Author: Elayne Riggs

Videogames sharpen eyesight

  • News
  • March 23, 2007

p-computer-play-5038992I’ve long considered myself on the 20th century side of the technology gap.  I’m geared for slower entertainment, like reading.  Even the shifting camerawork on most TV dramas makes my eyes hurt.

So I have no idea what to make of the new study indicating that "playing action video games for an hour or so daily actually helps sharpen visual acuity."  The study’s lead author, Daphne Bavelier (a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester) notes that "action-video-game play changes the way our brains process visual information.

"After just 30 hours of training, people who didn’t normally play video games showed a substantial increase in the spatial resolution of their vision, meaning they could see small, closely packed letters, like those on an eye chart, more clearly, even when other symbols crowded in."

As a person who doesn’t normally play video games, and really resents my bifocals, I view this as potentially good news, and await instruction from WomenGamers on how best to go about improving my vision.

State of newspaper cartooning

  • News
  • March 23, 2007

Via Tom Spurgeon, The Tacoma Daily Index’s Todd Matthews examines the current state and status of political and editorial cartoonists, with an emphasis on the Washington state papers.  Quotes like "The state of newspaper cartooning nationally is not a happy one" and "Political cartoonists are a dying breed" do not seem to bode well.

Similarly, via Heidi, Lev Grossman at Time Magazine also observes that "Comic strips in newspapers are dying. They’re starved for space, crushed down to a fraction of their original size. They’re choked creatively by ironfisted syndicates and the 1950s-era family values that newspapers impose."  and like Matthews, Grossman is hopeful that the new media will be the savior of editorial cartoons and strips, taking a more in-depth look at webcomics.

ComicMix will continue to follow the death and rebirth of these well-established artformsm, to see how well newspaper features can still flourish without being in the newspapers themselves.

What’s up this weekend

  • News
  • March 23, 2007

While some of us in the New York area are starting off I-CON weekend by listening to live streaming of The Comic Book Novice tonight at 9 PM Eastern (penciller and Dreamchilde Press head honcho James Rodriguez is the guest), we understand that things are actually happening in the rest of the world.  I don’t quite believe it, but I’ll take these people’s word for it:

At 5:30 PM today, you can catch cartoonist Keith Knight at the University of Florida in Gainesville.  Hey, Michael Davis is black, why wasn’t he invited to this?

Seeing Things: The Art of Jim Woodring opens tomorrow at Seattle’s Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery.

In addition to TMNT, the kids movie The Last Mimzy bows today nationwide (Matt Raub reviews it on ComicMix Podcast; scroll down), and Jenna Fischer assures folks "It is a very cute kid’s movie…better than most in the sense that it isn’t cut and paced like a rock video.  It is actually sweet and magical and interesting.  Oh…and you get to see Rainn’s ass.  Well, you see him in his undies bending over at the fridge.  Angela and I were giggling like schoolgirls.  Were were like, ‘Woah!  There is Rainn’s ass on a giant movie screen!’  (I’m sure the boys from The Office will be saying something similar about my ‘ladies’ when we see Blades of Glory next week.)"  Glenn can have his Sopranos; I’m just loving that The Office actors all seem so much like their characters.  Cool Office cast photos accompany that blog entry, by the way.

tshqcast-5308197Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing (who’s just discovered American Born Chinese, so congrats Gene Yang, you’ve been BoingBoinged!) mentions that artists Rob Sato (Burying Sandwiches) and Ako Castuera have a new show going up at the LA comic shop The Secret Headquarters starting next Friday.  By the way, Cory also mentions he’s signed a deal with IDW to sell comics based on his stories, and had his agent write a clause spelling out that "those stories are already under Creative Commons Attribution/ShareAlike/Noncommercial licenses that allow fans to make non-commercial comics," so it’s whatever the opposite of an "exclusive" is.  ("Loss leader," perhaps?)

And although it’s slightly past rather than upcoming, I wanted to mention Trina Robbins’ astounding news that "comics are alive and well in Scandinavia, and women are drawing them," as she reviews her lecture tour through Malmo, Copenhagen and Stockholm.  Brr, Scandinavia in March, glad someone looks happy in those photos!

Bouncing about

  • News
  • March 22, 2007

The idea of sports comics has always appealed to me.  I wish we had more of them.  Okay, any of them.  Sports is such a great method of portraying action without having the characters fight each other (by only having them metaphorically fight).

But Japan, with its vast array of comics subject matter, has the flare to not only pull off a sports manga but make it innovative and cutting-edge.  And now that the live-action version of Ping Pong is coming out, many are doubtless eager to see how it lives up to the original.

Folks in New York, Chicago and Seattle will get that chance, as Viz Pictures will be screening the comedic sports film for limited runs in those cities over the next couple of months. In New York, you can catch it at the ImaginAsian starting on April 6; in Chicago it debuts at Facets Cinematheque on April 27; and in Seattle it’ll be at the Grand Illusion Cinema beginning May 25 (which is a bit far in the future so no info is available yet on their site).

Why else Iran may be peeved at 300

  • News
  • March 22, 2007

kidwashington-6927111Will Shetterly has a theory about why Iran might be offended by the portrayal of the Persians in Frank Miller’s 300, and it’s not just the setting up of Persia/Iran as "the enemy" during a time of modern sable-rattling in that same area.

Shetterly notes, regarding how King Xerxes is costumed, that "A US film portraying Xerxes like this would be like a British film about the American Revolution portraying George Washington in a pink uniform with lots of ruffles."  Well, I can picture the ruffles.  And a lot of guys did wear pink in those days.  But point taken.

To be fair, Shetterly does note that "300 turns the Battle of Thermopylae into a fight between butch gays and queens. When Leonidas refers to ‘boy-loving Athenians,’ he’s clearly jealous."  Oh, snap!

I think I-Con, I think I-Con

  • News
  • March 22, 2007

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ComicMix‘s own Robert Greenberger reports on the panels in which he’ll be participating at this year’s I-CON out in Stony Brook on Long Island, and points to their long-awaited programming schedule (PDF file), which has finally been posted.

Naturally, since we deal with "all types of fantastic media," which is right up I-CON’s alley, ComicMix will be out in full force for this one!  We’ll try to report live on-site, but it’s all wifi dependent.

You can check Robert’s panel appearances on his weblog, and if you squint at the Sunday-at-3 PM slot on the schedule you’ll see my name somewhere as well.  I cannot recommend this convention enough, especially for folks local to Long Island.  The campus is lovely, the atmosphere very relaxing, and the dealers’ room a lot of fun.  Pack your checkbooks and your allergy medicine.

ELAYNE RIGGS: My life with Lulu

  • News
  • March 21, 2007

elayne200-8891049Back when my ex-husband and I were first getting heavily involved in online comics fandom and attending lots of conventions, there weren’t a lot of women con-goers, so we all tended to stand out a bit and more or less gravitate towards one another. As I recall there weren’t a lot of "booth babes" in those days, so the women con-goers consisted mostly of either readers (what we would call "fangirls" today but which term hadn’t even come into vogue by that point) or comics creators’ spouses, with the very occasional industry pro like Colleen Doran and Maggie Thompson and Heidi MacDonald.

As I was an avid reader with professional writing aspirations, I fit the first category but hoped to also fit the last — that I’d wind up in the second as well I could not have foreseen — and as most of the active industry pros seemed to be around my age and I’d already "met" so many of them online, that’s where I hung out.

And that’s where I first heard about a new organization called Friends of Lulu, named in honor of the comics character created by Marge Henderson Buell, which Heidi and a few others had conceived of at the 1993 San Diego convention to address the gaping chasm between women’s status in comics and that of their male colleagues. I’d been an active feminist since college, and the idea of a comics industry group formed to redress injustice and give visibility to the marginalized appealed to me.

At the time, the internal debate amongst the founders was whether to even admit non-professionals; fortunately they decided to open an organizational gathering (and membership) to non-pros, so I attended my first FoL meeting in San Diego in 1994. Now, as many will attest, I don’t have the best memory for specifics, so what follows are mostly general recollections and feelings, supplemented by my collection of FoL member newsletters from Volume 1 #1 (June 1995) through the summer of 2004. (more…)

Creators are fans too

  • News
  • March 20, 2007

By and large comics aren’t the best-paying gig around for writers and artists, so people who make a living telling comic book stories are primarily doing it for the love of the medium.  There’s far less of a dividing line between fan and pro than there is in other entertainment media — in comics it’s always been more of a continuum.

And thus we have some nifty posts by professionals talking about the comics they love.

Colleen Doran discusses the new Legion of Super-Heroes cartoon and, erm, a missing element.  Becky Cloonan talks about her love/hate relationship with an old X-Men story as a way of reminding us that "Comics is a teeny TEEENY tiny industry. Anything you say (especially on the Internet) will get back to you."  And Chris Weston presents his sugestions of five artists whom he thinks would be perfect for Judge Dredd, and illustrates why.

Turtles disrupt traffic

  • News
  • March 20, 2007

tmnt-6078260Here’s one you probably won’t see in most news reports.  I only heard it second-hand on the radio during my morning commute.  The traffic reporter commented about slow-downs on the upper level of the George Washington Bridge in New York City because folks dressed up like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were doing something or other on the bridge’s pedestrian walkway, and thus all the cars were slowing down to look.  He had no idea why the Turtle characters were there, but I blame viral marketing (what we used to call a "publicity stunt" in the old days — in this case, for this Friday’s opening of the TMNT movie). 

Oh well, it could be worse — it could be Moomins.

August denies Gyllenhall gab

  • News
  • March 18, 2007

John August sets the record straight on his blog:  Jake Gyllenhall is not considering the lead role in the Captain Marvel project which August has been tapped to write.  He continues, "I can pretty much assure you he’s never heard of the project. And we’ve never discussed him. We’ve never seriously discussed anyone.

"After several months of meetings, casting has come up exactly zero times. There’s no casting list. If there were a list, Gyllenhaal’s name would probably be on it, but trust me: there is no list. There’s no start date, no release date, no movie whatsoever. There’s just a script to be written. Which I should probably get back to."  Aww no, baseless internet speculation is tons more fun than doing actual work!  On to the next trumped-up rumor, then: Emma Watson — in or out?

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