Happy Thtar Warth Day!
May the Fourth be with you.
And a good thing too– Clone War advocates are everywhere.
Monthly Archive: May 2009
ComicMix Quick Picks – May 3, 2009
A weekend window-closing wrap-up:
- The hardest core Wolverine fan you’ve ever seen… unless someone’s actually gotten their skeleton laced with adamantium.
- The Seven Stages of the Comics Critic – comiXology
- Interview: Heroes artist Tim Sale on the true colour of Batman and Spider-Man
- The Comics Reporter: More staffers leaving Wizard?
- Warren Ellis on the genesis of Global Frequency:
I defined GLOBAL FREQUENCY from the start as Rescue Fiction. if not
explicitly Post-9/11 Rescue Fiction. Because Thunderbirds is the
anti-Superman. Now, I just woke up, so it’s okay if that doesn’t make
sense. But immediately after 9/11 I found people on message boards
ACTUALLY SAYING OUT LOUD that they wished Superman were real because he
would have saved the WTC. And that is an anti-evolutionary wish. What
you say is, I wish the dozen or so people who knew this was going to
happen could have informed someone who’d actually listen and that we
had had the sense/madness to engineer a mechanical response to someone
attacking NYC with flying death tubes. - Hooray, hooray, the first of May. And you know what that means– it’s time for The Wicker Man: May Day Mayhem Onscreen!
- If Destroyed, Still True: Remarkable coincidence alert!: Jonathan Maberry writes a Wolverine story and gets caught creating sockpuppets defending it. I tell people they’ll get caught if they write something under a different name, or if they hire someone to write under their name, but do they listen? Noooo…
Anything else? Consider this an open thread.
Ric Estrada: 1928-2009
Mark Evanier passes on the sad news that Ric Estrada has passed away at the age of 81.
Estrada was perhaps best known for his work on Amethyst: Prince of Gemworld, Karate Kid, Wonder Woman and numerous DC war and romance comics. Later in his career, he moved into animation with such 1980s TV series as He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Jonny Quest and Bionic Six. He was an Ink-Pot Award winner, a friend of the late Ernest Hemingway, a contemporary of Fidel Castro, and I believe he was ambidextrous as well, and could draw with both hands at the same time.
Estrada is the subject of an upcoming feature-length documentary being produced by his son Seth. You can read more about it here.
Our condolences to his family and friends.
Free Comic Book Day…?
But at ComicMix, every day is Free Comic Book Day! Go and read them if you don’t believe me, the links are all in the sidebar. And there are bunches of webcomics you should be reading that are free every day…
Nevertheless, it is an annual rarity for stores to be handing out free comics and so attention must be paid. http://www.freecomicbookday.com has all the details, including a list of all the comics and the signings.
If you need to find a comic book store, call 888-COMIC-BOOK, go to comicshoplocator.com, or download the iPhone app.
And hey, FCBD even has a comercial this year!
The Point – May 1st, 2009
WOLVERINE is on movie screens from coast to coast and now it is a wait for the numbers game. we talk to Michael Uslan who recalls what was like waiting for the same a few years ago with a film called BATMAN BEGINS and then great ready for the scoop on what his next super hero project will be (look here for a hint). Meanwhile, since you are already in the theaters, check out BATTLE FOR TERRA – but only after you hear our exclusive interview with the creator/director of the new animated film.
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Review: Wolverine reference books
It’s fascinating to see the same material presented in competing books, approached in entirely different ways. DK Publishing, the successful home to the various character-specific Ultimate Guides, offers up Wolverine: Inside the World of the Living Weapon (200 pages, $24.99) while Pocket Books, which has been home to the Marvel novels, gives us The Wolverine Files (160 pages, $40). The former is written by DK mainstay Matthew K. Manning while Mike W. Barr, not a writer normally associated with guide books or Wolverine, handles the second book.
Both detail the character’s background, his friends, his foes, his greatest capers, and a look at his deeply fractured psyche and tortured soul.
However, Manning’s book gives readers a far more detailed accounting of the backgrounds of the characters and storylines. Taking a chronological approach, he offers up overview of specific eras followed by key issue spotlights plus long looks at the key people in his life, both the good and the evil. Interspersed are also short bits regarding how the stories fit in with the overall publishing program at Marvel along with some insight into the creators and their efforts. As a result, this is a far richer, and cheaper, reading experience.
DK, known for its hyperkinetic layouts, tones things done here and makes each spread easier to read, with nice call outs, and judicious graphic selections showing the great range of art styles employed through the years.
If this book is to be faulted, it’s in not providing enough information regarding the behind-the-scenes work that led to these stories and events. For example, why did Bill Jemas decide that 2001 was the time to finally provide Logan with an origin? Also, Wolverine’s unusual friendships with Jubilee and Kitty Pryde are given short-shrift and both deserved more space.
Barr’s approach is the more creative, with files, reports, letters and memos from the people in Wolverine’s life summing up the man’s background and career. Written from the point of view of Nick Fury, Natasha Romanov, Jasper Sitwell and others, it has varied voices which make for a different reading experience.
The book is more cleanly designed, resembling a S.H.I.E.L.D. case file with tabs along the edge to replicate the look of a report. There are margin notes from Fury and sections are redacted to give it that “declassified look”. The profiles of people and places read not too different from a Marvel Handbook page and the art skews to the works from the last decade and could have benefited from material culled from earlier points in his publishing career.
While a more varied read, it’s also not as complete a dossier and for $40, it should offer a lot more, especially with the competitive book.
If both books are beyond your wallet, Marvel competes with their licensees with [[[Wolverine: Weapon X Files]]], a 64-page comic book for a mere $4.99. Head writer Jeff Christiansen and his ten colleagues have the advantage of the files being the most up-to-date given the shorter schedule for a comic versus a book. The Handbook pages follow the traditional format and scream for a redesign and the pick-up art is hit or miss.
Want more Wolverine after seeing the movie this weekend? You have plenty of options.
Manga Friday: A Drifting Life
A Drifting Life
By Yoshihiro Tatsumi
Drawn & Quarterly, April 2009, $29.99
It’s hard, sometimes impossible, to avoid a tunnel-visioned view of the world – not to have one’s mental map of things resemble that famous Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover, with familiar things reassuringly large and the rest of the world a small, distant blur. And so everything we learn gets filtered through that initial world-view, with each fact setting itself into place like a brick and used as shorthand for huge swaths of that surrounding blur, and a few isolated facts pass for “knowledge” of something far away.
For most of us, the history of manga goes like this: Tezuka sprung, fully-formed, sometime after the war. There were other creators, but hardly anybody can remember any of them. Eventually, the shonen-shojo gulf appeared, in the ‘70s, and real manga history started, with series that we can usually remember and some that we’ve actually read. Maybe we believe that because so very little of the first generation of manga has ever been translated into English, and maybe that’s because most of those stories are utterly ephemeral and best forgotten even by the Japanese. Or maybe not – but how would we know what was good, what the artistic movements, the creators, the publishing lines and magazines were fifty years ago in a country on the other side of the world, in a language where we can’t even tell where words end?
That’s where A Drifting Life comes in. It’s another one of those bricks: isolated, yes. Specific rather than comprehensive, absolutely. Biased, certainly. But it’s the story of those years, of the early days of manga from 1945 through 1960, from a creator who was there, and telling a semi-fictionalized story of a culture, an industry and a time we knew nothing about before.
Drawn & Quarterly has published three books of Tatsumi’s work before this, three collections of his short stories from the 1969-1972 period: The Push Man and Other Stories, Abandon the Old in Tokyo, and Good-Bye. A Drifting Life comes from somewhat later in his career, though how much later isn’t clear. It’s been said that Tatsumi worked on this for more than a decade, and the epilogue – set in 1995 – has the feeling of bringing the story up to the “present day.” So, from that evidence, I surmise that Tatsumi worked on A Drifting Life from the mid-80s to the mid-90s, with serious uncertainty about both ends of that assumption. But it does look like he came to write this memoir long after the events he’s writing about, and probably at least a decade after he created the other stories we’ve seen from him.
The Many Origins of Wolverine
If you’ve read ORIGIN: The Story of Wolverine, Weapon X and various issues of his own title and the X-Men books, then you know the basic background of the mysterious mutant called Logan and the secrets behind who he was in the past. It took many years to piece together, but we finally learned the truth.
Basically, Wolverine was born James Howlett, later taking on the name Logan after discovering he was a mutant with heightened senses, advanced healing, a connection to animals, and bone claws that could extend from his hand.
Logan traveled the world, becoming a samurai at heart, later becoming involved in the Weapon X project, working alongside his old enemy Victor Creed AKA Sabretooth, a mutant who had similar abilities but none of Logan’s compassion. Weapon X eventually attempted to turn him into a bio-weapon, burying most of his memoies, implanting false ones, and lacing his skeleton and bone claws with the unbreakable metal adamantium. After escaping Weapon X, he worked for the government for a few years before finally joining the X-Men. Since then, he has become a true hero, discovering his whole past in recent years.
But this story was not intended from the beginning. There were a few other proposed ideas for Wolverine that were discarded. There were ideas hinted at but later disproved or simply never followed up on.
Want to hear more? Read on.
Grave of the Anime Companies: Central Park Media Files for Bankruptcy
Anime and manga distributor Central Park Media filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy last Friday, which means that the company does not plan to restructure and its assets will be liquidated. CPM put out such classic anime as “Revolutionary Girl Utena,” “Project A-Ko,” “Demon City Shinjuku” and “Grave of the Fireflies.” They also published yaoi manga under the Be Beautiful imprint as well as assorted shojo and shonen titles. However, they hadn’t issued any new releases in a year.
This news comes less than two years after the collapse of Geneon USA. Apparently, CPM won’t comment on how they got to this unfortunate pass, although they’ve obviously been struggling for some time. Of course, times are tough in publishing, and the bottom’s dropping out of the manga market in Japan. Geneon also cited illegal downloading as a factor in their troubles, and I’m wondering what role that played in CPM’s demise.
It’s sort of ironic, really. Fan subs and scanlations helped build the manga and anime industry in the U.S., and now they’re probably helping to tear it down.
Amy Goldschlager is an editor at findingDulcinea, the Librarian of the Internet, and SweetSearch, the smarter search engine.
‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ open thread
Go ahead, you can talk about it legitimately now.
