Sixteen years ago today, Carol Kalish, vice president of new product development at Marvel Comics died suddenly at the age of 38.
The best tribute, to this day, came from Peter David in his But I Digress column for the Comic Buyer’s Guide.
We still miss her.
Photo by Alan Light, taken at the 1982 San Diego Comic-Con.
Comics Links
Costumes? Check. Vigilante activities? Check. The KKK were always closer to mainstream superheroes than we’d probably like, but it took Craig Yoe to dig up the bizarre ‘20s newspaper comic strips in which a flying KKK squad do good deeds.
Political cartoonist Steve Bell is interviewed by the Sunday Herald. [via Forbidden Planet International]
Wizard has photos from Fan Expo Canada 2007.
TrekWeb interviews IDW editor Andrew Steven Harris about the future of Star Trek comics.
Comic Book Resources interviews Christos Gage about the upcoming House of M: Avengers mini-series.
Heidi MacDonald remembers Disney Adventures Magazine at The Beat.
ICv2 interviews DC Comics’s King of All Media, Paul Levitz.
On the Fantagraphics Blog, Gary Groth interviews Alias the Cat creator Kim Deitch.
New Scientist employs the theory of social networks to explain why super-heroes always win.
MangaBlog has a longer version of an interview with Mark Crilley that originally ran in Publishers Weekly’s Comics Week.
Comics Reviews
Bookgasm reviews John Porcellino’s King-Cat Classix.
At Comic Book Resources, Augie De Blieck, Jr. reviews two recent TwoMorrows books and other things.
Comics Reporter reviews Monte Beauchamp’s Devilish Greetings.
The San Francisco Chronicle reviews James Sturm’s America.
Warren Peace Sings the Blues reviews Gilbert Hernandez’s Chance in Hell.
There’s been a flurry of posts lately in the comics blogosphere, including Glenn Hauman’s last column here, about perceived value for money (let’s just call it PVFM) when it comes to comics. The consensus seems to be, American comics periodicals from the Big Two are usually about 22 pages long and take mere minutes to read through, which is Not Good. Added to that the current buzzword in vogue for what used to be called "padding," now rechristened "decompression," and the PVFM aggravation level shoots way up as the time actually spent reading the thing goes way down. And the conclusion is, there just ought to be more words per page, and possibly more pages per pamphlet, so the reading time (and thus the presumed enjoyment time) increases and fans don’t feel like they’re being ripped off and more readers will return to comics and all will be well with the world. It’s gotten so bad that I’ve actually seen online comics pages where a writer/artist will put up a page of wordless story and apologize for the lack of dialogue on it!
Allow me to ask: When did PVFM become a condition upon which entertainment should be created? Do all stories have to be dense, or should all stories strive instead to be good?
Look, I understand PVFM. I frequent an all-you-can-eat sushi place, for cripe’s sake. The sushi’s very good there, or I wouldn’t frequent it. But I’ve been to lots of AYCE places that made me wish I paid more for less-but-better stuff. As anyone who’s visited a 99-cent store would agree, quantity isn’t always synonymous with quality.
Particularly where such a subjective experience as entertainment is involved. Perhaps I’m the wrong person to ask this, what with my swiss-cheese retention abilities, but were all the stories you really remember fondly real long ones? I’ve been to some long, dense movies that were full of sound and fury and signified less than nothing; the concession candy had more fulfillment. And I’ve spent two minutes reading various pithy blog posts that stick with me far longer than the screens and screens of blather that, frankly, I usually can’t even make it all the way through. But okay, let’s be fair — comics aren’t blog posts, where brevity and getting to the point is often prized. And they’re not movies, where unspoken movement can convey so much that a constant stream of words isn’t necessary.
So tell me, without looking: what’s your favorite comic book story, and how many words does it contain?
Well, at last the word is out. The BBC has found a way around David Tennant’s commitments to Shakespeare and Russell T. Davies’ desire to stretch. Both will be back in 2009 for a season-between-seasons consisting of three Doctor Who specials, the last probably being the annual Christmas special. Whereas Torchwood is likely to continue, the official start to the official fifth season will happen in 2010.
No word on if Tennant and Davies will be back for Season Five, but it seems doubtful the Doctor will regenerate during the Christmas Special. Unless Santa Claus is from Gallifrey.
Season Four starts transmitting in the U.K. in 2008, following the second season of Torchwood.
People have been speculating that we here at ComicMix were going to start up with a webcomic any day now, but we had a secret shame — we didn’t actually know how to create 21st century cutting edge webcomics that all the kids read today. But thanks to Ridiculopathy (with a hat tip to Dirk Deppey) we finally know how to do it!
Rule #1 – Don’t draw anything. Illustration is hard work and a time-consuming skill to acquire. Thanks to modern technology, most notably the copy & paste feature found on most modern computers, it is now completely unnecessary. Grab a random image from Google Image Search and add some speech bubbles. Don’t even draw the speech bubbles- just search "speech bubble" on your pal Google Image Search.
Easy enough. Who needs real artists and letterers anyway? They’re always late, and just make you tired and grouchy.
Rule #2 – Don’t write actual jokes. Other than the mistake of spending time drawing a comic, the second most common mistake newcomers make is writing one. Some people waste hours wracking their brains for a funny premise or clever line, but it’s utterly pointless and only exposes you to the danger of your readers just not finding your jokes funny. Instead, start from a very specific audience (most often based on a fandom, fundamentalist religion, or bizarre sexual practice) and tell them what they want to hear in four-panel format.
Hey, we can skip over getting writers too? Hot damn! Brian, we just dropped our burn rate down to, like, nothing! We can put it all back into T&A — er, sorry, T&E. Travel and Entertainment. Really. Honest.
Rule #3 – Don’t be gracious. A great way to generate buzz for your web comic is by picking a fight with another web comic, preferably someone with a more established site so that the inevitable "look at what this moron just said" links on his forum will boost your server stats. Again, you can’t and probably shouldn’t write jokes about them, so just barf up a few panels about calling your target names and making them cry.
This keeps getting better and better! Hey, um — who do we want to pick on today? Scott Kurtz? No, we’ll see him this weekend. Warren Ellis? He’s not crossing the Atlantic for a year, but his fans are scary. Wait — Bendis! He’s under an exclusive contract, he wouldn’t be able to write for us anyway, so we don’t have to suck up to him. Hey, Bendis! Get a toupee!
Rule #4 —
Oh, who cares at this point? We’re ready! We know everything! Time to start up a web comics publishing empire!
I wonder if we can have a press release ready in time for Baltimore….
Labor Day’s over and it’s back to work or school. Here’s some cheap thrills to get you through the day. (Our illustration is a recent Clay Bennett editorial cartoon.)
Comics Links
The Daily Cross Hatch interviews Evan Dorkin (in the first of what may be many parts).
Eddie Campbell remembers zipatone.
Comic Book Resources talks to Paul Jenkins.
Just in case you missed it: Monday was, in the Comic Curmudgeon’s words, Fööberdämmerung.
Comic Addiction talks to Ben Templesmith.
Newsarama slashes summer. No, really. That’s what it says.
The Montreal Gazette reports that a Dragon Ball Z live-action movie will be filmed there over the next year. OK, is there any chance that this won’t suck? [via Newsarama]
Comics Reviews
Brian Cronin of Comics Should Be Good reviews the first issue of the new magazine about comics, Comics Foundry.
From The Savage Critics:
SF/Fantasy Links
SF Scope reports that the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) have just suspended their ePiracy committee in the wake of SFWA Vice President Andrew Burt’s recent badly-handled complaints against the Internet text-sharing site Scridb. (The full SFWA motion is also available on their LJ community.)
Robert J. Sawyer thinks the process for the Canadian SF award the Prix Aurora is horribly messed up this year — but he has a suggestion to help fix it.
There we were, in Cape Girardeau, Mo. at a convention chatting with fans and signing autographs – yes, the Missouri Mafia together again.
There is an element in the preceding sentence that’s wrong. It’s the word “again.”
Before I explain, a warning: the subject of this week’s blather is so trivial, so insignificant that it does not merit a footnote in the most comprehensive of comics histories, even if that footnote is in a type font so tiny one could use it to put the whole of next year’s New York Times on the head of a pin, presumably near the dancing angels.
Where was I? Oh yeah, in southeast Missouri with Roy Thomas and Gary Friedrich, being very well treated by the convention sponsor, Ken Murphy. The occasion was a reunion of the aforementioned Missouri Mafia – i.e., the three of us. I don’t know who first used the term Missouri Mafia, which Roy, in a recent email called “a dumb phrase,” or why. It was probably because we three, in the late 60s and early 70s, were working as writers at Marvel Comics (and Gary and I also wrote for Charlton) and we were not only from Missouri, we all had a connection to a particular parcel of the state. I was working as a reporter for the Cape Girardeau newspaper; Gary and Roy were childhood friends who lived in Jackson, about eight miles from Cape.
To make a story I’ve told probably hundreds of times as short as possible: Roy was editor of what was unquestionably the best comics fanzine, Alter Ego, and had just accepted a comic book job in New York. I did a story on him for the paper, a month later he sent me Stan Lee’s writer’s test, I did it and then Roy and Stan offered me a job, which I accepted. A year or two later, Roy recruited Gary and…voila! The Missouri Mafia.
The Mafia’s ranks were augmented by the eventual arrival on the scene of Steve Gerber, who, coincidentally, graduated from my alma mater.
A couple weeks ago I opined that the loss of the Weekly World News makes the supermarket a less enjoyable experience. While gathering grub for my big family Labor Day barbecue blowout this weekend, I found a small gem.
Disney Adventures, which is about to go out of business, publishes an occasional reprint digest called Comic Zone. Not bad; it’s worth checking out. Keep an eye out for their fall 2007 edition, because it reprints the first part of Jack Kirby’s Sunday newspaper strip adaptation of The Black Hole.
In case you hadn’t seen it – and, please, keep up the good work – The Black Hole was the Evil Empire’s attempt to cash in on the Star Wars/Trek fad of the time. The movie was done in Disney’s typically clueless fashion, lacking only in style, drama, script, and energy. Starring Maximilian Schell, Tony Perkins, Robert Forster, Ernest Borgnine, and Slim Pickens, Disney actually pulled off the impossible: making a movie with Ernest Borgnine and Slim Pickens that completely sucked. I thought so, the now-former editor of the Weekly World News who sat next to me thought so, and the nine year old sitting behind us thought so.
Jack Kirby’s adaptation was far better, even in the confining space of the newspaper strip. Art-wise, it’s one of Jack’s better post-70s efforts. Storywise, the art is one of Jack’s better post-70s efforts. Because it was in the papers, a lot of Kirby fans missed it. Ergo, check out Comic Zone. Jack did the art and is credited with the script. This reprint adds Paul Mount’s full color palate to the effort.
Kudos to Comic Zone comics editor Jesse Post. And I sure hope you still have a gig; we need comics for kids, sold at places where kids can get them.
Artwork copyright 1979 and 2007 Disney. All Rights Reserved. Never mess with the Mouse.
It feels like just yesterday that the summer blockbuster season was here, but I suppose we’ve already moved on from there and straight into that time of year when thriller/horror movies come out of the woodwork, and usually sink rather than swim. This year we’re subjected treated to another Japanese thriller remake with One Missed Call, another underground-graphic-novel-turned-award-winning-film with 30 Days of Night, and yes: yet another Saw movie – because they cost about $8.50 to make.
We proudly start off this traditional season with Rob Zombie’s faux remake/prequel of John Carpenter’s quintessential slasher flick Halloween. Now not to play into the web-gossip, but there was quite some controversy about this film’s script, involving a leak and a very critical critic from a website which I choose not to mention (I will give a hint though: it rhymes with Paint it Drool Booze). But all of that aside, it was rumored that Zombie went into rewrites only a few short weeks before shooting. Now I felt this was relatively unwise, but as usual, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start as we usually do, in the OCD fashion of a film breakdown.
Starting off with my favorite aspect of the film, the acting; I have almost nothing to complain about here. It’s evident in all of Zombie’s work (a whopping three films) that he is a huge fanboy, and while every fanboy has their niche (Smith has Star Wars, Tarantino has chatty women, and Favreau has Vince Vaughn) Zombie’s niche is easily noticed as B-Movies. This film is a practical who’s who of B-Movie actors, much like his previous two films were. To name a few, we movie geeks get Danny Trejo, Brad Dourif, Malcolm McDowell, Sid Haig, William Forsythe, Udo Kier, Clint Howard, and of course Tyler Mane as our masked pro/antagonist. With a cast like this, topped off with Zombie’s frightening-yet-gorgeous wife, Sheri Moon, this film was meant for every fanboy in the theater to swoon with joy every time we get another cameo, much like this reviewer did. Though it probably isn’t necessary for me to reveal, each actor pulled off their creepy-yet-impressive roles to a tee.
Moving onto the technical aspect of this film, I was torn. Another one of Zombie’s trademarks is complete filth, and not in the sense of obligatory nudity (of which there was plenty in this film), but in the sense that the film and setting as a whole made me long for a shower once the credits rolled. From the very start, we’re treated to visuals of a completely rundown, white-trash home in which almost everything looks dirty and unpleasant, all the way to the end of the film where just about everything/one is covered in blood. Much like House of 1000 Corpses and Devil’s Rejects, this film definitely adapted the feeling of grittiness that the horror movies of yesteryear prided themselves on.
One trait that Zombie seemed to pick up in this movie that was thankfully left out of his two previous pieces was the use of unnecessary camera shakiness. I’m not sure if its his way of falling in line with popular films like the Bourne trilogy and the use of shaky camera work, or if it was a cheap way to add tension to a scene that already displayed it, but it was not only unnecessary, but distracting. When a filmmaker prides himself for turning heads with the amount of gore and violence he uses in films, there is no need to strap the camera to a rabid dog every time he feels the need to add more tension to the scene. The close angles and fast cuts during action sequenced made it feel like a bad episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and that’s not good, especially when the substance is far too good for any overuse of style.
Finally we move on to the pièce de résistance: in talking about the script/plot of the film. Going into a straight-up slasher film, my expectations never soar, in fact I usually leave my brain at the door. But when a movie is hyped as giving more substance to a horror movie that I practically grew up on, I wanted there to be substance and closure to a 30 year old story. Instead we get half-assed character development and dialogue that actually had me laughing out loud when it wasn’t exactly necessary. I’m proud of the fact that we took a snippet of Donald Pleasance’s dialogue from the 1978 film and turned it into an hour of film, but this should have been about what makes one of the greatest Monsters of American Cinema tick, rather than just explaining who he is and that he likes to stab things. I call him the pro/antagonist because if the character development was done properly, it would show that Michael Myers killed to protect his family, and hurt those who threatened that. Instead we barely touch on that subject, and spend more time watching Myers kill naked teens while they have drunken unprotected sex.
Overall, looking at this film as another slasher film with a great supporting cast, it exceeds almost all expectations. But this film had to potential of being the Batman Begins of a potentially dead horror franchise, and instead of turning this into a trend in the genre and possibly getting the chance to see Peter Berg’s Friday the 13th, we’ll more than likely be subjected to another ten years of Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash vs. Godzilla vs. Kramer.
I reluctantly give the film a 7/10, only because while it may be an American pastime and one of my favorite weekend activities, a movie needs to be more than an hour plus of killing naked drunken teens having unprotected sex.
Comics Links
Wired has a long article about the creators of Penny Arcade, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik.
Rick Geary presents: The Comic Con Murder Case, a short online comic.
Comics Reporter interviews Nick Abadzis, cartoonist of Laika.
Greg Hatcher of Comics Should Be Good thinks about history and comics and ends up daring DC Comics to just reboot their entire line already.
Comics Reviews
The Toronto Star reviews Scott Chantler’s The Annotated Northwest Passage.
The LA Times reviews Adrian Tomine’s upcoming graphic novel Shortcomings.
Brad Curran of Comics Should Be Good reviews Countdown to Adventure #1.
From The Savage Critics:
Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing reviews DMZ: Public Works.
Edward Champion reviews Warren Ellis’s novel Crooked Little Vein in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
SF/Fantasy Links
The 2009 World Science Fiction Convention will be held in Montreal, Canada. Neil Gaiman will be the author Guest of Honor.
SF Site has indexed the contents of the first twenty-four annual volumes of Gardner Dozois’s annual Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology, by author, title and volume.
Reports from Worldcon:
And reports from Dragon*Con:
Neil Gaiman visits the Great Wall of China and learns that giraffes are forbidden to drive cars there.
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
Stephen Colbert, we have your writer for “The Chronicles of Amber”!
January 20, 2023
The Law Is A Ass #460: Those “For Life” Sentences Are Nonsense
February 24, 2022
