And while Santa Claus is toodling down Broadway and we start playing Alice’s Restaurant, we bring you the wise words of Warren Ellis:
Don’t forget, my Yanqui readers, the true meaning of Thanksgiving: give your neighbours an infected blanket this Thursday and then move into their houses after they’re dead.
Eat hearty, give thanks, and if the Lions game bores you, take some time and read some comics.
Today is Thanksgiving and a hearty Happy Thanksgiving to you all.
As it turns out, it’s also the birthday of my late wife, Kimberly Ann Yale, who would have been 54 today. This is a day for stopping and giving thanks for the good things in your life and so I’ll ask your indulgence while I remember one of the best things in mine, which was Kim.
For those who don’t know her, never met her, how do I describe her to you? My god, where do I begin? Physically – heart shaped face, megawatt smile, big blue eyes. Champagne blonde hair which, in her later years, she decided should be red. That decision was pure Kimmie. She looked good, too, but she also looked good bald. More on that in a few moments. She was buxom and damn proud of it. Referred to her breasts as “the girls” and was fond of showing them off. She was about 5’8” so that when she was in heels we were about the same height. Basically had an hourglass figure although sometimes there were a few more seconds packed into that hourglass than maybe there should have been. We both fought weight problems and I still do.
All that, however, is mere physical description. Photographs could tell you as much and more and still tell you so little about Kim. Not who she was. Kim was an extrovert to the point of being an exhibitionist. She was flamboyant sometimes; I have described her at times as the world’s most innocent narcissist. She loved the spotlight but with the delight of a child. Yet, she also loved nothing better than to be in the corner of a tea shoppe or coffee house, drinking her cuppa, writing in her journal, totally absorbed into herself and the moment. (more…)
No, not Stan Lee, his 87th birthday isn’t until December 2009. Today is the birthday of Hall of Famer Stan Musial, #6 for the St. Louis Cardinals with a .331 lifetime batting average, and a man so respected in the game that Brooklyn Dodgers fans never booed him at Ebbets Field.
Happy birthday to the Donora Greyhound!
Modernism and self-referentiality have been rampant in superhero comics for a good twenty years now; Alan Moore was the main instigator, with his great final Superman story and the Watchmen “pirate comics” motif. Some of the best and most entertaining stories since then have been knowingly "comics," from Grant Morrison’s "The Coyote Gospel" in Animal Man to John Byrne’s pleasant run on She-Hulk. But self-referentiality can also curdle like milk, or gnaw away its own belly like the fox under the Spartan boy’s cloak. There’s a huge streak of allegory in modern superhero comics – actually, "allegory" gives it too much credit; what we actually find are naked bids for audience identification and equally naked scornings of any connection to or interest in the supposedly puerile and retrograde wishes of that audience. (Pop quiz: who does Superman-Prime represent and why?)
Mainstream superhero comics have become a high-speed whirlwind of reader-response feedback done mad, with convoluted continuity one week and shredded history the next, and, no matter what, the anvil chorus of comics bloggers complaining that something or other is “raping their childhoods.” Doctor 13: Architecture & Mortality is not the first series to dive into the middle of that debate – hell, most of the big crossovers now are thinly veiled attempts to seduce the audience into believing in one propaganda version of continuity or other. (“Marvel has always been at Civil War with Eastasia.”)
But Doctor 13 does have the advantage of trying to be fun – and, even better, at generally succeeding. It does feel a bit like special pleading in the end; Azzarello is yet another guy who grew up with comics and wants to celebrate the stuff he loved as a kid. (Exactly the kind of comics writer, I’m afraid, that we need less of today.) The art is also very nice: Cliff Chang has clean, confident black lines defining crisp space, and is particularly good at drawing people. (more…)
I’ve taken a break from my promised sequel about comic book artists whose current work I like because (1) I still haven’t made it through the most recent DC comp box, (2) it’s not like there’s a huge clamor for it. and mostly (3) I’ve been in a sort of weird transition mode and needed to write about that because it’s never far from my mind, but is thrown into special relief during the upcoming holiday season.
In truth, I feel like this entire year has been a transitional one for me. Losing my best friend then my father in rapid succession threw me for such a loop it seems doubtful I’ll ever fully regain my equilibrium. Then there was The Job Thing. I’d been looking for a new position for awhile but the timing never worked out. Every time my job search gained momentum, my boss would return from Europe and I had to put everything on hold. Meanwhile, lots of little downturns became bigger ones and, to make a long story which I’ll be happy to tell you in a bar sometime short, on November 9 my employer of ten years and I officially came to a parting of the ways.
I have enough severance pay for awhile and am still interviewing for a new position back in Manhattan, so this isn’t a lamentation on my lack of current employment. It’s more a realization of how lucky I’ve been again this year. Even with deaths in the family and among my circle of friends, I have so very many blessings in my life. And with my half-century mark looming ever closer (a week from Sunday, in fact) I thought it would be a nice and perhaps inspirational idea to count those blessings.
This week it’s all about the shopping, and maybe that eating thing, too. ComicMix Radio kicks it off with our preview of new comics and DVDs that hit your stores even before the bird is stuffed or the parade kicks off, plus:
• Valiant keeps bouncing back – this time with some new X-O Manowar
• Captain Marvel and Mice Templar both go poof – in a good way!
• Tim Burton & Disney bring back Alice
• Coming Soon – 3-D without those annoying glasses
We’ve even got a link to a sneak peek of Black Friday deals on books & DVDs, so Press The Button!
This week it’ s all about the shopping (and maybe that eating thing, too, but…) – ComicMix Radio kicks it off with our preview of new comics and DVDs that hit your stores even before the bird is stuffed or the parade kicks off, plus:
We’ve even got a link to a sneak peek of Black Friday deals on books & DVDs – so Press The Button!
Where were we this morning? Ah yes, it was actually noontime on Saturday, where we headed upstairs to the Hotel Penn’s Sky-something ballroom for the Mark Evanier-moderated panel "Marvel in the 60s and 70s."
Just look at those luminaries. Gary Friedrich; Dick Ayers (in his old Army outfit that still fits!); Herb Trimpe; Joe Sinnott. Truly amazing gentlemen, with the usual stories you’d expect. But the best anecdote may have been one in the making, as Mark received an email from Stan Lee during the panel, emailed him back that he was currently moderating a panel and did Stan have something to say…
…which of course, about a half hour later, he did. It went something along the lines of "Tell those gentlemen they need to get out of that hick town and come to Los Angeles, where they can join me for a real Marvel panel!" Mark should have the exact text up on his blog shortly, I’m sure.
"But," you say, "you promised us purple pants!" Well, here’s a Wizard to warm you up:
The bearded gent on the right, come in all the way from Israel, is Mike Netzer. Or is he the one on the left? I’ll never tell. Purple pants aplenty below! (more…)
Boneyard is a series about a guy – Michael Paris is his name – who inherited a cemetery way back in issue #1, and arrived to find it full of various monsters from myth and legend. Luckily, the vampire, werewolf, troll, gill-woman, and so on were friendly, and convinced him not to sell out to evil forces. As you can see from the cover, we’re up to the sixth collection by this point, so the series has settled into itself, and is somewhat predictable. (On the other hand, these are all thin collections, of about four issues apiece, so we’ve only gotten up to issue #24 – it’s not in any huge rut, just a comfortable status quo.)
The major overall plot of the Boneyard series involves the machinations of Certain Forces – culturally literate readers might take Mayor Wormwood’s surname as a major clue – to buy the cemetery from Michael or to obtain it in some other way. (For nefarious reasons, of course.) The main subplot centers on Michael’s very, very slowly budding romance with Abbey, the cute ancient vampire. (Given that much of Boneyard creator Richard Moore’s other work is pornographic, I find it amusing that his characters either immediately have sex upon meeting or are too shy to even talk to each other.)
This volume, though, isn’t really about either of those plots – it touches slightly on Abbey’s long-time rivalry with Lilith (another ancient, powerful vampiress), but it’s mostly about the cast going to a big dress-up party thrown by a previously unmentioned ultra-powerful supernatural being called the Luminary (who is called the Illuminary on the back cover). (more…)
It’s always nice when a convention takes place in your own backyard, a mere express bus or train journey away, and despite the weather turning chillier this is a great time of year to be out and about in NYC. Michael Carbonaro has been running his bimonthly Big Apple comics and media expos for at least a dozen years now, and every November he gathers industry luminaries and showbiz greats together in his signature extravaganza, the National. Naturally, ComicMix was there this year, and although I could only make it on Saturday I snapped plenty of photos and talked to lots of friends!
ComicMix Media Queen Martha Thomases knows how to keep her hands busy at the booth; the pink cashmere layer in her latest knitting endeavor felt absolutely gorgeous!
Here was the view of the left side of our row, with Bob McLeod in the foreground, then my husband Robin Riggs (I shuttled the few feet between the CM table and our location for much of the day), then Scott Roberts, and in the background Rodney Ramos. More on those two below. In fact, more of everything below! (more…)
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
Stephen Colbert, we have your writer for “The Chronicles of Amber”!
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The Law Is A Ass #460: Those “For Life” Sentences Are Nonsense
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