Tagged: comics

Slightly Belated 110th Birthday, Hans und Fritz

  • News
  • December 13, 2007

Our favorite role models, The Katzenjammer Kids, turned 110 years old yesterday. In case you weren’t aware, the newspapter strip is still being published each Sunday.

Created by Rudolph Dirks and first appearing in William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal on December 12, 1897, the strip was among the very first to be regularly published and endure. It also helped establish the language and format of the comic strip and, therefore, the comic book.

The Katzenjammers also helped establish intellectual property copyright and trademark law. Dirks left Hearst to work for the even-scivvier Joe Pulitzer and his New York World, taking his characters with him. Hearst sued. The courts ultimatey ruled that Dirks had the right to continue his feature, but so did Hearst. However, only Hearst owned the name "The Katzenjammer Kids." (more…)

Things to come, by Elayne Riggs

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  • December 12, 2007

elayne100-7452000This is the time of year when people usually start to compile "best of" lists and recaps. But as 2007 has been more "the worst of times" for me than "the best of times," I prefer to look forward. After all, as Criswell once "predicted" in a hardly-memorable Ed Wood film, "We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives!"

Crystal ball gazing also helps if you have the retention level of a hyperactive gnat, which I’m afraid is the case for me. I don’t tend to get worked up over details in comic books or TV shows or movies because most entertainment is ephemeral to me; I just don’t feel I need to keep all the minutiae in my head. It carries the added advantage of making rereading the same book a lot more fun to me, a constant surprise as I encounter things again that I didn’t remember from the last time I read them.

In the land of graphic literature, at least in this country, Diamond’s magazine Previews is the only consumer choice in terms of moving from baseless speculation about what may or may not happen in monthly story installments months down the line (that’s more the realm of comics "news" sites, which often busy themselves in breathlessly extolling events yet to happen to the detriment of examining current comics) to actually planning out and ordering one’s reading of choice for the foreseeable future (say, two months down the line). Time was, order forms were the sole purview of retailers. Of course, time was when Previews wasn’t the only game in town. Not that the disappearance of competitors like Capital City and Heroes World constitutes anything like a monopoly for Diamond! At least not according to the antitrust investigation, which didn’t consider comics as separate from other literature. In any case, with all the major companies sewn up with exclusives and treated as Premier customers (some pigs being more equal than other pigs), Previews is the only choice now for readers who wish to support their local retailers, as well as for publishers who want to reach audiences they can’t afford to grow on their own (even in this age of online ordering). Unfortunately, Diamond doesn’t accept every comic published into the hallowed pages of Previews, so now more than ever it pays to see what’s out there in the virtual world, but online content distribution is another column entirely.

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Rock Posters Rule!

ComicMix Radio jumps right into this week’s pile of new comics and DVDs that are screaming to be added to your gift list… plus:

• There was a day when every good (or bad) rock & roll concert had a distinctive poster attached. There’s a list of the Top 25 All Time Rock Posters – and even a few surprises for comic fans (Nancy, a word to the wise. Avoid this Alternate Universe Sluggo)

• If you like Street Fighter, this is your week

• Spike awards the Top Video Games but where was Guitar Hero?

• This week’s Sold Out score: DC 2 and Marvel 1

• The Fresh Prince puts his music career aside for a while

Please Press The Button – our pal Sluggo is getting scary!

The Evolution of the Superhero, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • December 11, 2007

redfox-8337995And on we plod, continuing our seemingly interminable discussion of the evolution of superheroes. This week, let’s leave the capes and masks and other such accoutrements, and the “super” prefix, in the trunk and concentrate on the hero part.

First, a little oversimplification.

Heroes come in two models: the authority-sanctioned kind, as embodied by King Arthur’s posse, Beowulf, and James Bond, to cite just three of many possible examples, and the loners – the cowboys, the private eyes and, yes, most superdoers.

Conventional wisdom has it that the first kind were dominant throughout most storytelling history – were, in fact, integral to the “monomyth” described by Joseph Campbell. Again oversimplifying: ultimately, the result of all the hero’s roving and adventuring was benefit to his community. And, bowing once more to conventional wisdom, the second kind, the loners, became prominent after the First (don’t we wish!) World War when belief in the essential goodness and wisdom of humanity’s leaders became…well, challenging.

I dunno…the cowboy archetype was well-established before the war broke out in 1914, and it, in some ways, was the model for the private eyes and other rogue justice-dealers. I guess you could argue that the defining event of America’s nineteenth century, the Civil War, made the citizenry wary of Authority, and that wariness grew for maybe a hundred years as media technology made our immediate ancestors aware that if a person was in the market for some really ripe corruption, the statehouse was the place to look..

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Shh! Reviews of two Wordless GNs for all ages

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  • December 11, 2007

These two books were both published as graphic novels for younger readers, by very different publishing houses – Owly comes from the small, quirky comics-oriented press Top Shelf, while The Arrival is a rare graphic novel from the childrens’ publishing juggernaut Scholastic – and they have interestingly different reasons for being wordless.

Owly is more obviously for kids; it’s drawn in a somewhat fussy comic-book approximation of a clean-lined animation style, with big eyes and heads on small bodies. The characters, with the possible exception of a friendly storekeeper, are all clearly meant to be kid-equivalents; this is a world like Arnold Lobel’s “Frog & Toad” stories where pseudo-children live on their own and deal with kid-sized issues themselves. It’s pretty obviously wordless so that even kids who can’t read yet can follow the story. (Talking about wordless comics can cause troubles with explaining just what “reading” means in a particular case – there are a lot of kids who can “read” the Owly books even though they can’t decode words in English yet.)

In the first three books, our main character, Owly, has made friends with a worm (Wormy – not Dave Trampier’s character, though), a snail, a butterfly, and what I think is a chipmunk (or maybe a field mouse). The stories are all about friendship: learning to trust each other and to make friends with creatures that you suspect might want to eat you. Since these characters are all in a sweet all-ages comics story, everything works out fine, but I do have to wonder about the lesson. (Or maybe this is exactly the lesson kids need right now, since they already get way too much of the opposite lesson: to hate and fear anything unexpected, strange, or different.)

In this book, creator Andy Runton introduces yet another character, an opossum. He, too, is scared of Owly – as an opossum should be; owls are serious predators, and real-world owls are probably the scariest, nastiest things these kind of small animals will ever know. (If Owly runs much longer, Runton’s reliance on the introduce-a-new-character-who’s-scared-of-Owly plot could cause trouble; it’s hard to have a large cast in a book where no one speaks or has names in the main story.) Everything works out well in the end, of course, though it gets a bit weepy along the way. Some kids who are physically able to follow this story might find it emotionally hard to take. But, if they’ve read the first three Owly books, they’ll be expecting the friendly, happy ending.

The Owly books do have some appeal to adults, particularly mushy, sappy adults who have young children (like myself). People who exclusively read mainstream comics would probably find Owly intensely sappy; I think it’s exceptionally sweet. I like Owly and his friends, and I want to see them happy. (more…)

The Darkness and Will Ferrell

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  • December 10, 2007

No matter what your holiday is, these next couple of weeks will be as fast paced as a Jack Kirby plotline. Here is a couple of quick hits for those “goof off" minutes I know you will grab:

• Landlord star Will Ferrell will be criss-crossing college campuses next February to promote FunnyOrDie.com and Semi Pro, his latest feature from New Line Cinema. The site will also release a new video starring Ferrell and his co-star Andrew Daly each week leading up to the film’s premiere on Leap Year Day, Feb. 29th.  The "Will Ferrell’s Funny or Die Comedy Tour" pairs Will with three of the site’s regular stand up comedians, Zach Galifianakis, Demetri Martin, and Nick Swardson. Meanwhile, if you have no idea what’s Will’s Landlord videos are yet – go here (http://www.funnyordie.com)

• Dale Keown returns to the Darkness, with The Darkness #3 in February. He will pencil a special flashback sequence in that issue scheduled for release in February 2008. Meanwhile, The Darkness #3 will feature two covers by Keown and Stjepan Sejic (First Born, Witchblade) and can be previewed here (www.topcow.com/darkness). (more…)

Shazam! The Monster Society of Evil Review

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  • December 10, 2007

The old Fawcett Captain Marvel (as opposed to all of the other Captains Marvel since him) is a character that pretty much all comics kibitzers agree should be handled with a light, semi-humorous touch, kept out of tight continuity, and allowed to be fun. But we’re usually left deploring the situation when he’s given yet another grim ‘n’ gritty makeover to be “relevant” and to shoehorn him into continuity. But Jeff Smith is on our side – as a million comics bloggers have mentioned before me – and his Captain Marvel is much closer to Otto Binder & C.C. Beck’s than it is to Judd Winick’s.

Smith spent his first decade-plus in the comics industry working on one long story – the bestselling and critically acclaimed Bone – so the first thing The Monster Society of Evil does is prove that he’s not just a one-trick pony. (It also shows, by implication, that the center of gravity of the field has still not shifted: even a massively successful independent creator, who could do anything at all for his second major project, will still have a tendency to want to work on a superhero for the Big Two, featuring a character created decades before he was born and owned by an international conglomerate.) Smith, as we all suspected, is just a good storyteller, and the odds are that he’ll have a lot more stories to tell over the next few decades.

The Monster Society of Evil is a very loose retelling of the story from Captain Marvel Adventures of the same name, serialized over more than twenty issues during World War II. (Which, incidentally, proves that it wasn’t all “Done in One” stories back in the Good Old Days – there have always been different kinds of stories.) The original story was very much a serial, like the movie serials of the day, with cliffhanger endings and escalating dangers from episode to episode. It’s a fun roller-coaster ride, but, re-reading it these days, it’s also very much of its time. (more…)

Presidential candidate Ron Paul picks his super-hero favorite

  • News
  • December 10, 2007

ronpaul_flag-3417888As part of the run-up to the presidential primaries next year, ComicMix asked Texas Congressman Ron Paul who his favorite comic book super-hero might be.  We think this is at least as revealing as their favorite movies, favorite books, or favorite chocolate-chip cookie recipes.

Candidate Paul, running for the Republican nomination on a Libertarian platform, was happy to respond. From Congressman Paul:

 

"My favorite comic book superhero is Baruch Wane, otherwise known as Batman, in The Batman Chronicles.  "The Berlin Batman," #11 in the series by Paul Pope, details Batman’s attempts to rescue the confiscated works of persecuted Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises, from Nazi Party hands. 

“Batman’s assistant Robin writes in the memoirs, "[Mises] was an advocate of individual liberty, free speech, and free thinking… and so, should I add, the Berlin Batman." Batman, a Jew in hiding in Nazi Austria, was willing to risk his life for the sake of the promulgation of freedom, and I find this to be super-heroic."

batman-chronicles-11-pg18-4306055

From The Batman Chronicles #11, written and drawn by Paul Pope, colors by Ted McKeever, letters by Ken Lopez. ©1998 DC Comics.

 

I Pity the Poor Immigrant, by Martha Thomases

  • News
  • December 8, 2007

According to my reading of the nightly news (between 4 PM and 7 PM, we watch CNN, BBC, and NBC), illegal immigration is a huge issue as we go into the primary season for the various presidential nominations.  According to various estimates, there are as many as 12 million people living in the United States who are in the country illegally.  Some entered legally, as students or tourists, and didn’t leave when they were supposed to.  Others snuck in without going through the proper channels.

Neither party has a consensus on what its position is, but, to greatly oversimplify, the Democrats want to find a way to more quickly legalize the illegals while the Republicans want to deport them.

My opinions on the subject are greatly influenced by the comics I read now and read growing up as a child.  As a DC fan, I know:

  • Superman is an illegal immigrant (since granted citizenship), whose adopted parents committed perjury when they claimed he was their biological child. (more…)
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Manga Friday: Wandering Assassins

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  • December 7, 2007

gin-5066764Manga are just as full of fossilized genres as any other popular media, as I’m coming to discover. A case in point is this week’s haul: three series, all from the same publisher, all of which can be vaguely characterized as being about a wandering assassin.

OK, I’m stretching the term too far with the first book, Gin Tama. Our title character, Sakata Gintoki, is a samurai on a near-future Earth economically dominated by aliens, where carrying a sword has been outlawed. He doesn’t actually go around killing people for money – though he will kill them along the way to doing other things, if they really deserve it – but instead works various odd jobs, which tend to require violence by the end. At the beginning of the book, he picks up a sidekick, our viewpoint character, Shinpachi – who was also trained to be a samurai, but has few skills and is in the book mostly to be the reader identification character (pop-culture- and food-obsessed, slightly overweight, glasses wearing – these Japanese creators know how to pander like no one’s business). They pick up a third member of their team in the middle of this volume, but I shouldn’t give away her secrets ahead of time.

Gin Tama doesn’t take itself all that seriously; it’s clearly a historical story (set in the Meiji period, more or less) moved bodily into a SF setting, with only minor changes to make things fit. And, like a lot of comics, it’s easier to enjoy something mildly silly if it knows that it’s silly – Gin Tama is quite aware that it’s quite generic, and quite hard to believe, but it’s ready to entertain anyway. I appreciate that, even if I find the winking at the audience and obvious melodrama a bit much. This isn’t the greatest samurai comic out there, but it’s a fun samurai comic that I don’t expect will ever get terribly serious, and there’ll always be a market for that.

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