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The Variant Question, by Mike Gold

  • News
  • December 17, 2007

Despite my firm belief that I know everything about everything, I humbly admit there is something about this variant cover thing I don’t understand. Therefore, I’m tossing these questions out to you, the public, for comment. I’m not really trolling for comments; I honestly don’t understand this stuff.

I got into this because I just finished filling out my part of the retailer’s order form for Diamond distributing. My wife will do so tomorrow, my daughter already did. None of us are particularly interested in variant covers. In fact, I can’t recall any of us ever ordering one, let alone juice up our orders so we can procure one of those “for every ten you get one” deals.

Some publishers release as many as five different covers on damn near each title they publish. Some only restrict themselves to two, and then only occasionally. I understand how the device works as a sales incentive for comics shop owners, but, really, do you – as a reader – enjoy this? Do you usually buy alternate covers? All of them? Some of them? Only particular artists? Do you ever pay a premium for one?

More important, if you can’t get one at your store, do you buy it at a premium on the collector’s market? If there’s an alternate cover out there you want, do you track it down online or at conventions or sic your friendly neighborhood retailer on the quest?

Collecting mania aside, there’s really nothing new about alternate covers – the magazine business has been at it since the invention of the staple. In our little donut shoppe, it goes back at least as far as 1956 – Mad #28 had three variant covers. About 15 years ago, our hobby (as opposed to art form) was consumed by gimmick covers: prisms, holograms, lenticular pasties, all kinds of stuff. More recently, we’ve even combined the two with the variant gimmick of the “pencil” cover. Yep, you’re paying more for an unfinished product. (more…)

“Dark Defender” Dexter nominated for Writers Guild Award

  • News
  • December 16, 2007

How do you get nominated for a Writers Guild Award? Write a comic book episode, apparently; one that’s a cut above the rest. (Sorry. Should I have gone with "slice of life drama" instead?)

One of the six nominees for this year’s Writers Guild Awards in the Episodic Drama category is "The Dark Defender" episode of Dexter, which reimagines America’s favorite serial killer as a vigilante called, you guessed it, The Dark Defender, because he seems to only be killing other killers, so he’s just a misunderstood vigilante. Like Rorschach. Or Faust. Or John Wayne Ga– well, you get the idea.

Showtime has been doing little bumper videos in the style of the Dark Defender comic book, here’s a taste:

The 60th Writers Guild Awards will be February 9th, strike or no strike. The finale of this season’s Dexter airs tonight on Showtime, and the series is rerun a couple of times a week.

A Spacious Odyssey

  • News
  • December 16, 2007

On this occasion of the 90th birthday of Sir Arthur C. Clarke, why not curl up in the capsule with a good ComicMix column or three?  After all, any sufficiently advanced ComicMix column is indistinguishable from magic!  Here’s a bunch from which to choose from this past week:

Now it’s time to leave that capsule, if you dare… Dave?  Dave?  ("Dave’s not here, man!")

The Posthumous Persistence of George E. Turner, by Michael H. Price

  • News
  • December 16, 2007

George E. Turner is a familiar name among serious movie buffs – a pivotal figure in the realm of film scholarship, as influential these many years after his death as he was during a lengthy prime of productivity. George’s authorship alone of a book called The Making of King Kong (and known in its newer editions as Spawn of Skull Island) would be sufficient to cinch that credential.

But add to that George’s hitch during the 1980s and ’90s as editor of The American Cinematographer magazine and resident historian of the American Society of Cinematographers, and you come up with a pop-cultural impact of formidable staying power, beyond the reach of trendy distractions.

Where George preferred to limit his interests to the prehistory of filmmaking and the first couple of generations of Old Hollywood, he nonetheless kept a hand in current developments: His last job in a seven-year span of purported retirement was that of storyboard artist and second-unit director on the hit network teleseries Friends. And as a fan, he was as fluent in the continuing story-lines of The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer as he was in the history of RKO-Radio Pictures or the careers of Boris Karloff, Claude Rains, Tod Browning and Val Lewton.

The Friends storyboarder hitch is significant: Even those who are most familiar with George Turner’s film scholarship – for example, a chronic-to-acute genre-history series that he and I launched in 1979 with a book called Forgotten Horrors – scarcely know of his parallel career as a commercial artist and gallery painter, a comics artist and newspaper illustrator, and overall an accomplished talent in practically any medium one might care to mention. His higher degrees, after all, were in commercial illustration (from the American Academy of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago), and before he re-invented his career in Hollywood during 1978-80 he had spent some 27 years as the editorial art director of a daily newspaper in Northwest Texas. (more…)

Girls, Girls, Girls!

  • News
  • December 15, 2007

The ads have been all over comics the last few months, and you may have even thought about going to the website. So what is the deal behind the Suicide Girls and how do they fit into comics and pop culture?  The Big ComicMix Broadcast sits down with one of the most popular of the clan and get some answers …  Plus:

• DC makes a major claim on your wallet in 2008 (not to mention space on your book shelf)

• Welcome creator Robert Kirkman to the web!

• A new place to grab cool game trailers

• A nice slice of holiday web trivia

Here’s where you get to Press The Button!

Calls for artists

  • Uncategorized
  • December 15, 2007

board-1261147Rich Watson passes along an invitation from Alex Simmons regarding an exhibition he’s putting together at the Bronx Community College, entitled THE COLOR OF COMICS: Reflections of Images Behind and Within the Pages.  Says Simmons, "this will be an exhibition comprised of characters of color in comics and the people behind them. Though the characters will be African, African American, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, etc., the creators may not be. Who, why, and how well it works — for the most part — is a story unto itself, and one we’ll let you and the viewers decide. The show opens the first week of February and runs through mid-March, 2008. It will contain images from a number of artist and publications, as well as works from the OTHER HEROES comic art exhibit, and the Africa Comics exhibition."  More information and submission guidelines here; the deadline is the end of this month.

As many have already noted, the installation of Val D’Orazio as Friends of Lulu National President has really revitalized the organization, which is currently holding a "Design-A-Lulu Initiative, a fundraising and increased public awareness effort in which we ask artists to dream up their own interpretation of our Lulu mascot."  Details can be found at Val’s Occasional Superheroine blog as well as the FoL site and, at last count, at least a dozen other places. The preferred deadline for this is the end of January.  We’re also quite pleased that Val has also undertaken a massive updating of the Women Doing Comics and Industrial Strength Women lists we originated on the national site.

Lastly, Upper Deck editor Mark Irwin has put out a call on his deviantART journal for artists for the Marvel Masterpieces 2 card sets; please click on the link for information on how to submit sample jpgs.  He’s planning to ship out the card blanks on January 24.

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We Are Family, by Martha Thomases

  • News
  • December 15, 2007

family_clean12-4183176The holidays! That glorious time of year, so beloved by People of Faith, who celebrate not only their respective religious holidays but also their prized Family Values! A love of family, they say, is what separates the Godfull from the Godless. Atheists and agnostics do not have family values.

Humbug.

Family is pretty much the definition of primal. Children are, traditionally, the result of sexual activity, which is something animals do (plants, not so much). Our relationships with our parents, or at least our mothers, define our existence, as mammals and as humans. We yearn simultaneously for closeness and independence, approval and self-reliance.

More recently, family is a social construct that facilitates pacing on property, so that parents can leave their possessions to their children instead of to the Church or the State. And when property is involved, so is greed, envy, revenge, and other emotions that make stories fun to read or watch (living this stuff is way less interesting). From the Greeks through Shakespeare, the Tales of Genji and more, blood and money make families tick.

Families are the font of comedy, too. What would comedy be like without guilt, and what kind of guilt would there be if we didn’t have families? Or fear and resentment?

(more…)

Girls Talk: The Golden Compass

  • News
  • December 14, 2007

The Golden Compass is the new film from New Line, directed by Chris Weitz, and starring Dakota Blue Richards, Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Sam Elliott and the voices of Ian McKellan and Ian McShane, among others.  It’s about a young girl, Lyra, who lives in a world where everyone’s soul is outside her body, represented by an animal who can not only talk, but also argue.  The soul, called a daemon, is able to change shape until its human reaches maturity, when it “settles” into one form.

There has been a great deal of controversy about this film, based on the book by Philip Pullman, because some people think the bad guys (members of an organization called The Magisterium) is The Church. The Magisterium is conducting experiments, trying to remove daemons from children “for their own good,” and so “they will obey the rules.”  There’s also a lot of talk about a substance called Dust, but that doesn’t play an important part in the story until the later two chapters of the trilogy.

Martha Thomases:  What did you think of the movie?  What would you tell people who don’t know anything about it?

Lillian Baker:  I think it’s pretty good as long as you’re someone who likes surprises.  There were a lot of sudden movements.

MT:  Would you call it a scary movie? (more…)

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Manga Friday: Miki Falls

  • News
  • December 14, 2007

miki-spring-2228449Mark Crilley has been influenced by Japan before: his best-known work, the long all-ages Akiko series, is about a Japanese girl who has various adventures on alien worlds, and various elements of Japanese culture found their way into that book. But Akiko was still clearly a Western comic by a Western creator.

Miki Falls, on the other hand, is a deliberate attempt at what’s called an “OEL Manga” – something that follows many of the conventions of Japanese comics but was written as an Original English Language work. Crilley doesn’t draw his book backwards – wisely, I think, since if it can be difficult for a reader to switch orientation, I can only imagine how difficult it would be for a creator to do so – but it’s otherwise a very manga-influenced work. And so I’m looking at it this week as our “Manga Friday” feature.

Miki is just starting her senior year of high school in a fairly rural area of Japan. She’s determined to be really herself during this new year – not to go along with other people because it’s easier. (This seems to be a common desire for manga protagonists, possibly – he said, putting on his armchair group psychologist hat – because Japan is such a homogenous, conformist society.) But, since this is a manga story – and, to be less culturally specific, because it is a story about a teenage girl, and mostly written for other teenage girls – she meets a boy. A new boy in school. A mysterious, attractive, fascinating, keeps-to-himself boy. A boy named Hiro Sakurai.

Miki tells herself that she’s not falling in love with Hiro, but of course she is. And of course he’s utterly aloof, ignoring her – and everyone else in the school – at all times. Spring is the story of their meeting, and Miki’s budding love-hate relationship with Hiro (love him because he’s a dreamy boy, hate him because he won’t even look at her). At the end, we learn the secret, very manga-esque, reason why Hiro must hold himself aloof from all love…nay! from any normal human emotion! (Oops. I’m channeling Stan Lee there. That’s not a specific hint, but Miki and Hiro’s relationship does have aspects very familiar to Western comics readers, with a large helping of angst.)

(more…)

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