Category: News

If you’ve been following my columns this month here and here, you know I’m on a tirade.  I don’t like it that women are still considered an afterthought in the comics industry, especially as our industry is represented at comics and pop culture conventions.

And so, I want to shine a spotlight on various shows, and discuss what they’re doing wrong, and what they’re doing right.

In my last column here, I wrote a lot about ReedPop, the folks who put on big shows in New York and Chicago, among other things.  They only had women creators as about ten percent of their featured comics guests.  Since then, several people have alerted me to the fact that C2E2 is highlighting their female guests in their advertising.  This is a great thing.  I commend them for it.

However ….

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On the eve of the Academy Awards, the Tweeks look at multiple Oscar-nominated [[[Gravity]]], starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. (And some quick coverage of [[[Thor: The Dark World]]] DVD, because reasons.)

I don’t know if you already knew about this Steampunk charity bundle in support of Direct Relief, which has already made over 16 thousand dollars. Contributors get to save the world by buying steampunk.

The bundle includes thousands of pages of great reading, hours of gaming fun, and tons of fantastic music. You can get it all for just the donation of a dollar (though larger donations are encouraged and appreciated). The money raised by sales of the bundle helps fund to Direct Relief (directrelief.org) which is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that provides medical assistance to people around the world who have been affected by poverty, natural disasters, and civil unrest. This bundle includes award-winning games such as Syberia, music from such artists as the acclaimed Sxip Shirey, and exclusive content such as the Cities of Ether anthology by G. D. Falksen. The great thing about this is that for as little as a dollar you get thousands of hours of entertainment and art, and you also help people all over the world by supporting Direct Relief. The more people know about the bundle, the more they chance they have to pick up some great Steampunk themed games, books, comics, and music, and the more funding the charity gets that can then go and help people all around the world. It’s a great win-win situation for everyone.

George Harrison once said to Eric Idle, “If we’d known we were going to be the Beatles, we’d have tried harder.”

That’s the phrase that comes to mind when I look back on that fall day when the pages first came into the darkroom at DC Comics. I’d been working there no more than a month or two.

Back in the day, pages of art that had bleeds were drawn on 12×18″ boards, which were too big to photocopy. To make copies for the colorist, every page had to be shot on a stat camera. Hundreds of pages a week. With photochemicals. It was a mind-numbing job, and I know one person who simply left one day for lunch and never came back.

And so one day, this book came in to be shot. Great, an oversized book, and it looked double-sized– 40 pages. There goes my break. I started to shoot the book.

Ooh, Sam Kieth art. I knew his pencilled stuff from an APA in the early 80’s, but I mainly knew him as the inker for Mage and later, penciller on Manhunter. Mike Dringenberg I knew from Adolescent Radioactive Black-Belt Hamsters (Don’t ask. Please.) And the writer– Neil Gaiman? That new guy, the one who wrote Black Orchid? Hmm…

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If there’s one good thing about a very very VERY long winter, and yet another snow day, it’s this.

This week our resident twin tween geeks review the soon-to-be-a-major-motion-picture novel, The Fault In Our Stars by John Green. Take a look for yourself: