Author: Elayne Riggs

VINNIE BARTILUCCI: ComicFest from the inside

In the early 90’s I had made a fair to middling name for myself in comics fandom. I was a regular on the CompuServe forums, was running a comics APA of my own, THWACK!, and had started submitting to CAPA-Alpha. I had started writing articles for Wizard magazine, which is how I made friends with Pat O’Neill, their first Editor-in-Chief.

One night Pat contacted me to tell me that Gareb Shamus (Wizard‘s owner) was looking to do a comics con, and wondered if I was interested in running it. Well, he was close to being right — it was a friend of Gareb’s, David Greenhill, who had made a fortune in the sports card industry, and was looking to move to comics. Not as a speculator (there were soon to be plenty of them) but as the promoter of a comics show.

David’s idea was to bring a lot of the "business" of the card industry to comics. His ideas were good – too many comics shops were (and still are) run as if they were hobbies, and most comics shows didn’t make any attempt to market to the general public. He planned to change that. He planned to hire a major PR firm to push the show, get the publishers to invest in the show both financially and with publicity, a lot of big ideas. He just didn’t know how to actually run a show.

Well neither did I, but I wasn’t tellin’ him that…

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ELAYNE RIGGS: The Golden Age of ComicFest

elayne200-5677311The crazier my responsibilities get (yes, I’ve missed posting here as well) and the more I lurch toward the Big 5-0, which I will now commemorate near year’s end without a father and without a best friend, the more I yearn for simpler times. Of course, "simpler" is as relative and subjective a term as they come. In political parlance, it usually means "a time in the hazy past whose values were clearly espoused on fictional TV shows that we can no longer distinguish from reality because they either filmed before we were born or they encompass the way we wish things were or should have been," which explains a lot about our current administration because it’s never a good idea to consciously try to fit reality to fiction, whether you’re talking about Father Knows Best or 1984 or even Star Trek.

In a personal sense, "simpler" usually means "before my life had as much heartache and difficulty, and when there were supportive pillars that I always thought would be there." And it’s weird, because "always" isn’t always as permanent as we seem to think it is.

Take my Golden Age of Comics. A writer once opined that everyone’s Golden Age of Comics is 12. Not for me. For me it began in my mid-20s when my first husband, Steve Chaput, got me hooked for good on indies and, thanks to Crisis on Infinite Earths, the new streamlined DC Universe. (My best friend in college, the late great Bill-Dale Marcinko, tried mightily to get me interested in late-70s Marvel fare, but it was all too soap-opera’y for me back then. In those days I hated the idea of soaps. Nowadays I can’t wait for the next episode of Ugly Betty. Go figure.) By 1993 Steve and I had discovered online fandom, which still consisted mostly of folks in the CompuServe Comics and Animation Forum (yep, this was pre-Usenet; I wouldn’t make my first tentative posts to those comic groups until 1994), and we were making plans to help out our friend Vinnie Bartilucci (who had actually introduced us to the wonders of email and suchlike) with the running of the Greatest Comic Convention Ever.

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May sweeps at ComicMix

We’d like to welcome Michael A. Price to the Mix — see his Forgotten Horrors #1 below.  It’s always nice to have another contributor take the heat off an overworked news editor!  Between him and Martha (who’s occasional column now has a name, Brilliant Disguise) and Robert and Matt and Glenn, I’m starting to lose count…) Here’s our round-up of regular weekly columns:

Mellifluous Mike Raub‘s podcasts keep getting Bigger and Broader:

And don’t forget our very special premiere videocast, in which EIC Mike Gold hints at greater things to come…

Batgirl’s bid for equal rights

  • Uncategorized
  • May 5, 2007

Oh sure, we could link to the Avi Arad interview, or the many mainstream news articles on Free Comic Book Day, but everyone else is doing that, plus due to burnout from another killer work week we aren’t going anywhere today.  Not to our local comic stores, not to the movies, not even outside for any fresh air.  We just can’t justify reading and watching brand-new stuff whilst there’s so much almost-new stuff which we have yet to peruse.

Okay, we cheated a little and read some MySpace Countdown even though we’ve only just finished 52 #48 and won’t even get the last few issues of that title for a few weeks.  (We know 52 is finished because Greg Rucka sounds even more burnt out than we do.)  If we were the impatient type we could probably read them at a comic shop today — but no.  We’re getting a bit old for this.  We actually remember a time, for instance, when women weren’t paid nearly as much as men, as pointed out in this PSA from over 30 years ago which Tom Peyer found:

Ah, nostalgia.  Thank goodness that sort of gender discrimination’s no longer going on!

Spidey and Supes’ YouTube chat

Via Val D’Orazio, here’s a delightful parody of the Mac vs. PC commercials as action figures of Spider-Man and Superman discuss Marvel vs. DC movies.

Just one more thing to get you psyched for Spidey 3, in case you weren’t already.

Iron Man’s all shiny!

ironman_suit-9555339Thanks, Entertainment Weekly!  This is the shiznit!

Okay, I know lots of people out there liked the old square tincan one, but this — this is sleek and brassy and colorful and… well, it just looks like I’d picture Iron Man’s armor looking.

Kudos to FX guy Stan Winston, who designed them to fit on a real-life and, we’re figuring, increasingly sweaty Robert Downey, Jr.

Also?  IESB has some video from the set of the Iron Man movie.

Now – Classics from the UK

Remember how last Sunday I was lamenting the lack of comics based on classical literature by, say, "Virginia Woolf or a Bronte or two?"  Well, via Down the Tubes comes news of a new UK-based company starting up to tackle even more classic literature in a graphic format.

Classical Comics hopes to have its first titles up and running by next year, and lookie here (at right), Jane Eyre will be one of them!  (Not only that, but it will be adapted by Amy Cozine — great to see more women writers turning to comics!)

CC’s first adaptation, of Shakespeare’s Henry V, should be out this October.  Forbidden Planet International  has some sample pages.  Also planned are adaptations of Macb— er, The Scottish Play, as well as Dickens’ Great Expectations.  Which definitely describes my hopes for this company.  The more ways we can reintroduce cool books by dead writers to new readers, the more we can immortalize their wonderful prose.

Cartoonists Conundrum

While we’ve been in the throes of office hell, we’ve noticed some changes going on in cartoonist-land that bear passing along:

  • Alison Bechdel has announced that she’s cutting back on production of her popular Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip from biweekly to monthly, in order to work on her new memoir, which she estimates will be ready in 2009.  She’ll be interspersing the new strips with "archive strips" (aka reruns), the first of which was published today — check out the very first episode of DTWOF, from 20 years ago!  (And be sure to check out Amanda Marcotte’s review of Bechdel’s Fun Home on the A-list political blog Pandagon.)
  • Mikhaela Reid passes along the news about Ward Sutton ending Sutton Impact (check out The Beat for more) and about the closing of The New Standard, a very friendly venue for political cartoonists which will be sorely missed.  (See Glenn’s post below for further cartoonist troubles at larger circulation papers.)
  • We do have some good news to pass along, however.  The Ormes Society’s Cheryl Lynn has kicked off the Torchy Brown Art Meme over at her blog, the results of which will be published on TOS’s site.  (That’s Torchy over on the right.)  And Heidi MacDonald crows that the House of Twelve Comic Jam folks have a new meeting place, starting this very evening.  It’s not far from Jim Hanley’s, so Manhattanites can grab their weekly haul and a drink with that jam, if they have the bread.

And if you are going to drink, please draw responsibly.

ELAYNE RIGGS: Forward into the past

elayne200-3491864The comics industry stands at an exciting crossroads. International acceptance of graphic literature is starting to have a positive effect on how Americans see non-superhero genres, as manga saturates teen audiences and award-winning autiobiographical novels like Fun Home and Persepolis enthrall adults. When you factor the geek contingent into that, as even the superhero genre (the one most non-comics readers associate and conflate with the medium itself) gains mainstream acceptance in blockbuster movies and hit TV shows, it would seem to be another Golden Age for the artform. The future of print and online comics looks healthier than ever.

So why is so much of the comics industry still mired in the past?

Take Previews, for instance. Now, Diamond Comics distribution and comic book retailers do many things right. Diamond’s comic store locator provides a valuable service, and Free Comic Book Day (this Saturday, don’t forget to peruse your local store with someone "new" to comics!) has become a much-anticipated event. And I suspect Previews isn’t as much a problem as a symptom of a wider dilemma facing brick-and-mortar specialty stores caught in the timeline between the demise of newsstand and mom-and-pop outlets (where many of today’s adult readers bought their first comics) and the promise of mainstream bookstores and targeted online purchasing.

Personally, I think the root of the problem is non-returnable product.

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Chuck Jones at the OC

  • News
  • April 30, 2007

readtosucceed-1734735ComicMix friend (and my first husband) Steve Chaput reports that the Orange Public Library & History Center (in Orange California) where he works, has just opened its doors featuring an art exhibition called Read To Succeed®, sponsored by the Chuck Jones Center for Creativity and Orange Public Library.

The exhibition includes original, hand‑painted animation cels which have never before been available for public viewing, and will be on display through mid-September.

The press release mentions of Jones, "A voracious reader himself, Chuck relished the opportunity to sketch and paint a variety of colorful works showing Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, Wile E. Coyote, Road Runner, Porky Pig, Sylvester, Tweety, Pepé Le Pew, and other characters finding knowledge, fun, and adventure in the pages of books."

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