60 Comments | Posted: January 31st, 2009 | Filed under: Reader Participation
I fucking
hate the android Red Tornado. (Oddly enough, I think the Vision is radder than
doing a vertical backflip on a Big Wheel.)
Put yours below.
5 Comments | Posted: January 31st, 2009 | Filed under: "Funny"
1 Comment | Posted: January 30th, 2009 | Filed under: Shameless Self-Promotion | Tags: the rack
There is important businss talk in the first panel. Very important business talk.
69 Comments | Posted: January 29th, 2009 | Filed under: Reader Participation | Tags: bughouse, steve laffler
For me, it’s Steve Lafler’s Bughouse stories, perfectly constructed downbeat jazz dramas in a word inhabited by insects, full of betrayal, romance, and drugs.
Put yours below.
4 Comments | Posted: January 29th, 2009 | Filed under: "Funny"
1 Comment | Posted: January 28th, 2009 | Filed under: Art Appreciation, Outbound Linkage | Tags: registered weapon
I’d recommend starting at the beginning. Yes, there really is a a cash register police detective. No, they are not on drugs.
(OK, maybe they’re on drugs. I shouldn’t really speak for them.)
4 Comments | Posted: January 28th, 2009 | Filed under: "Funny" | Tags: alice in wonderland
2 Comments | Posted: January 28th, 2009 | Filed under: Shameless Self-Promotion | Tags: the rack
It seems as if one of our normally hale-and-hearty staffers has fallen victim to the -itis that has been making its way across the land.
8 Comments | Posted: January 27th, 2009 | Filed under: Art Appreciation | Tags: j jonah jameson, jjj, spider-man's butt
Paul has just taken over art duties on Living With Insanity, a fine webcomic worth your time.
Edit: Paul’s just added a color version on his blog.
25 Comments | Posted: January 27th, 2009 | Filed under: Thinking about Comics Marketing | Tags: dc, marvel, twitter
A lot of people are touting social media and how it’s changed how fans interact with brands, claiming that it allows for transparency and a level of engagement that goes above and beyond websites and blogs. Jennifer Van Grove at Mashable wrote a great blog entry about the best Twitter brands and the people behind them. While it’s interesting to see how companies and their customers interact publicly, it’s also important to note how professional these exchanges are.
And when you think of professionalism, Marvel Comics immediately springs to mind. Let’s look at the following exchange between a fan of the publishing concern and the company’s official Twitter account.
To review: a fan mentions that they read ten Marvel comics this weekend, and got rid of 20 weeks’ worth of DC’s weekly Trinity, written by Kurt Busiek and drawn by Mark Bagley. They are told, by a Marvel representative, that they’re amazed that someone could/would read 20 issues of this comic. (The original Marvel tweet has since been deleted, but someone smarter than me screencapped it and sent it my way.)
Kurt Busiek is currently writing a sequel to his Marvels series for the publisher. Marvels was a crown jewel in the publisher’s line through the 90s and continues to sell well for them because it’s actually very good. Mark Bagley was a mainstay of the Spider-Man titles through the 90s and drew over 100 consecutive issues of Ultimate Spider-Man, a title that helped the company’s publishing division ride the success of the cinematic version of the character to financial solvency.
In other words, to get a cheap shot at their perceived “competition,” a Marvel representative threw two of their most respected creators under the bus. This “competition,” by the way, has been blown vastly out of proportion over the years mostly by Marvel and its fans. While I can appreciate the tongue-in-cheek tone they’ve embraced (“Not Brand Ecch” and “Distinguished Competition” being two of my favorite bits they’ve used,) there’s a distinct difference between winking at the readers and outright badmouthing of another publisher’s product. Despite the inflamed passions of fans on both ends of the spectrum, it’s not like either DC or Marvel’s comic book divisions are making cars – they’re putting out $3-$4 doses of serial entertainment. The closest thing to comics and how they’re purchased is America’s movie habit and while Fox and Paramount certainly compete for weekend dollars across America, you never see either studio trashing the other for the quality of product. (Most likely because they know that neither of them has a leg to stand on in that department.)
There’s room for more than one major company putting out comic books. That sort of dismissive, we’ll-finance-anyone used-car-salesman bullshit cheapens Marvel in multiple ways and while there’s plenty to say about DC’s inability to grasp Twitter and the like, I think it’d be better to not have said anything at all than indulge in cheap snark at the expense of your brand’s respectability.
22 Comments | Posted: January 27th, 2009 | Filed under: Reader Participation
Place your single favorite Marvel Comics story title below.
2 Comments | Posted: January 27th, 2009 | Filed under: Shameless Self-Promotion | Tags: the rack
What’s this?
Staff picks at Yavin IV?
Yup.
36 Comments | Posted: January 26th, 2009 | Filed under: Reader Participation | Tags: solicitations
THE ESSENTIAL BLACK PANTHER
Written by DON MCGREGOR, JACK KIRBY & MORE
Penciled by BILLY GRAHAM, RICH BUCKLER, GIL KANE, JACK KIRBY, & MORE
Cover by JACK KIRBY
KIllmonger! Man-Ape! Baron Macabre! Kiber The Cruel! King Solomon’s Frogs? Thrill as T’Challa encounters the unusual and deadly in a series of Marvel Blockbusters where the fate of a nation — and the world — hang in the balance! This volume collects some of the Black Panther’s earliest stories from JUNGLE ACTION (Volume 2) 6-22 & 24 and BLACK PANTHER(Volume 1) #1-15 and MARVEL PREMIERE 51-53.
544 PGS / All Ages … $16.99
Put yours below.
1 Comment | Posted: January 26th, 2009 | Filed under: Shameless Self-Promotion | Tags: the rack
New strip, new strip,
new strip.
110 Comments | Posted: January 25th, 2009 | Filed under: Thinking About Comics
My Fantastic Four begins with the heat death of the universe and ends at the dawn of time.
Put yours below.
2 Comments | Posted: January 24th, 2009 | Filed under: "Funny" | Tags: batman
Comments Off | Posted: January 23rd, 2009 | Filed under: Shameless Self-Promotion | Tags: the rack
Blood, sweat, and tears went into this strip.
Mostly tears, though.
9 Comments | Posted: January 22nd, 2009 | Filed under: Meta | Tags: that tired obama meme
1 Comment | Posted: January 22nd, 2009 | Filed under: What I've Been Reading | Tags: denis bajram, soleil, universal war 1
1.
What starts off as a fairly by-the-book tale of a space fighter squadron packed with misfits turns into something more complex and seems to get out of the author’s control by the beginning of its second act. While Denis Bajram’s art is absolutely gorgeous and I appreciate any attempt to get European graphic novels to a winder audience, there’s some flaws in this that are pretty insurmountable for me.
2.
In general, I don’t mind it when science fiction plays fast and loose with science itself, but actually having a character spouting out increasingly convulted theories about what’s happening every ten pages or so grew incredibly tiresome, especially as they made no sense after a certain point and the ultimate resolution didn’t really reflect any of them. It’s technobabble in its purest form, words just piled on top of one another because it seems like they’re supposed to be there to say it’s science fiction. (You know, the spaceships kind of tipped me off there.)
3.
The writing is really
bad in several places. I’m talking “Oh hey, there’s something! Let’s go investigate so the plot can move forward” sort of blatant moments that stick out like a sore thumb. This isn’t Paul Benjamin’s translation at fault here: the plot just rears its head up and bends the story to its will in a completely non-organic and very clumsy manner that reminded me of a video game plot more than anything else.
4.
There’s also a distinctly European machismo that infects the work, one that leaves me cold. There’s a rape scene that’s treated with all the tact of one of the books’ space battles, and while there is comeuppance, the path to it is convoluted and requires a greater-than-usual suspension of disbelief (and a willingness to endure one of the most played-out of dramatic clichés, delivered straight from the
Guiding Light writing room.) I’ve noticed this very ham-fisted handling of sexual assault in other works from creators based on the continent (Hi, Jodorowsky!) but there was something just singularly galling about this incident and how it was treated by the cast.
5.
Plotwise, I’m actually fairly intrigued by what the book offers up: a war between two parallel realities that begins with a misunderstanding, but the way the story is being told is extremely offputting. I’m not given a reason to care about any of the characters, as they’re all razor-thin stereotypes (the brave, headstrong hero; the female commander with an overbearing father figure; the scientist who’s too impressed with himself; the coward who tries to make something of his life) living in a world that’s positively fetishistic about the military. I don’t give a damn what happens to the people in the center of things, a crippling failure on the part of Bajram.
9 Comments | Posted: January 22nd, 2009 | Filed under: Outbound Linkage
The complete six-thousand DVD set for The Wire is $82 on Amazon today. That’s right. $82. Buy two and keep one as an emergency backup in case you need a McNulty fix in your life after the apocalypse.
