From the 1989 book Pet Shop Boys, annually. here’s a look at vocalist Neil Tennant’s career at Marvel Comics’ UK offices in the 1970s. I’d normally post this sort of thing over at Disco Potential, but this features confluence and synergy with my medium of choice, so here we are.
This is from Garth Ennis’s Hitman, a series which helped cement Ennis’s reputation among fans as a writer that hates superheroes and views the genre with no small amount of cynicism:
This is from the second issue of J. Michael Straczynski much-hyped Superman run. In an interview with Comics Alliance, Straczynski stated that the point of his storyline was that it:[...] humanizes him, puts him within our reach, and just that alone affects both sides. Flying over the country at several times the speed of sound, you miss the details, you miss the personal stories happening down below you where you could be of use.
Here is Superman helping someone who is suffering cardiac problems:
“What can I do to help? I mean, besides using my powers to help get you to the hospital quickly. That’s outside of spec for this freshman year, ham-fisted soul searching that I’m supposed to be doing because the famous guy writing me has completely missed the point of my character.”
Update: Doctor Scott has the medical POV on this scene
You can’t overestimate his importance to the modern comic book or overstate his impact on writers of all stripes, so I’m not even going to try. He was the first guy to do what he did and he did it better than anyone.
An excerpt from a long, long email Mamet wrote to the writers for The Unit, a show he made for CBS.
REMEMBER YOU ARE WRITING FOR A VISUAL MEDIUM. *MOST* TELEVISION WRITING, OURS INCLUDED, SOUNDS LIKE *RADIO*. THE *CAMERA* CAN DO THE EXPLAINING FOR YOU. *LET* IT. WHAT ARE THE CHARACTERS *DOING* -*LITERALLY*. WHAT ARE THEY HANDLING, WHAT ARE THEY READING. WHAT ARE THEY WATCHING ON TELEVISION, WHAT ARE THEY *SEEING*.IF YOU PRETEND THE CHARACTERS CANT SPEAK, AND WRITE A SILENT MOVIE, YOU WILL BE WRITING GREAT DRAMA.
IF YOU DEPRIVE YOURSELF OF THE CRUTCH OF NARRATION, EXPOSITION,INDEED, OF *SPEECH*. YOU WILL BE FORGED TO WORK IN A NEW MEDIUM – TELLING THE STORY IN PICTURES (ALSO KNOWN AS SCREENWRITING)
THIS IS A NEW SKILL. NO ONE DOES IT NATURALLY. YOU CAN TRAIN YOURSELVES TO DO IT, BUT YOU NEED TO *START*.
I CLOSE WITH THE ONE THOUGHT: LOOK AT THE *SCENE* AND ASK YOURSELF “IS IT DRAMATIC? IS IT *ESSENTIAL*? DOES IT ADVANCE THE PLOT?
Designed by Amanda Conner, Sculpted by Jack Mathews.
Designed by Adam Hughes, Sculpted by Jack Mathews.
(To be fair, Hughes designed this pretty boss version of Barbara Gordon in costume as well.)
Here’s a sequence from this week’s Streets of Gotham written by Mike Benson and drawn by Dustin Nyugen, in which Batman tortures an innocent man to get some information:
(And yes, Frank Miller’s snappy line about rights from The Dark Knight Returns is a great bit of black comedy in the middle of a raucous satire. It is not a basis for How Batman Is.)
It’s important to note that the differences between that scene and this one are myriad: The Joker is an intelligent, cunning psychopath and Roland Davis is a bog-standard Gotham City heavy on which they have no evidence at all. Batman’s actions against The Joker are a last-ditch effort in The Dark Knight whereas torture is presented here as the first option. Gordon’s complicity in a warehouse interrogation in which a suspect is beaten is just as wildly out-of-character for him as Batman’s brutality against a man they’ve not even properly questioned is for the Dark Knight.
Maybe DC has something like this in its future, but that feels kind of doubtful right now.
(Also, yes, I know that’s Dick Grayson as Batman. The guy raised by Bruce Wayne is certainly going to follow in Bruce Wayne’s shoes when it comes to these things, isn’t he?)
I call bullshit.
Thank you for: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Amazing Adventures, The Avengers, Black Panther, Captain America Comics, Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers, Challengers of The Unknown, a slough of crime comics, Destroyer Duck, Devil Dinosaur, Fantastic Four, Forever People, Green Arrow, The Incredible Hulk, Journey Into Mystery, Justice, Inc, Kamandi, Machine Man, Mister Miracle, The New Gods, O.M.A.C., inventing romance comics, Sgt Fury And His Howling Commandos, Silver Star, Strange Tales, Strange Worlds, Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen, Tales of Suspense, Tales to Astonish, The Newsboy Legion, The Demon, The Eternals, The Inhumans, The Losers, The Mighty Thor, The Sandman, World of Fantasy, The X-Men and so, so much more.
See Also: Ten Reasons Fantastic Four #51 Is My Favorite Comic Book
1.
I’ve read and very much enjoyed Mark Millar’s ridiculous, over-the-top reinvention of The Avengers known as The Ultimates* since it began coming out. Even with its delays and too-cute mugging for the audience, it had just enough intelligence and wherewithal to keep me engaged and entertained, even if I knew it wasn’t a very good comic at all.
2.
Apparently, Marvel’s doing something with the Ultimate universe, rejiggering it and rebooting some things**, and one of those things was Millar creating an expanded Ultimate Avengers teams out of the mess. They’re pictured above, for your edification. There’s some of the usual people that years of reading Avengers comics mean that I like to see in an Avengers lineup: Cap, Thor, Iron Man. There’s also a few people that probably wouldn’t be on any Avengers team that I picked, but I’m not running Marvel comics, so hey, whatever.
3.
The thing that’s troubling to me is kinda simple and stupid and old mannish: among all these superhero types, there’s girl-with-guns (Black Widow,) purple-guy-with-guns (Hawkeye looking suspiciously like the Hate-Monger,) and black-guy-with-guns (Samuel L Jackson.) That’s three people with guns out of a lineup of eleven. That means that over a quarter of the Ultimate Avengers solve their problems with guns. That strikes me as overkill.
4.
It should be noted that one person using guns as part of a team of people with amazing powers and abilities strikes me as overkill. Guns are so common and ugly and silly***, particularly in a world where a living god could use his hammer to banish you to another dimension or a super-soldier hyped up on mega-dope from the 40s can disarm you with a thrown shield before breaking your jaw with his elbow. I think it was a wise man (Batman) who said guns make you stupid. They tend to make superhero comics stupid, too.
5.
So I guess I just talked myself out of buying Ultimate Avengers. OK, then.
*Not being a meth-headed loony who gets their kicks from that sort of thing, I chose to ignore Jeph Loeb’s run as much as possible. I know that The Blob ate The Wasp , which I’m sure gave someone, somewhere, the best erection of his life.
**For a company who’s always behaved as if their largest competitor’s history was unnecessarily convoluted and complex, the last decade has seen Marvel reboot, repackage, rewrite, and remove elements left and right for the sake of whatever the star writer at the moment seems to want. I’m fine with it, but it’s a case of the wok calling the kettle metal. Or something.
***I’m fine with guns in gun-friendly titles or movies or whatever. It’s just that they don’t work for me in superhero comics. That’s why I like the Punisher off on his own most of the time with very occasional ties and crossovers with the Marvel universe.
Watching Tokyo Gore Police the other day got me to thinking about that sort of schlocky sci-fi horror (see also: Tetsuo: The Iron Man and The Machine Girl) and how it serves as the ultimate evolution of tokusatsu like Kamen Rider and Ultraman. They frequently have many of the same attributes: Kamen Rider episodes begin with a brief explanation of his origin: “Kamen Rider, Takeshi Hongo, is an modified human. He was altered by Shocker, an evil secret society with aspirations for world domination. Kamen Rider fights against Shocker for the sake of human freedom,” while Tokyo Gore Police‘s protagonist Ruka is captured by the biotechnological freak she’s been hunting and becomes one of the monstrous “engineers” that she’s been trained to fight against for decades. It’s interesting how Japanese gore films act as thematic commentary about kid-friendly entertainment even as they find new ways to shock, disgust and entertain their audience by using familiar tropes to quickly hook the audience and then subverting them for dramatic effect.
Meanwhile, American adults who liked to watch Green Lantern fly around in space with a magic wishing ring as part of the cast of Super Friends can just go read Blackest Night to get the same effect.
Sean Witzke found some more of those dots the other day in a blog post I’d bookmarked but not read yet. I am the worst plagiarist ever.
…when I got my hands on a manga titled Addicted To Curry that’s about a curry shop struggling to get back on its feet after the mysterious disappearance of its chef/owner, I thought I’d be reading a more personal take on stuff like Oishinbo. I was looking forward to enjoying a comic about food and family and how they’re intertwined.
This is what I got before the table of contents on the first volume:
That’s Yui, the book’s 14-year-old co-lead.
Just once, I’d like for this sort of thing to not fucking happen. Could you work on that, please?
An email from a friend stated the following:
A typical $2.99 comic book is 32.6 cents/ square foot (22-6×10 inch pages)I’m just going to assume this is all true because I can barely figure out a tip and just end up throwing $10 at whoever is willing to bring me my damn gazpacho.Wednesday Comics is 13.6 cents / square foot (15-14×20 pages)
The standard $2.99 comic book costs 2.38 times more per square foot than Wednesday Comics.
OK, here’s the thing. People email me wanting to know what I think about things. Not, like, things I care about, but things like DC’s upcoming Blackest Night or the return of Steve Rogers. I think it’s nice that people want to know my opinion on something that obviously means something to them, but (and God, this sounds even more egotistical than usual) I don’t spend any time at all thinking about that sort of thing anymore. Over the last year or so, I’ve started to create more than react, and I’ve opted to be more positive in general about comics, sticking to talking about what I like and actually want to read versus whining about matters that don’t interest or excite me at all. So, if you want to know what I think about comics happenings along these lines, the answer is more-than-likely going to be “I’m not.”
If DC wants to do a Green Lantern-themed remix of Marvel Zombies, that’s fine. It’ll probably sell very well to the sort of people who want that sort of thing. (I actually really enjoyed The Sinestro Corps War, but that seemed to fill up my space magic-ring-themed mega-event reserves to their required levels pretty handily, with the upcoming Wednesday Comics strip by Busiek and Quinones keeping things topped off.) If Marvel wants to resurrect a character that nobody with half a lobe in their skull thought would stay dead, that’s fine. I’ll read it in the book format because I think Brubaker’s done a bang-up job with the title, and I’ll write a one-off comic strip about how the marketing stunt around it ended up doing at a fictional comic shop because that’s the sort of thing people like, but I can’t imagine devoting any real thought to the matter unless it was my bottom line that was being affected by the whole issue.
In the past couple of months, I’ve seen some people who I thought were smarter get caught up in grinding out content about what they hate about comics, and it baffles me. Why rehash the “news cycle” that Newsarama and CBR are working when you can celebrate how cool, how vital comics are by pointing out smaller titles that you enjoy? Don’t get me wrong: there’s some reviewers whose insightful savaging of the mainstream is something I enjoy and look forward to, but they’re actually coming up with useful analysis of the medium and its trends, not pissing and moaning about how comics aren’t what they think they should be and how Dan Dildio (I swear I saw that yesterday) needs to fuck right off.
(The short version: If you don’t think you’ll like something, ignore it. Something better will come along. That’s what I do and don’t you want to be just like me?)
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Think about it, won’t you?
OK, here’s the last part of my look at webcomics that were sent to me by their creators over Twitter. Thanks to everybody that participated and I’ll likely ask people to shoot me some URLs again sometime next month for the second round. If you’ve not caught up, here’s part one and here’s part two.
Strange Candy by E.Snodgrass, A. Brownlow, K. Olympia, and J.Baird
A fantasy humor manga with no shortage of in-jokes and cultural references for those in the know. From someone on the outside looking in, it’s like a glitter-covered tax form: confusing and shiny. It has been going on for eight years, however, so there must be something going for it.
Strip For Me: Complex by Douglas Noble
Smart, apocalyptic science fiction with a rough-hewn look to the art that builds the mood very nicely. This one’s in its infancy but looks to have a lot of potential.
Supertrue!!! by Max Huffman
Max Huffman’s journal comics are a scream. He needs to do more. Someone get him on that.
Tech-Diff by Donna McGarry and David Shirley
This purports to be “A comic following the life and trials of Crag Smashface, his long suffering room mate Mel and his idol the world’s greatest super hero Emo Man.” In reality, it seems that there’s no real characters, no story, just “jokes” that frequently require an intimate knowledge of whatever the creators are into at any given time.
The Black Cherry Bombshells by John Zito & Anthony Trovarello
I’ve never quite clicked with this popular Zuda strip about post-apocalyptic Las Vegas and the titular girl gang. The storytelling seems very choppy to me, depending more on the next high concept than anything else and while the art has improved dramatically, it rarely manages to pull off the action sequences this series thrives on.
The Elves of Lleu Garnock by Irene Pitcairn
A longform, derivative fantasy comic. If the title appeals to you, then you’ve got nothing to lose by taking a look. I will say that the art gets cleaner and stronger over the run, reminding me a bit of both Linda Medley and Colleen Doran.
The Laugh-Out-Loud Cats by Adam Koford
An unstoppable juggernaut of meme-meets-classic-cartooning that I very much enjoy. It’s amazing how he’s built two characters that speak almost exclusively in sampled soundbites. I discussed Koford’s new book previously.
The Mighty Jambo by George Beedham
A superhero-slacker comic that, frankly, starts off pretty dire but improves massively once it becomes about the punching and shooting. Beedham’s art improves along with the story with his storytelling becoming stronger as the strip continues, but I will say that his adherence to comic book art makes for occasionally odd webcomic moments, such as the frequent double-page spreads that require the reader to click to view them in another window.
The Night Owls by Peter Timony and Robert Timony
Oh, this is a heck of a thing that the Timonys are doing. A retro strip that moves along at a fair clip, with each individual page containing at least one and sometimes multiple plot beats. It looks downright gorgeous too.
The Suckerboys by Jim Thorpe
A very nicely-drawn strip that doesn’t really do anything new, as it features two slackers with nerdy inclinations, but chugs right along anyway. Thorpe’s art is a high point: his facial expressions are dead on and his characters’ body language serves as a nice primer to other creators.
Things Change by Derik Badman
I’m sort of shocked I’ve never come across this one before. A thematically-dense comic that circles around the idea of metamorphoses with art that’s greatly accentuated by Badman’s use of two-tone color schemes on the majority of pieces. The beginning seems a bit “and now it’s time for the author to masturbate about how great he is,” but after that it’s a very engaging, very human piece of work.
Willow’s Grove by Karl Kleese
Cute animals get kidnapped by aliens and try to find their way back to Earth. The art seems a bit stiff to me, but there were enough chuckles to keep me going through the entire archive so far.
Xeno’s Arrow by Greg Beettam and Stephen Geigen-Milller
There’s something very 1980s-black-and-white-indie about this science fiction comic, and I mean that in a good way. The dialogue’s feels a bit contrived, the setting (a group of aliens escape a massive intergalactic zoo) a bit too familiar, and the art hits a lot of the same notes that Keith Giffen did after he discovered Muñoz’s work, but it all comes together just so to make a comic that’s comfortable and interesting. Funny, how that works out.
