Author: Andrew Wheeler

Today’s Hot Comics Links

  • News
  • August 21, 2007

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Comics Links

Suspension of Disbelief (which I haven’t seen updated much lately, so I hope it’s back) looks at Spirit #5, and that old bad-plotting standby, beating a guy until he signs a contract/confession/whatever.

Think the San Diego Comic-Con is big? It’s only the third largest comics gathering in the world – and number one is Japan’s Comiket, held twice a year in Tokyo. This past weekend, about 550,000 people were there.

Forbidden Planet International reports on graphic novels at the recent Edinburgh International Book Festival.

Publishers Weekly reports on the recent land-rush business in movie rights for graphic novels.

Newsarama rounds up and comments on a bunch of stories about DC comics’s Zuda project.

Canada’s National Post reports on the Toronto Comic Arts Festival.

The Chicago Tribune talks to Douglas Wolk about whether comics are getting any respect.

The LA Times has noticed that some comics have been “slabbed” by CGC. Once again, the mainstream press runs about a decade behind events in the comics world…

Comics Reviews

Graeme McMillan of The Savage Critics admits that he’s a latecomer to Ultimate Spider-Man, but he likes #112.

Comics Reporter reviews an anthology comic from a few years back, Reactor Girl #6.

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Metal Men, Naruto, and Other Unfathomable Things

  • Uncategorized
  • August 20, 2007

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Comics Links

Comic Book Resources looks back at the long, odd history of the Metal Men.

The Toronto Star reports on a Toronto Comic Arts Festival presentation on four wordless graphic novels from the early 20th century.

If you’re like me, and spent much of the weekend in the company of kids watching a Naruto marathon, you might also find this Paul Gravette lecture about Naruto to be useful in explaining what the heck it all is about.

Comics Should Be Good takes a look at all of Image Comics’s October covers.

Mike Sterling discovers that if you stare at a poster of Superman’s funeral long enough, the abyss also gazes into you.

Comics Reviews

Comics Reporter reviews Rian Hughes’s Yesterday’s Tomorrows.

The New York Times reviews Emily Flake’s These Things Ain’t Gonna Smoke Themselves and Jessica Bruder’s Burning Book.

Warren Peace Sings The Blues reviews Whiteout by Rucka and Lieber.

SF/Fantasy Links

Douglas Cohen responds to comments and criticisms of his drive to increase subscriptions for print SF/Fantasy magazines.

Irene Gallo of The Art Department showcases Jon Foster’s covers for Timothy Zahn’s “Dragonback” series.

The Hugo Awards now have a website of their own – just in time for this year’s awards, which will be announced at Nippon 2007 in less than two weeks.

The UK SF Book News Network lists all of the newly-published books that they’ve received in the last three weeks.

(more…)

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Women Spotted at Comics Convention

  • News
  • August 18, 2007

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Comics Links

Comic Book Resources investigates the existence of women – often attractive women, some of whom actually read comics – at comics conventions. Astonishing! (Illustration: one of those elusive “real women.”)

A long 1977 New York Times article about Harvey Kurtzman and Mad magazine has been posted by Mike Lynch. [via Mark Evanier, who had some comments on it]

The Times (of London) checks in with Cam Kennedy and lan Grant about their in-the-works graphic novel adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde.

Mark Trail likes squirrels. [via the Comics Curmudgeon]

Kleefeld on Comics posts scans from the mid-70s Mighty Marvel Comics Strength and Fitness Book. [via everyone else blogging about comics, basically]

Comics Reviews

Bookgasm reviews the second trade paperback collecting the DC series 52.

Richard of Forbidden Planet International reviews The Other Side.

Eddie Campbell reviews Robert C. Harvey’s biography of Milton Caniff.

Dana of Comics Fodder reviews this week’s Marvel comics.

Greg Burgas of Comics Should Be Good does that one better – reviewing a pile of this week’s comics regardless of their publisher. (more…)

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The All-New 1982 Show

  • News
  • August 17, 2007

evanier-2752483Comics Links

The Beat has a few choice photos from the 1982 San Diego Comic-Con – sure, it was smaller and easier to get around, but look at the clothes they had to wear! (This photo of Mark Evanier, and the others at this link are by Alan Light.)

Todd Allen is not entirely positive in this Comics Should Be Good report on Wizard World Chicago.

Grumpy Old Fan (at Newsarama) pokes at the current legal issues around Superboy’s ownership.

The Beat has posted the official, lawyer-approved settlement agreement between Fantagraphics and Harlan Ellison.

Comics Reviews

Charleston City Paper reviews a few comics collections, including Flight, Vol. 4 and Linda Medley’s Castle Waiting.

Blogcritics reviews the first issues of Black Adam and Metal Men.

The A.V. Club has a comics review column this week, starting off with Fletcher Hanks’s I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets and covering over a dozen other compilations or original GNs.

Comics Reporter reviews Postcards: True Stories That Never Happened.

Comics Reporter reviews Gilbert Hernandez’s Chance in Hell.

Brian Cronin at Comics Should Be Good reviews Good As Lily, the new Minx comic.

The Savage Critics usually has a couple of reviews every day (and I’m too lazy to link to every single one of them); here’s Graeme McMillan writing about a bunch of comics that came out last week.

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing reviews Death Valley. (more…)

STRIP REVIEW: LoserPalooza

  • Uncategorized
  • August 15, 2007

loserpalooza-5360067First, the consumer report: LoserPalooza is a treasury-sized collection, which means it’s larger and more expensive than the usual run of comic-strip collections, and also that it collects strips from two previous smaller collections. In this case, LoserPalooza has the comics from Say Cheezy and Scrum Bums. LoserPalooza does have the Sunday strips in color, though, so it’s not entirely twice-baked beans. (It’s also rarely clear whether a strip is being reprinted in its entirety to begin with, or if all of the strips from the smaller collections make it into the Treasuries; specifically, it’s not clear in this case.)

Get Fuzzy is one of the most successful new strips of the past decade, and possibly the most successful strip launch since Dilbert in 1989. (The competition includes strips like Pickles, Baby Blues, and Adam @ Home, which aren’t as edgy as Get Fuzzy and so are probably in more papers daily. On the other hand, Get Fuzzy seems to be one of the most successful comics when it comes to selling reprint collections, so it’s hard to tell which strip actually makes the most money or has the most readers.) In any case, it’s still fairly young, for a daily newspaper strip, and it’s grown to a lot of papers pretty quickly.

As the characters note in a storyline mid-way through this book, Get Fuzzy could be seen as a Bizarro-world version of Garfield. A man of indeterminate age (Rob Wilco) lives with a cat (Bucky) and a dog (Satchel), and funny stuff ensues. Except, in Get Fuzzy, we don’t identify with the cat – Bucky is clearly insane (as all cats are). Satchel is lovable but dim, also like most dogs. And Rob isn’t quite as much of a loser as Jon Arbuckle. Well, he is a vegan rugby fan who hasn’t had a date in years, does something unspecified involving crunching numbers, and roots for the Red Sox – so maybe I should say that he’s a more realistic loser than Jon is. Get Fuzzy doesn’t have the ground-into-the-turf running jokes Garfield does – and I hope it won’t, even if it runs for thirty years – but it’s vastly younger than Garfield is, and hasn’t had time to get stale.

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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Shenanigans

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Yes, the title is “Shenanigans,” with quotation marks already in place. No, I don’t know why. It’s not a direct quote, there’s no place named Shenanigans in the story, and it doesn’t seem to be an ironic “air-quote,” either. (There’s more than one bar in this book that could easily have been named Shenanigans, but none of them actually are.) It’s just an annoying, unnecessary tic.

“Shenanigans” is pleasant but unexceptional, a frothy romantic comedy that I suspect started off as a screenplay and probably would have worked better in filmed form. It takes place in St. Louis, where our creepy main character, Holden, gets kicked out of his girlfriend’s apartment at Christmas-time for obsessively playing videogames instead of going out to dinner with her. I’m not sure how old he is; he seems to be a student, but we really don’t get a sense of his normal day-to-day life or a solid idea of what he does for a living. The one thing we see him doing seems like a college work-study program: teaching kids to play hockey. Although…he does seem to sponge off the women in his life, which may be a clue as to his lifestyle.

Holden meets a young woman named Casey, and moves in with her that night. (Help me out here: is that as weird and unrealistic as I think it is, or are twenty-somethings really that friendly these days?) They also sleep in the same bed the night they meet, but don’t have sex, which is just a bizarre combination, especially since the story takes pains to point out that they didn’t have sex. Between the scenes that we see, they drift into something like a normal boyfriend-girlfriend relationship (except for the fact that he’s sponging off her as he did with his last girlfriend), and presumably they start having sex at some point…though the story doesn’t feel the need to explain that point.

Then the story finally starts: Casey has been working as a waitress, but decides to start tutoring college students in math instead. Her qualifications: she’s really really good at mental arithmetic, and she’s totally hot. (No, seriously. There’s no sign that she has a math degree, or anything of that nature. So she seems to be coaching college students in, at best, high-school algebra. My opinion of the fine colleges of St. Louis is still diving as I type this.) Since she’s totally hot, all of her clients are horndog young men who think they’re going to score with her, so her tutoring sessions consist mostly of her edging away from them. She doesn’t seem to realize this, which I suppose makes her some sort of idiot savant…or maybe not a savant. Speaking of not realizing things, her advertisements are clearly based on those for prostitutes, which Holden instantly realized (well, he would, wouldn’t he?), but Casey just doesn’t see.

(more…)

Do I Have To Say It?

  • Uncategorized
  • August 13, 2007

batman-8980031Graeme McMillan of The Savage Critics discovers the single best panel of the week (see above) and reviews Batman #667. No, seriously – does anyone else think that looks like Halloween about three doors down from stately Wayne Manor?

Newsarama has two sets of pictures from Wizard World Chicago – mostly of people in costumes, natch.

Ain’t It Cool News reads the current script for the Thor movie, and likes it.

Your sign of the apocalypse of the day: bikini-clad stormtroopers. (Insert your own “Aren’t you too…to be a stormtrooper” joke here.)

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing reviews the graphic novel Giant Robot Warriors by Stuart Moore and Ryan Kelly.

The Toronto Star reviews Warren Ellis’s novel Crooked Little Vein.

Movies Online interviews someone they called “Neil Gaimon” about the movie “StarDust.” I wonder if they asked him about his comics series Snadman, or his young readers novel Caroline? (And is he any relation to Charles Dickkens, the well-known Dutch author?)

Comics Reporter interviews Doug TenNapel, cartoonist of Black Cherry.

Greg Hatcher of Comics Should Be Good wants to write about the “Entwistles of comics.”

Neth Space reviews the new anthology The New Space Opera, edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan.

The UK SF Book News Network talked to Chris Robertson about his new novel, Set the Seas on Fire.

Yatterings reviews InterWorld, the new novel for young readers by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves.

John Scalzi of Ficlets interviews David Anthony Durham, author of Acacia.

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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Notes for a War Story

In its original Italian form, Notes for a War Story won the 2005 Goscinny Prize for Best Script and was the Best Book of the Year for 2006 at the Angouleme comics festival, so I have to assume that it’s one of the very best European works of recent years. Which is unfortunate, since I found it only moderately successful.

It’s set in an unnamed European country, during an unnamed conflict among unspecified groups, in the vaguely recent past. All the non-specificity is meant to give it an aura of timelessness, or of dislocation, or something like that, but it left this reader feeling as if I were wandering about in a fog. Compared to the specificity and closely-observed detail of a book like Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde, Notes from a [[[War Story]]] is thin and ineffectual, unwilling to commit to being for anything, or against anything other than the very abstract idea of war.

The plot follows three young men – Giuliano, Christian, and Little Killer – who are scavenging in a region of small villages being bombed by enemy forces. They’re not in the armed forces, and they never encounter anything like regular armed forces, not even as much as seeing a bomber in the sky. They’re supposedly in the middle of a war, but they are actually seen in a mostly-depopulated landscape, drifting into gangsterhood.

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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Laika

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This graphic novel is pretty good just on its own terms, but it’s an excellent object lesson. If you know of anyone who thinks that comics are essentially limited in scope to brightly-clad folks punching each other with great vigor, this will help to expand their horizons. It’s the story of Laika, a Russian dog who was the first living creature from Earth deliberately sent outside the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s an impressively-researched story braiding a fictional back-story for Laika (and several other characters I believe are also fictionalized) with the story of the “Chief Designer” of the early Russian space program, Sergei Korolev. And all that is told in comics, and, I suspect, primarily aimed at the grade 6-12 audience.

I’m not familiar with Adadzis’s work, but the note on him in [[[Laika]]] calls him an editorial consultant who “creates words and pictures for a living and loves both equally.” According to his website, muck of his work has been for children, especially recently, though he did something called Millennium Fever (with Duncan Fegredo) for Vertigo in 1995 and [[[Children of the Voyager]]] (with Paul Johnson) for Marvel in 1993.

Laika is a dense book; we start off with a flashback to Korolev’s release from the gulag in 1939, stop briefly at the first successful Sputnik launch in 1957, and then dive back into a long account of the life of a dog. (Who, as we all can guess, eventually becomes Laika.) This graphic novel is about two hundred pages long, and each page has about ten small panels, in shifting grids with occasional snippets of white space. And there’s quite a lot of dialogue along the way, in what I’m tempted to call the Russian manner. It’s not a quick read by any means, and the panels can get quite cramped at times. It’s never difficult to read, but there is an awful lot here. Those who judge books by how much time they take to read should enjoy Laika.

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Giant Lego Man: Threat or Menace?

  • News
  • August 10, 2007

 

 

 lego-7918767Baffling News Story of the Day: Dutch children discover and befriend a giant Lego man in the sea. AOL claims that he’s “smiling,” but I’m more familiar with the standard Lego faces than they are – that, my friend, is a smirk, which means this story is not yet done. (Hey, I just had a thought — any chance that this guy is the monster from the secret "Cloverfield" movie?)

Comics Reporter reaches way back to review 1967’s Marvel Collector’s Item Classics #13.

Neil Gaiman talks to NPR about Stardust (you’ll have to listen to it, not read it).

Comics Alliance interviews Eddie Campbell.

Sequential Tart interviews Gail Simone about her plans for Wonder Woman.

USA Today has a graphic novel roundup.

The Ephemerist thinks that Garfield is the new Nancy. When I see Jim Davis drawing three lasagna pans in the background, then I’ll worry.

Chris’s Invincible Super-Blog reviews Nick Abadzis’s graphic novel Laika. (Which I’ve just read; look for a review here in a few days, Gawd willing and the creek don’t rise.)

Comics Should Be Good’s latest Reason to Love Comics: Fin Fang Foom, baby!

Ralph’s Comic Corner of Ventura, CA was recently robbed. But it’s not as bad as it would have been – the robbers “walked by actual cash money to steal Spawn and Witchblade.”

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing thinks Brian Talbot’s Alice in Sunderland is the “single weirdest graphic novel [he’s] ever enjoyed.” I smell a pull-quote for the second edition!

Dana of Comic Fodder reviews her usual weekly batch of Marvel comics. (more…)

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