Sixteen years ago today, Carol Kalish, vice president of new product development at Marvel Comics died suddenly at the age of 38.
The best tribute, to this day, came from Peter David in his But I Digress column for the Comic Buyer’s Guide.
We still miss her.
Photo by Alan Light, taken at the 1982 San Diego Comic-Con.
Comics Links
Costumes? Check. Vigilante activities? Check. The KKK were always closer to mainstream superheroes than we’d probably like, but it took Craig Yoe to dig up the bizarre ‘20s newspaper comic strips in which a flying KKK squad do good deeds.
Political cartoonist Steve Bell is interviewed by the Sunday Herald. [via Forbidden Planet International]
Wizard has photos from Fan Expo Canada 2007.
TrekWeb interviews IDW editor Andrew Steven Harris about the future of Star Trek comics.
Comic Book Resources interviews Christos Gage about the upcoming House of M: Avengers mini-series.
Heidi MacDonald remembers Disney Adventures Magazine at The Beat.
ICv2 interviews DC Comics’s King of All Media, Paul Levitz.
On the Fantagraphics Blog, Gary Groth interviews Alias the Cat creator Kim Deitch.
New Scientist employs the theory of social networks to explain why super-heroes always win.
MangaBlog has a longer version of an interview with Mark Crilley that originally ran in Publishers Weekly’s Comics Week.
Comics Reviews
Bookgasm reviews John Porcellino’s King-Cat Classix.
At Comic Book Resources, Augie De Blieck, Jr. reviews two recent TwoMorrows books and other things.
Comics Reporter reviews Monte Beauchamp’s Devilish Greetings.
Warren Peace Sings the Blues reviews Gilbert Hernandez’s Chance in Hell. (more…)
There’s been a flurry of posts lately in the comics blogosphere, including Glenn Hauman’s last column here, about perceived value for money (let’s just call it PVFM) when it comes to comics. The consensus seems to be, American comics periodicals from the Big Two are usually about 22 pages long and take mere minutes to read through, which is Not Good. Added to that the current buzzword in vogue for what used to be called "padding," now rechristened "decompression," and the PVFM aggravation level shoots way up as the time actually spent reading the thing goes way down. And the conclusion is, there just ought to be more words per page, and possibly more pages per pamphlet, so the reading time (and thus the presumed enjoyment time) increases and fans don’t feel like they’re being ripped off and more readers will return to comics and all will be well with the world. It’s gotten so bad that I’ve actually seen online comics pages where a writer/artist will put up a page of wordless story and apologize for the lack of dialogue on it!
Allow me to ask: When did PVFM become a condition upon which entertainment should be created? Do all stories have to be dense, or should all stories strive instead to be good?
Look, I understand PVFM. I frequent an all-you-can-eat sushi place, for cripe’s sake. The sushi’s very good there, or I wouldn’t frequent it. But I’ve been to lots of AYCE places that made me wish I paid more for less-but-better stuff. As anyone who’s visited a 99-cent store would agree, quantity isn’t always synonymous with quality.
Particularly where such a subjective experience as entertainment is involved. Perhaps I’m the wrong person to ask this, what with my swiss-cheese retention abilities, but were all the stories you really remember fondly real long ones? I’ve been to some long, dense movies that were full of sound and fury and signified less than nothing; the concession candy had more fulfillment. And I’ve spent two minutes reading various pithy blog posts that stick with me far longer than the screens and screens of blather that, frankly, I usually can’t even make it all the way through. But okay, let’s be fair — comics aren’t blog posts, where brevity and getting to the point is often prized. And they’re not movies, where unspoken movement can convey so much that a constant stream of words isn’t necessary.
So tell me, without looking: what’s your favorite comic book story, and how many words does it contain?
People have been speculating that we here at ComicMix were going to start up with a webcomic any day now, but we had a secret shame — we didn’t actually know how to create 21st century cutting edge webcomics that all the kids read today. But thanks to Ridiculopathy (with a hat tip to Dirk Deppey) we finally know how to do it!
Rule #1 – Don’t draw anything. Illustration is hard work and a time-consuming skill to acquire. Thanks to modern technology, most notably the copy & paste feature found on most modern computers, it is now completely unnecessary. Grab a random image from Google Image Search and add some speech bubbles. Don’t even draw the speech bubbles- just search "speech bubble" on your pal Google Image Search.
Easy enough. Who needs real artists and letterers anyway? They’re always late, and just make you tired and grouchy.
Rule #2 – Don’t write actual jokes. Other than the mistake of spending time drawing a comic, the second most common mistake newcomers make is writing one. Some people waste hours wracking their brains for a funny premise or clever line, but it’s utterly pointless and only exposes you to the danger of your readers just not finding your jokes funny. Instead, start from a very specific audience (most often based on a fandom, fundamentalist religion, or bizarre sexual practice) and tell them what they want to hear in four-panel format.
Hey, we can skip over getting writers too? Hot damn! Brian, we just dropped our burn rate down to, like, nothing! We can put it all back into T&A — er, sorry, T&E. Travel and Entertainment. Really. Honest.
Rule #3 – Don’t be gracious. A great way to generate buzz for your web comic is by picking a fight with another web comic, preferably someone with a more established site so that the inevitable "look at what this moron just said" links on his forum will boost your server stats. Again, you can’t and probably shouldn’t write jokes about them, so just barf up a few panels about calling your target names and making them cry.
This keeps getting better and better! Hey, um — who do we want to pick on today? Scott Kurtz? No, we’ll see him this weekend. Warren Ellis? He’s not crossing the Atlantic for a year, but his fans are scary. Wait — Bendis! He’s under an exclusive contract, he wouldn’t be able to write for us anyway, so we don’t have to suck up to him. Hey, Bendis! Get a toupee!
Rule #4 —
Oh, who cares at this point? We’re ready! We know everything! Time to start up a web comics publishing empire!
I wonder if we can have a press release ready in time for Baltimore….
Labor Day’s over and it’s back to work or school. Here’s some cheap thrills to get you through the day. (Our illustration is a recent Clay Bennett editorial cartoon.)
Comics Links
The Daily Cross Hatch interviews Evan Dorkin (in the first of what may be many parts).
Eddie Campbell remembers zipatone.
Comic Book Resources talks to Paul Jenkins.
Just in case you missed it: Monday was, in the Comic Curmudgeon’s words, Fööberdämmerung.
Comic Addiction talks to Ben Templesmith.
Newsarama slashes summer. No, really. That’s what it says.
The Montreal Gazette reports that a Dragon Ball Z live-action movie will be filmed there over the next year. OK, is there any chance that this won’t suck? [via Newsarama]
Comics Reviews
Brian Cronin of Comics Should Be Good reviews the first issue of the new magazine about comics, Comics Foundry.
From The Savage Critics:
SF/Fantasy Links
SF Scope reports that the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) have just suspended their ePiracy committee in the wake of SFWA Vice President Andrew Burt’s recent badly-handled complaints against the Internet text-sharing site Scridb. (The full SFWA motion is also available on their LJ community.)
Robert J. Sawyer thinks the process for the Canadian SF award the Prix Aurora is horribly messed up this year — but he has a suggestion to help fix it.
As our own Martha Thomases pointed out last Saturday, today is Labor Day. Martha made an interesting comparison between Manhattan and the Bottle City of Kandor without once referencing Rudy Guiliani as Brainiac. Nice self-restraint, Martha!
Like Martha, I, too, come from a city of Big Labor, one that has thus far managed to avoid the menace of Wal-Mart, the worst drug that has invaded American shores. I was a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW; the Wobblies) until I became an editor, a.k.a. “management.” So I tend to look at the world from the point of view of the working person, and I’ve got the financial stability to prove it.
So on this, ComicMix’s first Labor Day, I thought I’d make a few comments about the comic book business and its workers.
Creators who work in this medium are, by and large, freelancers. They are, by and large, responsible for their own health care and retirement. This means that most comics people have no health care or retirement. I know people on the Right consider this to be their fault, the result of the fact that they’re not as smart as people on the Right. These are fools who have never had to face the prospect of going without food or lodging. It’s amazing how fast your priorities change when you’ve got nothing on the table and in a few weeks no place to put that table. As a comics editor, I’ve always remembered this: the people upon whom I depend to pay my rent are living tits to the wind.
Not everybody in comics management remembers this. Back in the 1960s a number of important creators at DC Comics tried forming a guild to protect their jobs and provide some security. DC, of course, was (and is) in the heart of Manhattan. These were creators who were important to the company: they were involved in producing some of the company’s more successful features over the course of their tenure. And within about a year, each and every one of them was gone from the company.
In fact, DC’s then-management actually brought in an editor, Dick Giordano, who would bring in his own creative crew from Charlton. Without knowledge of the situation – he was still in Connecticut at the time – Dick found himself replacing many of these creators. When he told me that story (at the same Westport bar where he was hired by DC), it was clear he hated having been cast as something of a patsy. One of the many reasons I respect him.
Another attempt at guild-making came in the late 1970s. Fresh from his successful campaign on behalf of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Neal Adams helped organize a guild that included a wide variety of comics writers and artists, one that, for a while, looked like it might carry some real weight. (more…)
We know you’ve had a tough childhood– having Peter David as a father can’t be easy on anyone– but you’ve thrived and blossomed, and we hope you’re having a happy birthday. Good luck with getting the driver’s license.
(Never let it be said that we don’t take any available chance to embarrass Ariel.)
I’ll be travelling today, hoping everyone else had plans to take to their cars either yesterday or tomorrow, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t leave you with some fine ComicMix columns from his past week, all well worth reading:
And for your listening pleasure, Mellifluous Mike Raub brings you the Big ComicMix Broadcasts as always:
And, of course, check out Mike’s weekly Stories Behind The Big Broadcast.
Have a swinging September, y’all!
I love action movies. So does Korean film director Ryoo Seung-wan, which is made abundantly clear in the ample extras for the Dragon Dynasty two-disc Ultimate Edition release of The City of Violence. Originally I wasn’t going to review another Dragon Dynasty DVD so soon after my praise of their Hard Boiled and Crime Story remasterings, but I was overwhelmed by the sheer mass of action movie analysis available for this South Korean labor of love.
Ryoo is an award-winning director of such international cult favorites as Arahan and Crying Fist, but even after those successes, and others, he was dissatisfied with the compromises he felt inclined to make because of producer and studio collaboration. Sitting down with friend and co-worker Jung Doo-han – the stunt coordinator and action director for such Asian classics as The Foul King, Legend of Gingko, Fighter in the Wind, and A Bittersweet Life – they formulated a compromise-free concept.
Or, as Ryoo himself put it: “What if we made a film for under a million dollars with characters like those from John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow, who go to a place like Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, have to struggle and fight like in Jackie Chan’s Police Story, I film it like Martin Scorcese’s Raging Bull, edit it like Sam Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch, and set it to something like Sergio Leone’s soundtrack for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly?” The result is The City of Violence, a well-named film if ever there was one.
Upon setting eyes on the kinetic movie poster I had no idea that the charismatic stars were also the director and fight choreographer, but to dodge more compromise by having to train out-of-shape actors to take on the roles of childhood friends investigating, and taking vengeance for, the murder of a colleague, Ryoo and Jung co-star themselves – a sticking point throughout production. The movie itself is a linear, lean, mean, and exciting thriller which plays like a Japanese yakuza film filled with golden age of Hong Kong kung-fu battles, but, thanks to the hours and hours of special features, it plays like an action film tutorial. (more…)
He calls himself the "Super Adaptoid" of comics and we can easily say he’s done it all – from Sgt. Fury to the Justice Society and from Millie The Model to Conan. How did a school teacher from Missouri end up writing so much comics history for the last four decades? Roy Thomas tells The Big ComicMix Broadcast all about it in an exclusive interview!
Meanwhile we’re covering more title changes at DC, MTV’S VIdeo Music Awards get remixed and we rundown of a bunch of new stuff on the web to look at if you get bored over your three-day weekend.
You have the day off, so PRESS THE BUTTON and let’s party down!
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
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