This mock ad (described as “but a daydream wish”), from Marvel Comics The Untold Story author Sean Howe, seemed appropriate given earlier thoughts today:

Always worth linking: You can find the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund here, and the Hero Initiative here.

Heidi Macdonald traces the origins of graphic novels as a force in U.S. library lending:

The audience of children and teens is growing, critical and academic recognition has confirmed comics’ literary and artistic value, and a new shelf of modern classics has arrived. The use of comics is on the rise in educational circles as well: a recent survey by test-prep publisher Kaplan showed a third of ESL teachers use comics to help teach English, and the call for unorthodox learning materials in the new Common Core standards could result in even more attention for the growing field of nonfiction comics… According to librarians surveyed for this article, graphic novels are among the most circulated categories, right up there with teen paranormal romance and DVDs.

Reed Tucker has a plan to save the comic book industry, it seems:

The big-two publishers at this point should take a hard, honest look at themselves in the mirror and realize what they are: caretakers of trademarked characters owned by big corporations. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. These characters have long histories and massive name recognition around the world, and there are plenty of creative types out there who’d cut off their penciling hand to work on them. That’s the one major advantage DC and Marvel have over the other publishing houses, besides upfront money to talent.

There’s no point in the publishing giants wasting time and energy trying to launch new characters and new-concept series at this point only to cancel them in six months. (Vibe, anyone?) That part of the market is now better served by Image and other boutique publishers. And what writer or artist, in the age of the creators’ rights movement, wants to hand over a new character or concept that he won’t own?

In total, his suggestions (which are all for Marvel and DC) are:

1. Publish less comics
2. Cut all comics to $1.99 in price
3. Focus on individual titles, not crossovers
4. Don’t create new characters, but stick to established properties

While none of these – with, perhaps, the exception of the last one – are bad ideas, per se (Really, is anyone really convinced that the DCU line has to have 52 titles in it?), I remain unconvinced that any of them are necessarily realistic in today’s market, never mind likely to save the industry…

So, yesterday afternoon, I posted this on Twitter:

400+ retweets – and responses that ranged from “Does Kirby’s estate see any of that money?” to “Jack Kirby must be a rich man!” – later, I thought it might be a good idea to put a little more meat on those bones.

As I said in the tweet, the figure comes from the first issue of TwoMorrows’ new magazine, Comic Book Creator. Specifically, it comes from an article called “If Kirby is King, Why Haven’t Jack’s Heirs Made One Measely Thin Dime Out of The Billions of Dollars Generated by His Creations in Hollywood Motion Pictures?”

The $7,310,655,909 figure mentioned is the combined worldwide box office and subsequent U.S. DVD sales for X-Men, X2: X-Men United, X-Men: The Last Stand, X-Men Origins Wolverine, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Fantastic Four, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Hulk, The Incredible Hulk, Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger and Marvel’s The Avengers up to Feb 27 this year.

It’s actually low-balling the actual amount made by those movies; the DVD figures – $753,342,333 – are (a) missing any movie released on DVD before 2005 (i.e, the first two X-Men, the first Hulk), (b) not including Blu-Ray sales, and (c) are only domestic sales, meaning there’s a lot more out there… especially when you consider just how well Iron Man 3 is doing in theaters right now.

The Comic Book Creator piece by Jon B. Cooke notes that “The Marvel/Disney empire is raking in billions of dollars from the fruit of his imagination and they aren’t leaving scraps for his children and grandchildren; what they are sharing with progeny Susan, Neal, Barbara and Lisa, and their children is nothing. Zip. Zero. Zilch.” That may not be exactly true; Ed Brubaker certainly said otherwise in an interview with Tom Spurgeon last year:

At the same time, I’ve always felt good about the fact that the credits for Captain America say, “created by Simon and Kirby” and that Marvel had settled with Simon and Kirby — not Kirby himself, but Kirby’s heirs — over Cap. So they are getting something from the Avengers movie, because of that.

Certainly, the lawsuit between Joe Simon and Marvel over ownership of Cap was “amicably settled” in 2003, although details of that settlement remained confidential. It’s possible that Kirby’s estate was involved in that settlement, but by no means definite; Brubaker would be more in the know about the subject than the majority of us, and Captain America wasn’t one of the characters mentioned in the 2010 lawsuit the estate brought against Marvel (A lawsuit that Marvel won, of course). So perhaps Kirby’s heirs aren’t getting zilch, but “a little bit more than zilch.” It’s still not really enough, though, is it?

In the last two decades – Really, little more than a decade – Marvel and its partners have generated more than seven billion dollars from Kirby’s co-creations from movies alone, never mind merchandise or publishing sales. Elsewhere in the Comic Book Creator issue (I know, I know, I keep mentioning it; You should buy it. It’s well-worth reading), Alex Ross puts it best, I think:

Well, I kind of feel like we know the great sin of how the Superman deal went is one of the biggest, most well-known stories in comics, given that that built the entire industry. But given that Jack Kirby himself almost built that entire other half of the industry by his own blood and sweat through countless books over a 50-year career, it’s got to go down as really the greatest sin of comics that in a way he didn’t both receive the amount of remuneration in his lifetime that he deserved, and that there isn’t a permanent structure set up for his family today.

The great Judge Minty fan film – inspired by 2000AD‘s long-running Judge Dredd strip, unsurprisingly – is now online in its entirety, and it’s well worth watching:

You can find out more about the movie here, but it’s worth pointing out that not only was the movie made with the permission of 2000AD owners Rebellion, but it was also co-written by Michael Carroll, who’s one of the team of Dredd writers on the weekly strip these days. Which is to say, this is a pretty authentic “fan film,” all told.

When I was reading the new Bite Me collection from Dylan Meconis the other week, I thought to myself Someone should hire Dylan to write something, she’s just ridiculously talented as a writer. Lo and behold, someone had already had that same idea: She’s just been announced as a staff writer for Scott Kurtz’ PVP:

I’m really excited to be working with Scott on PvP. I’ve been an avid reader for years, but when Cory [Casoni, PVP brand manager and director of business development] and Scott invited me to fill in, I was surprised by how natural it felt to step into the world of the strip. Being asked to continue as a regular contributor is a delight, not least of all because I might get to talk Scott into drawing things I’ve always wanted to see, like Brent riding a llama. Writing for a beloved daily strip like PvP is a big departure from my previous projects. I’m used to toiling over long stories without the benefit of a collaborator, much less one with the talent and experience of a Scott Kurtz. I can’t wait to see the results.

The current storyline is already benefiting from her touch; as the webcomic celebrates its fifteenth anniversary, Kurtz says that “In just a couple of writing sessions, Dylan and I have laid down the broad strokes for some exciting changes in the PvP comic strip. This is only the beginning of what’s to come. We have big plans, a lot is going to change, and the future of PvP is bright!”

Jonathan Hickman talks Avengers, New Avengers and Infinity:

We haven’t really clued people into what the point of ‘Avengers’ is. I suppose you could make an argument that we we’ve done a 12-issue prelude to the stuff that’s going to happen… Maybe I shouldn’t have done it that way, but I’m happy with the work. I think we’ve turned in a lot of cool issues and done some neat stuff, but probably the velocity and ‘mission statement’ will ramp up very soon. I think when people see ‘Infinity,’ understand what it is, where we’re going from there, people will understand why we took all this time to do these little seemingly disconnected and open-ended stories.

There’s something to be said for runs where everything isn’t immediately locked into place, I think; when I think back to my favorite runs of superhero books – Morrison’s Doom Patrol and Justice League, Duffy’s Power Man and Iron Fist, Englehart and Staton’s Green Lantern/Green Lantern Corps – none of them came in with an immediately obvious mission statement, but instead drifted into themselves more slowly, more organically. I seem to remember Kieron Gillen made a similar comment about his Iron Man run having a similarly staggered beginning for some reason; is it wrong that I find this charming, instead of offputting?

Tom Spurgeon’s write-up of his Portland trip and the Stumptown Comics Fest is so very, very worth your time to sit down and read:

I think Portland gets a lot of its deserved praise by being an awesome place for comics people to live. Things like the effectiveness of its public transit or the way that older people have a functioning role in the city’s culture are as important as any single group, person or institution that has a direct, trackable relationship with a longbox. As a result, the community of comics-people kind of organically arises from the general artistic community, and the benefits of the specific grouping of comics-makers, fans and thinkers-about become a bonus to the benefits of just living in one of the great places to settle down. You read about comics people interacting in Portland and it’s always somehow less dramatic than the interactions you read about in other places. No one is holding onto each other for dear life in Portland. They have things to do. Stories from other North American cities involve intense encounters and astonishing leaps in artistic development; stories about paths crossing in Portland are frequently of the “Wow, you can’t go to dinner without seeing another comics person somewhere in the damn restaurant” variety. I think this flatters a lot of what’s individualistic and independent about many comics-makers, and also acts as a crucial hedge against the frequent desire to wrap yourself in a comics blanket so tightly you can’t breathe.

So much more in the link; Spurgeon is a wonderfully honest and evocative writer in this, managing to get across his experience of the show in a way that feels appropriate and balanced, and definitely not forced.

If you’re wondering what effects Wolverine’s actions in the past at the end of Age of Ultron #6 may have had on the Marvel Universe, Brian Michael Bendis has an internal Marvel document for you that might just blow your mind – A list of stories and events that would/might have gone very differently without Hank Pym around:

A – No Vision1 – No marriage to Scarlet Witch/Immortus plan to prevent her from breeding possibly derailed

2 – No birth of children (Speed & Wiccan of Young Avengers)

3      – No undoing of their children, which Immortus engineered in part to ensure Scarlet Witch’s mental instability and thus pliability

a – Mephisto and Master Pandemonium affected

4      – No Leonia, NJ-based events (Vision and Scarlet Witch maxi-series)

a – No opportunity for Crystal to meet and have affair with Norman Webster

1 – No divorce from Quicksilver

5      – No defeating Salem’s Seven

a – they conquer the witch town of New Salem, and we have an entire town of evil black mages working against humanity

6      – Does not form West Coast Avengers

7      – No Scarlet Witch insanity

a – No Disassembled deaths of Ant-Man/Lang, Jack of Hearts, Vision destruction

b – No M/M-Day/Decimation

1-     Hundreds of X-Men/mutant stories undone

8      – Grim Reaper’s Lethal Legion potentially defeat and slay Avengers (Captain America, Black Panther, Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch)

1-       Thousands of ripple effects from those deaths

2-     Grim Reaper won’t later feel the need to revive his “dead” brother Wonder Man as a zombie, which means Wonder Man presumably remains dormant

9 – Vision not present as one of the Dead Avengers who save the living Avengers during the Chaos War.

There’s a lot more. As Bendis himself says, “get ready to get dizzy.”

CBR’s Brett White ponders what this past weekend’s Stumptown Comicsfest taught him:

Comics really aren’t just about superheroes, and there is plenty of joy to be found outside of the narrow scope of the Big Two. Yes, I knew this already. And yes, I read plenty of non-superhero comics on a monthly basis. But being in the midst of a town and a convention that so thoroughly celebrates independent publishing with as much fanfare as C2E2 celebrated the fights and tights genre made me really take notice… It’s not a stretch to say that in the recent past I only viewed creator-owned work as a stepping stone to getting into the major leagues and being handed the X-Men’s reins (and yes, I’d make the team nothing but ’90s X-Force and Maggott, so what?). Thanks to Stumptown, I now have a better understanding of the joy that creating original work can bring. I now see that there is a community ready to try new things and read comics based on how good they are and not based on whether or not they’re part of a larger franchise.

It really should be said: One of the greatest things about Stumptown is that it’s really about comics as a medium, as opposed to specific genres, companies or the like. It’s all about the creators and the comics, no matter who or what they are. Far more shows could stand to learn a little of the Stumptown thing.

The winner of the bookstore market in April is unsurprisingly clear from this chart of the Top 20 graphic novels: It’s obviously The Walking Dead, which takes nine of the twenty slots (with three different volume ones, interestingly enough; the hardcover, the omnibus and the compendium), as has pretty much been the case for some time now. But there’s something worth paying attention to happening at the bottom of the Top 20.

Matt Fraction and David Aja’s Hawkeye Vol. 1: My Life As A Weapon is at #15. That, in itself, is a big deal, because Marvel collected editions tend to fare pretty terribly in the bookstore market (No Marvel superhero book charted at all in December 2012, nor January or February 2013, for example; Avengers Vs. X-Men charted in November 2012, and then you have to go all the way back to May 2012 to find another Marvel U title, when Infinity Gauntlet reached #19 as a result of the Avengers movie), but it’s an even bigger deal when you realize that it’s the book’s second month in the Top 20; it actually debuted in March, at #9.

Two months in the bookstore market Top 20 is very unusual for a superhero book, which tend to peak in their month of release and drift off never to be heard of again… Has the buzz around Hawkeye gone outside of the comic industry, perhaps (If so, deservedly; it’s a really good book)? And if it has – and if Marvel keep it in print – could Hawkeye turn into Marvel’s first perennial seller in the bookstore market?

Next year’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier adds Steve Rogers’ long-time partner The Falcon to the mix, as played by Anthony Mackie. On-set photos of Mackie in uniform surfaced today courtesy of Lainey Gossip via WENN, showing a much more basic military look for Sam Wilson than his usual superhero attire. While it seems unlikely that we’ll see Falcon in the full red-and-white feathered attire in the movie, it’s also distinctly possible that what he’s sporting in the pictures here isn’t necessarily his “final” look. Though it could be. Hey, it’s still early!

A fuller look at Mackie, who co-stars in current Michael Bay release Pain & Gain, follows after the jump. Captain America: The Winter Soldier, directed by sitcom vets Joe and Anthony Russo and starring Chris Evans as Captain America and Sebastian Stan as The Winter Soldier, is scheduled for release on April 4, 2014.

Read the rest of this entry »

Iron Man 3 has been getting all the Marvel movie attention lately, but Fox’s The Wolverine is less than three months away, with a release date of July 26. On Wednesday, a minute-long sizzle reel of footage (some new, some seen in previous trailers) surfaced online, first seen at last month’s CinemaCon. Here it is:

And in further Hugh Jackman-as-Wolverine news, X-Men: Days of Future Past director Bryan Singer tweeted a picture of Jackman in character — his back, at least — on the set of the 2014 film, great news for fans of Logan in brown leather jackets.

Ridiculously good news from Paul Cornell, via a Suicide Girls interview by Alex Dueben:

We haven’t signed contracts yet but I have every reason to believe we will be starting season two [of Saucer Country] in comic form next year. In February, even. We’ve been talking to some lovely people about this and I think Saucer Country readers have a huge reason to be hopeful. I’m very much thankful to them for that. The sudden cancellation meant that I had to wrap things up really quickly, far too quickly to actually wrap the whole comic up. I thought about all the different plot threads I had to answer questions for and Ryan had already started drawing the first issue of the last three issue arc. That was just going to be a regular arc so the only way I could have finished the whole thing in two issues would have been in a lecture hall with a series of diagrams and charts going so that meant that and this meant this.

Cornell’s Saucer Country – co-created by, and with great art from, Ryan Kelly – was a particular favorite of mine all the way up to its recent cancellation at Vertigo. A UFO conspiracy thriller that’s as much political drama as it is X-Files-esque paranoiafest, it was intelligent and self-aware and horrifically overlooked by an audience that had no idea what it was missing. Hopefully, when it returns, more people will jump onboard.

I smiled, I admit, when I saw this on Twitter from former Comics Alliance editor Caleb Goellner:

Here’s the thing: Task Force Rad Squad, a comic that pretty much does for Power Rangers what Jeffrey Brown’s Incredible Change-Bots does for Transformers, is kind of amazing. I’ve maybe seen two episodes of Power Rangers at most – and the majority of that time was likely spent going “What is this? What is this?” over and over again – so it’s not even as if I’m the target audience, but nonetheless, the skew-wiff charm and humor of the thing works even if you end up thinking of it as a messed-up Forever People reboot meets Voltron, as I did. It’s just weirdly, overwhelmingly awesome.

Caleb writes TFRS, with Buster Moody and Ryan Hill providing art; he also writes and draws the even-more surreal (and just as enjoyable) Mermaid Evolution. As sad as Comics Alliance’s closure is, if it means he’ll have more time to create comics as a result, it’s one good thing to come out of the whole sordid affair.

Task Force Rad Squad is available for download online on a pay-what-you-want system. You really, really should go download it already.

Along with Padraig O Mealoid’s Poisoned Chalice series about the history of Marvelman at the Beat, one of my favorite long-running series of critical re-appraisals running on the comics internet currently is Colin Smith’s Shameless, a look at the career of Mark Millar that’s been quietly running at Sequart for the last couple of months. Smith, a smart and fair writer, clearly has a lot of affection for Millar’s work but not so much that it clouds his judgment of it, as can be seen in his look back at (The) Saviour, Millar’s first published series:

Yet to list the fundamental problems with Millar’s writing for The Saviour does help establish just how limited his skills initially were. The plot was overloaded and events were often apparently added simply because they seemed interesting. As the narrative sprawled out to include a rebellion in Apartheid South Africa and a first appearance of American superpeople, existing characters and threads would suffer for development. With no effective opposition to The Saviour, the book lacked drama and variety. Characters would go unidentified, or even possess confusingly similar names and identities. Flashbacks wouldn’t be identified as such, with Millar seemingly desperate to avoid using captions. Establishing shots and the clear identification of locations were often missing too. Adolescent humor could undermine satire and all-too-frequent gross-outs subvert a sense of accumulating horror. The attempt to portray the life of an underclass of gangsters, con-men, prostitutes and poverty-stricken victims floundered on what seems to have been a complete unfamiliarity with any such characters or situations.

In the midst of this consistent underdevelopment, only Millar’s invention and energy matched with the story-driving skills of artists Vallely and Kitching maintained a sense of purpose and forward momentum. Though the final two chapters of the run saw Millar producing scripts which were far more streamlined and effective, the impression left by the series as a whole is one of promise largely untempered by know-how and experience.

I remember eagerly reading Saviour when it came out – In large part because of Daniel Valley’s artwork for the first issue and a hope that he’d return for later issues (He didn’t; he did go on to illustrate Grant Morrison’s sadly-forgotten Bible John, which I always hope will return to print some day) – and definitely remember that the feeling of foreboding and building tension was completely undermined by the shock reveal of the “final” issue (It wasn’t supposed to be the final issue, but the book just stopped coming out soon afterwards; the perils of working with an indie publisher).

I’ve always felt that a lot of what was in Saviour‘s DNA has been recycled into later material for Millar. Most obviously, Chosen (AKA American Jesus), but also the short-lived 2000AD strip Canon Fodder. In a strange way, I’d love to see Saviour come back in some form or another, even just as a trip down memory lane… Time to hit the back issue bins, clearly.

One of the casualties of the sudden closure of Comics Alliance has made its way online – Dylan Todd and Ziah Grace taking a look at the first year of the new Valiant Entertainment:

Yeah, there’s a lot I like about Valiant. They tend to have solid creators working on their books and, for the most part, they tell stories that are at least competent, and, in the case of Archer & Armstrong and Bloodshot, are often fantastic. I like that almost all of their books manage to take the superhero concept and blend it with another genre; horror for Shadowman, sci-fi for X-O, action for Bloodshot, historical conspiracy for Archer & Armstrong. Their books are well-designed and the fact that they seem to be organically expanding their line is admirable.

There are some rough spots, though: the coloring across the board is kind of boring, and the “just get it out the door” mentality to the art is often problematic, making the art fairly interchangeable, house-style stuff which I feel diminishes the role of a penciler from a collaborator to just a cog in realizing the writer or editor’s vision. These problems that I feel are present across the industry, though. Also: Harbinger. I can’t overstate how disappointed I am with that book.

Lots, lots more in the piece, which is well worth reading. So go do that.

Zack Smith of this very parish creates the first funny “Angry Hitler” video in some time in response to yesterday’s news about the closure of Comics Alliance (Warning: NSFW language in the subtitles).

Of particular amusement to me: The DC/AOL joke. That people were seriously suggesting that could’ve been a thing yesterday blew my mind.

Lost amongst the various C2E2 announcements this weekend was this IDW series announced at Stumptown:

That’ll be Judge Dredd: Mega City 2 – City of Courts by noted comic book critic, creator of the spectacular Dredd Reckoning blog and all-around wonderful human being Douglas Wolk and the amazing Ulises Farinas, then.

Firstly, look at that cover; that just looks so good. Secondly, as a Dredd fan for some time, I’m surprised that it’s taken so long for someone to really take a look at Mega City 2 (The west-coast equivalent of where Dredd normally spends his time; it got destroyed very early in the series’ continuity). Thirdly, I’m not surprised that it’s Douglas doing this, considering his love for the Dredd character and especially the world co-creator John Wagner and others has built around him. Fourthly, I was already sold on this book before I saw Douglas write the following on Twitter:

Seriously, one of my most eagerly anticipated books of the year. Apparently, it’ll be released towards the end of 2013; when it gets solicited, go pre-order.

(And if you don’t know who Joan Didion is, there’s always the Internet.)

The Hollywood Reporter has Greg Rucka considering the rating given to June’s Man of Steel:

Superman is precisely what we should be teaching our children. Superman inspires us to our best. I haven’t seen Man of Steel, haven’t read the script, and I’ve assiduously avoided spoilers. I genuinely don’t know if this “reality” will be present or not. I want it to be brilliant. I want it to be glorious. I want it to be inspiring. I am keeping the faith.

But that PG-13 on Man of Steel is making me nervous. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know if it’s a warning that there’s another k-shiv coming for the kidneys, or if it’s just the cost-of-doing-business, or even if it’s an MPAA-bias against all superhero violence. I don’t know if this is a genuine caution to parents, or a marketing decision aimed at a demographic too-cool for Superman’s brand of hope and idealism, yet embracing of Batman’s self-loathing rough justice, to assure them their ticket will be money well-spent. I don’t know if that PG-13 is there out of sincerity or cynicism or politics.

Over at his Tumblr, someone asks whether or not this desire for an all-ages Superman movie is inconsistent with his own comic book work on the character, and Rucka responds:

I’m just nervous, as I said. The last time they made a Superman movie, my son was 8. I couldn’t take him to it, it was too dark for him. He wanted to see it desperately, because it was Superman. Superman means a lot to a lot of people. A lot of those people are children.

No, it’s not Warner Brothers’ job to parent my child. But I do think that, especially in the case of an icon as powerful as Superman, there is a responsibility to remember how diverse his audience is. The more of that audience you try to reach – and they’re trying to reach EVERYONE with the MoS campaign – the more, I think, that needs to be considered.

I hadn’t, I admit, given a lot of thought to the rating of the Man of Steel movie, although I agree with Rucka, when I think about it, that a Superman movie should be as available and suitable to young audiences as possible. I was thinking more about the tone of the film every time I saw the trailers or the photos or the whatever from it, and worrying that the movie will be try to be something other than… I don’t know, than “fun,” for want of a better way to put it. I mean, I want drama and I even want beauty, but shouldn’t Superman, of all superheroes, have a movie that’s also just fun?

(Related/unrelated: I loved Rucka’s Adventures of Superman run, as weirdly truncated as it seemed at the time. Very few people in recent memory have written a scene that “gets” the character as much as the one where Superman returns a lost child to her mother and then, calmly, happily explains that, no, there’s really not anything more important than that that he should be up to. I’d love to see Rucka do some more Superman; I’d really love to see Rucka do some more Lois Lane. Maybe one day.)