Category: News

Rare Super-Porn Discovered!

  • News
  • March 4, 2009

We just got an email from our old pal, Craig Yoe!. Craig sez:

 

I’d like to tell you about my brand spanking new book and blog. 

 

I recently discovered incredible, previously unknown, fetish art by the creator of Superman, Joe Shuster. The artist and his writing partner, Jerry Siegel, had sold Superman for 130 dollars. When they sued to get the rights back they lost and got drummed out of the comic book industry and Shuster fell on hard times. It was unknown that to get by and/or because of a personal interest in the subject, Shuster then did S&M porn for under-the-counter booklets called "Nights of Horror," sold in Times Square in the early fifties. The back story I uncovered involves the Mob, showgirls, neo-Nazi Jewish juvenile delinquents, inspired by Shuster’s art, known as the Brooklyn Thrill Killers, the famed anti-comic book crusader Dr. Frederic Wertham, Senate investigations, cops on payola, the books being banned by the Supreme Court, teenage girls being horse-whipped in the park, two murders…and dare I say MORE?

 

I have a full color coffee table art book I wrote and designed coming out April 1 (no fooling!) about all this, Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-Creator Joe Shuster.The publisher is the number one leading art book publisher in the world, the prestigious Abrams. I’m blogging about the book and revealing lots of rare art and info that didn’t fit in "between the covers."

 

Craig’s too modest to note that his book also sports an introduction by Stan Lee.

 

Considering the fact that, at the time they purchased Superman, one of DC’s owners had been actively engaged in publishing what was considered by the post office censors “pornography,” this is a rather ironic story.

Sadly ironic. 

It’s official: there’s no ‘Life On Mars’

  • News
  • March 4, 2009

ABC has officially cancelled the series Life on Mars, but will allow it to gracefully conclude with a definitive ending to the storyline. The network informed show producers it will not order additional episodes beyond the 17 in the works for this season and confirmed it won’t renew the series for next year. Production will continue through this month and the finale will likely be scheduled for early April.

Interview: The scans_daily moderators

  • News
  • March 4, 2009

livejournal-logo-8165535With all the hullaballo as to what happened to scans_daily, we decided that we should hear from as many of the players as possible, especially the ones who have been silent so far. We’re still waiting on an official statement from LiveJournal, but we have been in contact with two of the moderators from the former scans_daily group, "Stubbleupdate" and "Rabican", and they’ve graciously responded to our questions.

ComicMix: What do you know about the circumstances of the shutdown? Has LiveJournal told you what prompted the shutdown? Were you given any warning, or any ability to address the situation?

Stubbleupdate: I crawled out of bed on Saturday morning (which meant that the community would have been deleted late evening/night on Friday, America time) and saw that my inbox had a lot of LJ friends requests from people on the community. I get that sometimes, but four overnight is unusual. They all wanted to know where the community had gone, which is the first that I had heard of it. A lot can happen in six hours on the internet.

There was also an email from the LJabuse team telling me that the account had been permanently suspended. That was it. LJ tends to take a “Shoot first, ask questions later” approach to getting rid of communities that it’s been told are against its policies or laws, so that part shouldn’t be surprising.

As for correspondence from LJ, they didn’t say what had prompted it, just that it had happened. I don’t expect them to.

Rabican: The shutdown occurred overnight while the mod team was asleep, so we’ve had to pull together the story of the shutdown from multiple accounts. The most likely scenario we’ve surmised is that Peter David reported a group of X-Factor #40 scans to Marvel around the 24th; Marvel complained to Livejournal, and the Livejournal Abuse Team shut us down the night of the 28th (US time). We were given no warning whatsoever and told that the account was permanently suspended. The justification, given by form mail, was that our community existed "primarily to host copyrighted material without the permission fo the copyright holder" and this was against Livejournal’s TOS. We’re still looking into finding out the details of the abuse report made to the LJ Abuse Team.

It’s worth noting that both Livejournal and, I suspect, most of the major comics publishers have known about us for years, so it’s interesting to speculate what prompted them to move against us now. It’s possible Peter David making the report removed all possibility of plausible deniability. Or, Marvel wasn’t nearly as well-informed as we thought they were. We don’t know whether they thought the poster had uploaded most or all of X-Factor #40 rather than the half she did upload, although legally it doesn’t matter. The Peter David situation may have been a coincidence and it wasn’t Marvel at all, but Livejournal doesn’t move against copyright violations without a complaint from the copyright owner, so we know it was a comics publisher.


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MoCCA’s ‘Watchmen’ benefit screening discounted for costumed fans

  • News
  • March 3, 2009

Go to MoCCA’s Benefit Advance Screening of Watchmen on March 5th dressed as your favorite Watchmen character and get a ticket to the benefit, including the advance screening, VIP reception and after party for only $20! (That is $80 off the general ticket price.)

Tickets are limited, so order right away. Call today to order your tickets: 212-254-3511. Tickets available for Advance Purchase Only.

This once-in-a-lifetime evening begins with a reception at MoCCA for The Art of Watchmen exhibition, continues with an advance screening of Watchmen at AMC 19th St., and concludes with an author signing of Watchmen: Portraits by Clay Enos.

5pm: VIP Reception & SILENT AUCTION at MoCCA
7pm: SCREENING at AMC 19th Street 890 Broadway
10pm: AFTERPARTY back at MoCCA with special guests and a signing of Watchmen: Portraits by Clay Enos

Tickets are $100 | $75 for MoCCA members | $20 for Masked Heroes
Tickets may be purchased on-line at www.moccany.org, in person at MoCCA or by phone, 212-254-3511, Tues. – Sat., 12-5pm.

All proceeds from this special event go to support MoCCA programming.

Service advisories: PeterDavid.net, MichaelDavisWorld.com

  • News
  • March 2, 2009

Just letting people know, since folks have been asking:

PeterDavid.net was not pointing to the right folder for a while last night as part of the update brought on by the traffic update, but the nameservers have updated and it seems to be resolved now. Some of the older entries are still migrating over, but you should be able to reach it. As part of the upgrade, you may want to check your RSS feeds.

MichaelDavisWorld.com, on the other hand, has been having server problems for a few days now, but we’re told it should be resolved soon.

The Point – March 2nd, 2009

In like a lion with news on the resurrection of DEAD LIKE ME and how the stars feel about coming back from the dead. Meanwhile, Kevin Smith proves he still has it and makes our 5 Cool Things In The Comic Shop this week, and BATTLESTAR plus DOCTOR WHO equals LAW AND ORDER?

PRESS THE BUTTON to Get The Point!
 

And be sure to stay on The Point via badgeitunes61x15dark-9645994,  RSS, MyPodcast.Com or Podbean

 

 

The Un-Ethics of Watchmen, Part 1: A Bird’s-Eye View

  • News
  • March 2, 2009

drmanhattan-8414138Editor’s note: With the imminent release of Watchmen, we thought we’d try and get a different perspective. So we asked Alexandra Honigsberg, a professional ethicist and genre author, to read the book for the first time and delve into the ethos of the world created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.

If super-hero comics are the literature of ethics, then Watchmen is the literature of un-ethics. It is the template for what not to do and makes Batman look like a Boy Scout, even at his darkest Dark Knight. They make Dirty Harry look clean. There’s a new saying on the street that Bitch is the New Black, it Gets Things Done. Well, these guys and gals are certainly the biatch. But is there any way to redeem their actions so that the ends justify the means? Or, more importantly, that even the most inhumane or inhuman retains some sense of what it means to be human?

The study of ethics is the exploration of the good life and how to live it. Now by the “good life” I don’t mean the bling life. I mean a life that is honourable, virtuous and, on a profound level not shaken by the winds of change, happy. Happiness (or pleasure or joy or The Good). That’s the end, the ultimate goal, or what Aristotle calls “that at which all rational beings aim.” Ari makes a fine distinction between the acts of a man (animal, non-rational) and the acts of a human (rational) or what some of us might term the mensch (gender neutral). One of the biggest invectives that Laurie hurls at Dr. Manhattan/Jon Osterman is that, after working for so long in the lab and being so all-powerful (the man not only to end all wars, but end all worlds), he ceases to be human. Moore emphasizes this with quotes from Nietzsche, who claims that when we become evolved enough we will not need rules, we will have become extra-moral – the superman (not the Nazis’ bastardization thereof) who has no need of ethics as we now know them. But are we still human? Extreme means change the agent and therefore change the end (e.g., The Comedian’s total amorality). Can we still give a damn if we’re all god-like? Or in the midst of so much horror that no human could reasonably be expected to survive unscarred (think of the Holocaust), are we still human? What’s human? What’s life? What’s good and who decides? Who gives authority to whom and why?

 

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The latest on the Scans_Daily shutdown

  • News
  • March 2, 2009

Well, this has been an entertaining weekend.

To recap: on Friday, the LiveJournal community scans_daily has been suspended for posting copyrighted material without the permission of copyright holders, which is against LiveJournal’s ToS.

Many people, looking for a focus to blame, have taken out their venom on Peter David, bombarding his site with comments, some supportive, some abusive, and pretty much chewing up computer cycles. This has required moving up a planned migration and upgrade to the site, and there’s nothing like doing an upgrade while a comment storm is going on.

(Incidentally, this person is one of the more obnoxious pinheads I’ve come across in a while, whose argument seems to distill to "I was rude to someone I stole things from, so he took back what I’d rightfully stolen, I think, and this makes him a bad man". I suspect this person felt that the three bears had no right to chase Goldilocks away, let alone eat her– especially since she didn’t like two-thirds of the porridge that she ate.)

Further commentary has been brought up by Johanna Draper Carlson and Gail Simone on the "you’re shutting down a free comics site! Bad!" side, Kevin Church and Lisa Fortuner on the "About bloody time" side, and Digital Strips’ Brigid Alverson giving equal time to both.

As for the scans_daily moderators, the best summation seems to be from schmevil. Stubbleupdate has offered to answer questions in an interview; I’ve already sent a list.

 

Webcomics You Should Have Read: ‘Perry Bible Fellowship’

  • News
  • March 2, 2009

It started innocently enough, folks, I swear. I was patrolling my normal series of blogs, whence I came upon a startlingly funny little comic. Instantly I thought “Hey! Another opportunity to share with the masses an ongoing, intelligent, mildly offensive online comic! And again without fail, I find yet another online comic worthy of praise… that had already been deemed dead. But, my gentle readers (and my gentile readers too), I again choose to share with you a comic to be lifted on high and praised as “A Webcomic You Should Have Read!”. I give you The Perry Bible Fellowship. (Note: at this point henceforth when I declare things like this, you should quickly load up an MP3 of “O Fortuna Carmina Burana” and pour yourself a fine glass of Burgundy. If neither are available, a reasonable alternative would be a cassette single of "Step By Step" by NKOTB, and pour yourself a slop bucket full o’ Mountain Dew.)

I admit I find many things to be funny–religious zealots, explosions, bum fights, british curtness, farting, and my fiancé’s face when she’s asleep… and truly, this little strip seems to cover all those bases well, and then some*. A brief history tells us:

The Perry Bible Fellowship (or PBF) is a newspaper comic strip and webcomic by Nicholas Gurewitch. It originated in the Syracuse University newspaper The Daily Orange. The comics are usually three or four panels long, and are generally characterized by the juxtaposition of whimsical childlike imagery or fantasy with extremely morbid, surreal humor. Common themes include irony, religion, sexuality, war, science fiction, suicide, violence, and death.

The comic received its title, taken from the name of a church in Maine, in its Daily Orange incarnation.

Let’s dive in, shall we? (more…)

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