Evel Knievel: 1938-2007
Hail and farewell, big guy. Viva Knievel!
Monthly Archive: November 2007
Manga Friday: Girl Boy Girl
There are only two books for Manga Friday this week; I promise to do better next time but the end of the week snuck up on me while I wasn’t looking. (And I didn’t really have a third book that fit so nicely with my theme, anyway.)
There have been sex comedies since the days of the ancient Greeks – every culture does them, and every culture thinks slightly different things are really funny. (I’ve mentioned the common manga shorthand horny = nosebleed before; it is impressively visual, but it can look really weird to Western eyes, particular when exaggerated.) But sex comedies tend to cluster around a few major ideas – for some cultures, it’s cuckoldry, but in most of the modern world, the major plot line is about a horny young man and one or more attractive young women. That simplifies things down enough that the standard sex comedy travels internationally better than more culturally specific kinds of comedy.
(Or maybe I’m just babbling for a while before I get into the specific bizarre plots here. Well, let’s stop wasting time.)
The set-up in Strawberry 100% is straightforward, if a bit unlikely: fifteen-year-old Junpei Manaka accidentally sees the strawberry-bedecked panties of an attractive girl in his school when she falls on him up on the school roof. (I said “straightforward,” not “makes a lot of sense.”) He immediately falls in love – or maybe lust – with this girl whose identity he’s not sure of. And then, very soon, he starts dating his gorgeous classmate Tsukasa, mostly because she tells him that she wears strawberry panties.
But we the readers strongly suspect that class brainiac (with her hair in a bun, glasses, etc. to keep her from appearing sexy) Aya is actually the panty-wearer of Junpei’s dreams – and the two of them start studying together.
So we’ve got a classic love triangle: boy is in love with girl, but not the girl he thinks he is, and is entangled with girl #1 while girl #2 is quietly crazy about him. A wonderfully serviceable plot that’s kept plays and novels and stories humming along for a few thousand years now. Kawashita doesn’t mess with the successful formula all that much, but he uses it for as many panty shots as he can squeeze in (can you blame him?) and lots of close-ups of people looking longingly at or thinking about each other. It’s not quite as madcap and zany as Love Hina, but being within the realm of reason isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Strawberry 100% is a cute sex comedy for teenagers; it’s rated for “older teenagers,” but that’s mostly because there’s sexual attraction involved. (There’s no actual nudity or violence, though it does get quite suggestive. (more…)
The new Captain America?
We hear there will be somebody in a Captain America uniform come February, but no word yet as to who. However, thanks to this sketch hiding in Matt Feazell’s website, we have conclusive proof who it will be.
Ladies and gentlemen, the new star-spangled avenger– Cynicalman.
Oh, like you’ve got a better candidate. Trust me, by Election Day next year you’ll all know I’m right.
Is it me, or are they just stupid? by Michael Davis
This was supposed to be a lighthearted article about the wonderful time I had at Mid-Ohio Con and the “Geek List” my ComicMix colleagues and I came up with there. You know, Best Creative Team, Lee & Kirby. Best death of a superhero, Captain Marvel, etc. We came up with many great categories and it would have made for a great article, so great in fact I threatened my follow ComicMix columnists with death by DEATH RAY if anyone wrote that article but me. It’s only fair as I started the Geek List off with the first question.
Anyway that was supposed to be the article, but then I had the misfortune to discover a copy of Southwest’s Airlines Spirit Magazine from June 2006.
On the fourth and fifth page of that magazine, there is an ad for a children’s hospital. In that ad there is a photo of a young black kid on his bike. He is smiling and up beat.
He is also in front of a street sign. You know what street he is on?
He’s on PLANTATION VALLEY DRIVE.
Who in the world poses a black kid in front of a street sign that says PLANTATION VALLEY DRIVE?
What, was Coon Ave too far away? To much traffic on Jungle Bunny Road? Construction on Watermelon Lane? (more…)
Atomika power, and Angel after the fall
That comic shop you visit every week probably has a few secrets – books you walk right by and never notice. ComicMix Radio is taking it on ourselves to ferret out these gems and share each one. Who knows what we might find – starting today with the story of a creator who took his love of Jack Kirby and created a bigger than life series which has already reached eight issues. Get ready for the world of Atomika, plus:
- How a cancelled TV show became a red hot new comic series
- More Zombie sell outs at Marvel
- Even though Elvis is dead, Tom Swift is alive and well (he said expressley)
Stop staring at the pretty picture and Press The Button!
More on Z-Cult and the torrenting mess
Following the various stories all over the place. A few quick followups:
DC and Top Cow has asked Z-Cult to take down links to torrents of their books. Matt Brady points out:
…with the action against Z-Cult only having a superficial, if any, effect on the number of comic book torrents available online, many observers as well as downloaders are left wondering if the comics industry will soon be looking at a day when a publisher singles out and files suit against an individual who downloads – or scans and uploads comic books. While similar actions have shown little overall effectiveness in reducing the activity in the realm of movie and music or even as acting as a deterrent, they have been a public relations nightmare for the MPAA and RIAA. In an industry a few orders of magnitude smaller than either movies or music, one is drawn to ask what the effects of such a move by a comic publisher would be. Likewise, and this isn’t meant as a shot at the comic book industry, using the RIAA and MPAA cases as thumbnails, the legal costs to prosecute one such case of illegal uploading or downloading would quickly eat into even the largest comic book publisher’s bottom line.
The interesting thing is that DC, et al, do not seem to be issuing actual DMCA takedown notices. This is fascinating on a number of levels– the least of which is that the publishers aren’t really calling out any heavy legal artillery yet, this is mere politeness. I supect that at least one reason why they aren’t issuing true DMCA takedown notices is that it would require the publishers to show that they actually control the copyright in question, which could easily be thrown into question. (Superboy, anyone?) The DMCA grants copyright holders the power to demand the removal of works without showing any evidence that these works infringe copyright but the courts have begun to recognize this, and are beginning to issue large judgements against careless, malicious or fraudulent DMCA notices — for example, Diebold was ordered to pay $125,000 for abusing the DMCA takedown process. This also means that nobody has resorted to saying, "Oh yeah? Make us!" yet.
Related to this is that the companies almost certainly don’t know what they have legitimate rights to. This leads into a comment that JK Parkin made while blogging about Colleen Doran’s experience with Marvel DCU:
What I found interesting was that Doran said she’ll be using the site as a reference. I guess I found it surprising (and maybe I’m being naive here) that Marvel doesn’t have some sort of system in place already where freelancers working on a particular character have access to images of said character. That way Marvel could ensure the character was being drawn in the right costume, and the freelancer wouldn’t have to hunt for back issues.
–which leads into yet another story of how I was brought in to discuss digital strategies with comic companies. This time I was brought in to meet with Gui Karyo, at the time the CIO of Marvel, in March of 2001 to discuss the status of their archives, digital and otherwise; their upcoming CD-ROM archives, and digital asset management in general for the company. I pointed out that Marvel’s in house archives were a disaster, certainly in comparison to DC’s– Marvel didn’t even have complete printed runs of the comics they published, with gaps as recent as the previous decade. Their film for publication had been stored in a warehouse in Arizona, and hot climates are always where I want to store four decade old film.
One of the things I had suggested was taking the time to build a system for digital asset management, so that the company would know what they had and everyone in the company, plus freelancers and licensees, could access it easily. As a demonstration, I pulled out a thousand dollar comic book– Man Of War Comics #1– and said that I could make a decent argument in either direction on whether Marvel owned the rights or not.
For a variety of reasons, Marvel still hasn’t done it, and as a result their own freelancers are now shelling out money to get reference that the company should be providing. God only knows what it’s like for licensors. I’ll bet that they don’t even deal with Marvel and just look at Corbis instead.
Clean Cartoonists’ Dirty Drawings Review
Yoe is really the editor of this volume, but he’s credited as the author. Admittedly, he did write all of the text (except for a foreword by R. Crumb), but the art is entirely by other hands. And the art, of course, is the whole point of this book.
As you can guess from the title, Clean Cartoonists’ Dirty Drawings collects pin-ups, gag cartoons, convention sketches, private commissions, and other various bits of risqué art from artists not generally known for such things. The artists run the gamut of comic book, comic strip and animation names, from Carl Barks and Chuck Jones to Milton Caniff and Dan DeCarlo. And the art itself is mostly mild: there are some sex gags, but the art is mostly just nudes rather than anything like a Tijuana Bible. For some that will be a positive and for some a negative; I’m just reporting it. Crumb’s foreword touches on this aspect of the book, seeing it as a gap between what’s promised and what’s delivered – and declaring, if anyone could disagree, that he knows just what a “dirty” cartoonist is, since he is one. (And Crumb’s full-page drawing by his foreword is probably the most sexually explicit piece in the book.)
There are seventy cartoonists included in all – many with just one page, and none with more than five pages of work – in this book’s 160 pages. Some of them are somewhat out of place – such as Dean Yeagle, best known for Playboy cartoons, and Adam Hughes, whose work often looks like pin-ups anyway and doesn’t really add nudity here – but most of the guys (and a tiny handful of gals) included here are regular mainstream sequential art folks who only very rarely did anything risqué. (But Yoe has ferreted it all out from its various hiding places, and assembled it all for the ages.) (more…)
Medium Rare, by John Ostrander
You can learn the damnedest things in the most unexpected places
I was paging through last week’s Entertainment Weekly, the one where they anoint their entertainers of the year, and came across four women – Glenn Close, Mary Louise Parker, Kyra Sedgewick, and Holly Hunter – all grouped together by the fact that they are over 40, that they are starring in their own TV shows on cable channels, and all had a uniting reason for doing so: the work simply wasn’t out there in movies for them.
Okay, that’s not news. And that’s what wrong. Pop culture is a reflection of our society and the way that it chooses to show certain demographics of people – including sometimes their omission – says a great deal about our society and what and who we value. While the article made me think of older women, the same point can be made for other minorities. We’re talking not only of movies and television but comic books and other entertainments as well. It is not only the portrayal of these groups – to which there is some increased sensitivity – but their omission that reveals how our society sees itself. (more…)
DC responds to piracy — 2½ years later
There’s been a lot of talk about how DC and Marvel started going after scanners and torrent sites this Thanksgiving weekend, and now Z-Cult has agreed to take down all Marvel comics and wait a month before posting any DC books.
To which my response is: what took you so long?
I have particular reason to say so: I met with DC’s vice president of legal affairs, Lillian Laserson, and her assistants, Paula Lowitt and Jay Kogen, about the issue of scans available online back in April 2005– over two and a half years ago.
At the two hour meeting which covered legal issues, business cases, media ecology, and public relations, I delivered a spreadsheet to them that was current as of April 1, 2005, showing them how many DC comics had been scanned in and were available online. This wasn’t a spread sheet I created, mind you, it was created by the scanning community showing their progress. And they had made some serious progress: I pointed out that of all the comics published by DC in their (at the time) 70 year history, over 75% of them had already been scanned in and were available online. The numbers were closer to 90% post-Crisis. In short, the genie was already pretty much out of the bottle. (more…)
Happy 45th birthday, Jon Stewart!
Jon Stewart, American comedian, iconic host of Comedy Central’s "The Daily Show" and hero to geeks all over turns 45 today. In an era of corruption and cynicism, Stewart leads the pack in irreverent humor. His open criticism of the Bush administration and personality punditry shows gives its viewers hope in the face of governmental disappointment. Granted, the president and his cronies have provided Stewart with ample material, but faced with the alternative, I think we would all prefer that Stewart have to work harder to make fun of the times at hand than have them so tragically, if easily, at his disposal.
Happy Birthday, Jon– and hell, if we can’t cry about it, thanks for helping us laugh.
Obligatory comics related video. Damn, he’s young.
