Monthly Archive: February 2009

Challengers Comics is holding a kid friendly event this Valentine’s Day to celebrate the release of  the Tiny Titans "Welcome to the Treehouse" collection by renowned artist Art Baltazar.  The event will run from 12:00-3:00 on February 14, 2009 and will include free Tiny Titan themed sweets, valentines, signings by the artist and anyone who shows up to Tiny Titans Day in costume, kid or adult, gets a free Tiny Titans comic signed by Baltazar.   As if that isn’t enough, fans can come get their picture taken with characters from the book for free as well.  Challengers Comics is located at 1845 N. Western Ave in the West Town neighborhood of Chicago.

     “We know everyone is having a tough time right now and we wanted to do something to give back to the neighborhood we now call home”, explained co-owner of Challengers Comics Patrick Brower. “Tiny Titans are the kid friendly version of the Teen Titans a fan favorite book from DC Comics.  It’s been a hit with comic book readers young and old and is a great way for whole families to enjoy reading together.” The other co-owner of Challengers Comics, W. Dal Bush, commented “Art Baltazar has been working on various major comics for over a decade and is a downright nice guy. He’s a hometown Chicagoan who is a great example of what hard work and persistence can achieve.”

Two years ago today, on February 10, 2007, ComicMix went live to the world. In that short time, I’ve seen a lot, worked some very long hours, pulled many all-nighters, and would like to think I’ve come to some useful observations about the industry, which I now share with you.

1. The only think more disruptive to your regular work schedule and overall concentration than long-term hourly blogging would be posting the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42 every 108 minutes to a website. But we keep at it.

2. There are more of you out there than you think. There are more of us out there than we thought. Finding them all has been the challenging part. There’s always somebody who hasn’t gotten the word. The number of times someone has come up to me at a convention and said "GrimJack is back? I had no idea!" is still astounding to me.

3. Research and development, in comics and in technical matters, is not predictable. If it was, it wouldn’t be research and development, would it? But we continue to try and improve the website every day, and we keep pushing at the boundraries of comics. Lots of it may be invisible to you until it suddenly appears– but that’s the way the best magic works.

4. There is an almost staggering amount of creative work going on out there, so much so that it’s in danger of overwhelming Sturgeon’s Law. And happily, it’s a mix of styles and content, appealing to every niche– and every (you’ll pardon the phrase) mix. You want a story of zombies vs. vampires, you got it. You want pretty young girls meddling with mad science? No problem. And so on.

5. You never do a massive undertaking like this alone. I started to write up a list of all the people who have helped us out over the last two years plus and easily topped two hundred people– to all of them, who’ve helped us out in good times and bad, thank you all.

6. The Internet is still a big scary place to a lot of companies– and that’s really a shame, because that’s where all of their readers are hanging out nowadays, and it’s a lot cheaper than pushing paper around at a loss. But that’s a subject for a much longer post.

Again, thanks to everyone who’s contributed to ComicMix— writing, drawing, commenting, reading, or just having fun. Here’s to the future. See you in 108 minutes or so.

A collection of news items that have come in over the last few days while we’ve been recovering from NYCC.

• KC Carlson is also recovering, but from a mini-stroke instead of con crud. Get well soon, big guy.
• Brett Ratner directing Youngblood, according to Variety. So if you love what he did with X-Men 3… and Rob Liefeld continues one heck of a lucky streak.
• Denys Cowan alerted me to the existence of a Black Panther trailer for the BET series this summer, but for some reason Marvel didn’t make it embeddable. Because, I presume, they don’t want to let people share and promote it. Way to go, Marvel. Go follow the link.
• Rich Johnston for the win:
  Daniel Dae Kim, better known as Jin off of “Lost”, also attending the New York Comic Convention this weekend, in his capacity of being in “Lost,” “24,” “Enterprise,” “Angel,” “Hulk,” “Crusade” and all that. But he also wanted to walk around the show, buy comics, meet creators etc, without getting mobbed. So someone found him a “V For Vendetta” mask, letting Daniel walk around untouched for hours.
  As I start looking through all my photos…
• And finally, Spider-Man cake wrecks. (Hat tip: Lisa Sullivan.)

Anything else we missed? Consider this an open thread.

08: A Graphic Diary of the Campaign Trail
By Michael Crowley and Dan Goldman
Three Rivers Press, January 2009, $17.95

Typically, there are two kinds of non-fiction books about big events – first are the quick-and-dirty ones that come out almost immediately, pulled together from news reports or written on the fly or just knocked out by a writer with lightning fingers. The other is the “think piece” – longer, more measured, with time for distance and clarity. They each have their strengths: the quick books can crystallize a mood, and remind us of what we felt at the time, while the slower books tend to be the ones that last. It happens with all kinds of nonfictional topics, from biographies (the quickies come out after the personage has done something major, such as died) to political scandals to social movements.

But the area that attracts more quick books than any other is high-level politics – since the energy available to be expended on political arguments, thoughts, and post-mortems is effectively infinite; the winners are always happy to relive their victories and the losers are desperate to know how to win the next time. So every four years there’s a wave of books about the US presidential race: it starts slow, about a year out, with potted campaign biographies and thinly disguised position papers and various attempts to influence the debate. Once the race gets going in earnest, the Swift Boats start running – quick-and-dirty books (usually as dirty as possible) aimed at real or perceived weaknesses, plus new or updated versions of the first kind of books. And then there’s another rush after the election is done, praising or damning the winner, and explaining how everything will be utterly different, unless it’s going to be completely the same. At the same time, reporters bash their campaign columns into shape and shove them out the door as books, or quickly explain for posterity how they knew all of the important things all along. Finally, the slower, more thoughtful books – things like [[[What It Takes]]] and [[[The Selling of the President]]] – come along a year or so later…just as the machine starts to gear up for the next time around.

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