, intrinsic sex scenes in early issues of Love and Rockets. David Lapham did some well-crafted, germane sex scenes in Stray Bullets. I’ve been told that Bill Willingham’s Fables had some good and necessary ones. In Elfquest, Wendy and Richard Pini did some nice scenes. Others? Help me.

He goes on to say that, in comics, “characters are twisted to serve the whims, puerile fantasies and personal proclivities of the creators,” with illustrations of Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne’s sex scene from Geoff Johns’ Avengers run and the infamous Norman Osborn/Gwen Stacy sex scene from “Sins Past” in Amazing Spider-Man, amongst others. Coming from the man who wrote the unsettling Ken/Duck relationship into Star Brand – There was so much wrongness going on there, and yes, I have now referenced something that the majority of you have probably never even heard of, sorry – this rant is either the product of rethinking earlier attitudes or a great lack of self-awareness.

This is the jaw-dropping cover to Daredevil #10, by Paolo Rivera:

And this is a time-lapse video of Rivera creating said cover. Just amazing to see:

(Via The Comic Archive)
 

Kieron Gillen has a cold, and is spending his pre-Christmas cheer on Formspring, answering questions and offering up great advice for aspiring writers:

Try reverse engineering a comic. Probably a story you like, but any story would do. As in, look at the comic, then write the script for it. It’s interesting anyway, but it’ll force you to focus on the craft on the page. You should be reserve analysing every comic you read anyway. Panel counts, transition types, devices used, whatever. Learning to write comics ruins reading comics for a while, in as much as learning an instrument warps your listening to music (i.e. I could only hear basslines when I was learning bass, etc).

(A) Get well soon, Kieron. (B) Keep up the Formspring if you’re going to be offering this kind of awesomeness on it (I’ve been listening to the Nerdist Writers Panel podcast for awhile, and wishing there was a comics equivalent, and this post really felt like the kind of thing you’d hear there, in both content and attitude).

For those particularly concerned about what the Sinister Six got up to in this week’s Amazing Spider-Man, writer Dan Slott has some calming words for you. (Spoilers for those clicking through). (more…)

I mean, you look at Marvel, or at what’s happening with DC’s New 52 – it’s an anomaly for someone to stay on anything for very long. It’s like, they launch Wolverine and The X-Men with Chris Bachalo and then it’s Nick Bradshaw for a couple issues. Carlos Pacheco does a few issues of Uncanny X-Men and then it’s Greg Land. Who knows who will be doing those books this time next year? I don’t know if it’s done by design, but it has effectively devalued artists to the point that they’re more or less interchangeable.

I re-read Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men recently, and it was kind of depressing. He starts off so strong with Frank Quitely and they have this great thing going, and then it just turns into musical chairs. Regardless of the talent involved – and I really admire some of the other artists on those comics – I ultimately felt it undermined what Grant was doing. You look at wonderful, classic pieces of work like the Dark Phoenix Saga or what Frank Miller and Klaus Janson did on Daredevil – Alan Moore’s work with Dave Gibbons on Watchmen or with Rick Veitch, Steve Bisssette and John Totleben on Swamp Thing or the Lee/Kirby FF books – they’re not pock-mocked by rotating artists.

And everything over there is like that now. Comic book artists in particular are treated more as commercial artists than storytellers. They might as well be doing greeting cards for all the impact they’re allowed to have these days.

That’s Eric Stephenson, talking about the treatment of creators on Marvel and DC books these days. The line at the end about “artists in particular are treated more as commercial artists than storytellers” strikes me as particularly important, but I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it, to be honest. I’m torn because, well, as much as I agree that creators are storytellers, there’s also part of me that thinks “Well, they are commercial artists if they’re doing work-for-hire, aren’t they?” I understand that work-for-hire doesn’t mean that the quality of work is any lesser than creator-owned, but what I don’t quite get – or, perhaps, just can’t quite verbalize, because there’s a nagging buzz in the back of my head when I think about this – is that the idea of “storytellers vs. commercial artists” is somehow an either-or proposition. Perhaps the disconnect for me is in thinking about it from the artists’ perspective, and Stephenson is talking about from an editorial perspective? As in, “artists aren’t interchangible pieces in a machine if you’re looking for a consistent product”…? I don’t know, just yet, but there’s something there, in that line, that speaks to an expectation in the minds of editors, creators and fans that I suspect will become more of a pressing issue over the next year or so.

If you’re a budding comic creator – or just as in love with podcasts as I am – then you might want to give a listen to the new Making Comics podcast hosted by iFanboy’s Josh Flanagan and Comics Experience‘s Andy Schmidt (who’s also a former Marvel and IDW editor). As Josh explains,

We’ll be talking about many aspects of the art and industry, lending all the experience and knowledge we (mostly him) can come up with. Whether you’re a writer, artist, writer/artist, colorist, or just someone who appreciates the craft, we hope there will be something for you, and if your dream is to make comics, that you find yourself one step closer to it.

The first episode, on writing comics, is already available, with new episodes due weekly.

The first issue is a double-sized, 44 pages of Fiona goodness for our regular ongoing price of just $2.99. I think people are going to love it so much they’ll want to forever tarnish their flesh with bad tattoos of our characters, but in the off-chance the book’s not for you, I’ll happily buy our first issue back from you (my address is included in what promises to be a trainwreck of a letter column).

That’s Brian K. Vaughan, talking about his new Image series, Saga, which launches March next year. I’ve really been looking forward to this since it was first announced – I’m a big BKV fan, with the exception of some of his Marvel work (Sorry, Ultimate X-Men, it’s probably me, not you) – but there’s something so charmingly old-fashioned about when a creator offers to buy issues back on their creator-owned books that would’ve won me over no matter what. Of course, judging by the Fiona Staples art from the book that’s been released, people might end up buying it for the visuals even in the unlikely possibility that they hate all the words.

It makes me wonder, though; Ed Brubaker offered to buy back issues of Criminal early in that book’s existence, didn’t he? What other creators have done the money back guarantee thing to promote their work?