Tagged: comics

Great Hot Comics Links For Free!

  • News
  • December 2, 2007

Here in the east, we are getting our first look at snow. What better way to spend a Sunday afternoon than tossing a few issues of 52 on the fire and clicking our way around the cool spots we found for you:

The play A Very Ninja Christmas, based on Jimmy Gownley’s  Amelia Rules! series, is running this week (December 6th, 7th, and 8th) in Marlborough, New Hampshire on  2007. Adapted from a Christmas themed story that appeared in the first Amelia volume, “Amelia Rules: The Whole World’s Crazy,” the musical relates how 9-year-old superhero-wannabe Reggie Grabinsky enlists his superhero crew to try to prove Santa is a fraud. It is produced by Small Pond Productions. Plans to make the musical available to other theater companies is in the works and you can get details here.

That new Warren Ellis community we told you about is here. It’s actually a site for the upcoming webcomic FreakAngels which is set to premiere in February, 2008.

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund has kicked off its 2007 Holiday Benefit Auction here on ebay. You’ll find featuring a ton of rare and one-of-a-kind items offered to support the First Amendment legal work; proceeds from this auction will directly benefit the ongoing defense of Gordon Lee in Rome, GA. Items include original art by Jeff Smith, Matt Wagner, Dave Sim, Dustin Nguyen, David Lloyd, Kevin Nowlan, Terry Moore, David Mack and  signed items by Laurell K. Hamilton, Neil Gaiman, Harlan Ellison, Will Eisner, Robert Kirkman, Jon J Muth, Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee and others. Bidding is now open, with most items closing on Sunday, December 9.

A week or so ago, we told you about the Get Munked promotional effort for the feature film Alvin and The Chipmunks. In case you haven’t had a chance yet to annoy friends and family, go here and become the above-average chipmunk by recording a unique voice message. We are happy to say there are also free Chipmunk mobile voicetones, so start drinking now.

This week, ComicMix Radio plunges ahead with a big week for new comics and DVDs (Battlestar Galactica: Razor, anyone?), a behind-the-scenes on Bo Hampton and Robert Tinnell’s Demons Of Sherwood (coming to ComixMix – FREE, of course), another Hidden Gem from your local comic shop and a visit from the creator of America’s #1 family comic strip. That should hold you for another seven days!

Baby, It’s Cold Outside, by Martha Thomases

  • News
  • December 1, 2007

Convention season is over.  The days are short, and dark, and cold.  I don’t have to leave the house very often except to get food, or yarn, or comics.  I have much time in which to brood.  Here’s a few thoughts …

*  Comics came out on Thursday this week instead of Wednesday, and threw off my entire sense of rhythm.  The reason, I’m told, is that UPS was closed on Friday because of the Thanksgiving holiday.  Was this a surprise?  Doesn’t Thanksgiving always fall on a Thursday?  Get it together, people!  I don’t know what day it is if I haven’t read (and cursed at) Countdown!

  • I’m finding I like a weekly comic book as a format, just as I liked Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere, Homicide, Buffy and other soapy serialized dramas.  It’s a shame they have to wreck the comic with fight scenes, when we could just have sordid interpersonal scandals, instead.  Tamper with a few paternity tests, and you won’t need those pesky parallel universes anymore. (more…)

Manga Friday: Girl Boy Girl

  • News
  • November 30, 2007

There are only two books for Manga Friday this week; I promise to do better next time but the end of the week snuck up on me while I wasn’t looking. (And I didn’t really have a third book that fit so nicely with my theme, anyway.)

There have been sex comedies since the days of the ancient Greeks – every culture does them, and every culture thinks slightly different things are really funny. (I’ve mentioned the common manga shorthand horny = nosebleed before; it is impressively visual, but it can look really weird to Western eyes, particular when exaggerated.) But sex comedies tend to cluster around a few major ideas – for some cultures, it’s cuckoldry, but in most of the modern world, the major plot line is about a horny young man and one or more attractive young women. That simplifies things down enough that the standard sex comedy travels internationally better than more culturally specific kinds of comedy.

(Or maybe I’m just babbling for a while before I get into the specific bizarre plots here. Well, let’s stop wasting time.)

The set-up in Strawberry 100% is straightforward, if a bit unlikely: fifteen-year-old Junpei Manaka accidentally sees the strawberry-bedecked panties of an attractive girl in his school when she falls on him up on the school roof. (I said “straightforward,” not “makes a lot of sense.”) He immediately falls in love – or maybe lust – with this girl whose identity he’s not sure of. And then, very soon, he starts dating his gorgeous classmate Tsukasa, mostly because she tells him that she wears strawberry panties.

But we the readers strongly suspect that class brainiac (with her hair in a bun, glasses, etc. to keep her from appearing sexy) Aya is actually the panty-wearer of Junpei’s dreams – and the two of them start studying together.

So we’ve got a classic love triangle: boy is in love with girl, but not the girl he thinks he is, and is entangled with girl #1 while girl #2 is quietly crazy about him. A wonderfully serviceable plot that’s kept plays and novels and stories humming along for a few thousand years now. Kawashita doesn’t mess with the successful formula all that much, but he uses it for as many panty shots as he can squeeze in (can you blame him?) and lots of close-ups of people looking longingly at or thinking about each other. It’s not quite as madcap and zany as Love Hina, but being within the realm of reason isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Strawberry 100% is a cute sex comedy for teenagers; it’s rated for “older teenagers,” but that’s mostly because there’s sexual attraction involved. (There’s no actual nudity or violence, though it does get quite suggestive. (more…)

Is it me, or are they just stupid? by Michael Davis

  • News
  • November 30, 2007

This was supposed to be a lighthearted article about the wonderful time I had at Mid-Ohio Con and the “Geek List” my ComicMix colleagues and I came up with there. You know, Best Creative Team, Lee & Kirby. Best death of a superhero, Captain Marvel, etc. We came up with many great categories and it would have made for a great article, so great in fact I threatened my follow ComicMix columnists with death by DEATH RAY if anyone wrote that article but me. It’s only fair as I started the Geek List off with the first question.

Anyway that was supposed to be the article, but then I had the misfortune to discover a copy of Southwest’s Airlines Spirit Magazine from June 2006.

On the fourth and fifth page of that magazine, there is an ad for a children’s hospital. In that ad there is a photo of a young black kid on his bike. He is smiling and up beat.

He is also in front of a street sign. You know what street he is on?

He’s on PLANTATION VALLEY DRIVE.

Who in the world poses a black kid in front of a street sign that says PLANTATION VALLEY DRIVE?

What, was Coon Ave too far away? To much traffic on Jungle Bunny Road? Construction on Watermelon Lane? (more…)

Atomika power, and Angel after the fall

That comic shop you visit every week probably has a few secrets – books you walk right by and never notice. ComicMix Radio is taking it on ourselves to ferret out these gems and share each one. Who knows what we might find – starting today with the story of a creator who took his love of Jack Kirby and created a bigger than life series which has already reached eight issues. Get ready for the world of Atomika, plus:

  • How a cancelled TV show became a red hot new comic series
  • More Zombie sell outs at Marvel
  • Even though Elvis is dead, Tom Swift is alive and well (he said expressley)

Stop staring at the pretty picture and Press The Button!

 

 

More on Z-Cult and the torrenting mess

  • News
  • November 29, 2007

Following the various stories all over the place. A few quick followups:

DC and Top Cow has asked Z-Cult to take down links to torrents of their books. Matt Brady points out:

…with the action against Z-Cult only having a superficial, if any, effect on the number of comic book torrents available online, many observers as well as downloaders are left wondering if the comics industry will soon be looking at a day when a publisher singles out and files suit against an individual who downloads – or scans and uploads comic books. While similar actions have shown little overall effectiveness in reducing the activity in the realm of movie and music or even as acting as a deterrent, they have been a public relations nightmare for the MPAA and RIAA. In an industry a few orders of magnitude smaller than either movies or music, one is drawn to ask what the effects of such a move by a comic publisher would be. Likewise, and this isn’t meant as a shot at the comic book industry, using the RIAA and MPAA cases as thumbnails, the legal costs to prosecute one such case of illegal uploading or downloading would quickly eat into even the largest comic book publisher’s bottom line.

The interesting thing is that DC, et al, do not seem to be issuing actual DMCA takedown notices. This is fascinating on a number of levels– the least of which is that the publishers aren’t really calling out any heavy legal artillery yet, this is mere politeness. I supect that at least one reason why they aren’t issuing true DMCA takedown notices is that it would require the publishers to show that they actually control the copyright in question, which could easily be thrown into question. (Superboy, anyone?) The DMCA grants copyright holders the power to demand the removal of works without showing any evidence that these works infringe copyright but the courts have begun to recognize this, and are beginning to issue large judgements against careless, malicious or fraudulent DMCA notices — for example, Diebold was ordered to pay $125,000 for abusing the DMCA takedown process. This also means that nobody has resorted to saying, "Oh yeah? Make us!" yet.

Related to this is that the companies almost certainly don’t know what they have legitimate rights to. This leads into a comment that JK Parkin made while blogging about Colleen Doran’s experience with Marvel DCU:

What I found interesting was that Doran said she’ll be using the site as a reference. I guess I found it surprising (and maybe I’m being naive here) that Marvel doesn’t have some sort of system in place already where freelancers working on a particular character have access to images of said character. That way Marvel could ensure the character was being drawn in the right costume, and the freelancer wouldn’t have to hunt for back issues.

–which leads into yet another story of how I was brought in to discuss digital strategies with comic companies. This time I was brought in to meet with Gui Karyo, at the time the CIO of Marvel, in March of 2001 to discuss the status of their archives, digital and otherwise; their upcoming CD-ROM archives, and digital asset management in general for the company. I pointed out that Marvel’s in house archives were a disaster, certainly in comparison to DC’s– Marvel didn’t even have complete printed runs of the comics they published, with gaps as recent as the previous decade. Their film for publication had been stored in a warehouse in Arizona, and hot climates are always where I want to store four decade old film.

One of the things I had suggested was taking the time to build a system for digital asset management, so that the company would know what they had and everyone in the company, plus freelancers and licensees, could access it easily. As a demonstration, I pulled out a thousand dollar comic book– Man Of War Comics #1– and said that I could make a decent argument in either direction on whether Marvel owned the rights or not.

For a variety of reasons, Marvel still hasn’t done it, and as a result their own freelancers are now shelling out money to get reference that the company should be providing. God only knows what it’s like for licensors. I’ll bet that they don’t even deal with Marvel and just look at Corbis instead.

Clean Cartoonists’ Dirty Drawings Review

  • News
  • November 29, 2007

Yoe is really the editor of this volume, but he’s credited as the author. Admittedly, he did write all of the text (except for a foreword by R. Crumb), but the art is entirely by other hands. And the art, of course, is the whole point of this book.

As you can guess from the title, Clean Cartoonists’ Dirty Drawings collects pin-ups, gag cartoons, convention sketches, private commissions, and other various bits of risqué art from artists not generally known for such things. The artists run the gamut of comic book, comic strip and animation names, from Carl Barks and Chuck Jones to Milton Caniff and Dan DeCarlo. And the art itself is mostly mild: there are some sex gags, but the art is mostly just nudes rather than anything like a Tijuana Bible. For some that will be a positive and for some a negative; I’m just reporting it. Crumb’s foreword touches on this aspect of the book, seeing it as a gap between what’s promised and what’s delivered – and declaring, if anyone could disagree, that he knows just what a “dirty” cartoonist is, since he is one. (And Crumb’s full-page drawing by his foreword is probably the most sexually explicit piece in the book.)

There are seventy cartoonists included in all – many with just one page, and none with more than five pages of work – in this book’s 160 pages. Some of them are somewhat out of place – such as Dean Yeagle, best known for Playboy cartoons, and Adam Hughes, whose work often looks like pin-ups anyway and doesn’t really add nudity here – but most of the guys (and a tiny handful of gals) included here are regular mainstream sequential art folks who only very rarely did anything risqué. (But Yoe has ferreted it all out from its various hiding places, and assembled it all for the ages.) (more…)

Medium Rare, by John Ostrander

  • News
  • November 29, 2007

You can learn the damnedest things in the most unexpected places

I was paging through last week’s Entertainment Weekly, the one where they anoint their entertainers of the year, and came across four women – Glenn Close, Mary Louise Parker, Kyra Sedgewick, and Holly Hunter – all grouped together by the fact that they are over 40, that they are starring in their own TV shows on cable channels, and all had a uniting reason for doing so: the work simply wasn’t out there in movies for them.

Okay, that’s not news. And that’s what wrong. Pop culture is a reflection of our society and the way that it chooses to show certain demographics of people – including sometimes their omission – says a great deal about our society and what and who we value. While the article made me think of older women, the same point can be made for other minorities. We’re talking not only of movies and television but comic books and other entertainments as well. It is not only the portrayal of these groups – to which there is some increased sensitivity – but their omission that reveals how our society sees itself. (more…)

Comics, community and The 99

  • News
  • November 28, 2007

elayne100-4266390One of the things I mentioned in a previous column is how frustrating it is to many readers that reviewers have so many negative things to say about comics and so few positive ones — one of the reasons being, of course, that it’s simply easier (and, for many, more fun) to slag on someone else’s hard work than to praise it, to pick at the missteps rather than examining the story as a whole.  I still suspect this ties in with why so relatively few reviewers discuss the art in a comic book; as they’re writers, it’s easier to concentrate on just the writing, which one can then proceed to negatively nitpick to one’s own standard of personal amusement, rather than learning about how to talk about the main thing that separates comics from prose work, from movies, from just about any other form of entertainment.  But I digress.

I’ve had the first four issues of a comic book series in front of me for months, wanting to talk about them. This was before the series even debuted in the US, and now the first two issues have already appeared in stores. And with one thing and another in my crazy life, I haven’t had the time nor the wherewithall to actually sit down and review anything. And it’s become, as these things do, rather an albatross ’round my neck that I haven’t gotten to it. After all, a wonderfully talented, amazing woman who happens to edit the books sent them to me in good faith that I’d get to reviewing them sooner or later. And after all, wasn’t I the one who did over four years’ worth of weekly reviews on Usenet, covering at least a dozen comics during some of those weeks? What, besides life’s vicissitudes, was preventing me from sitting down and doing this review?

Sooner or later we all have to face our own procrastinating natures. For me, the approach of the year’s close and the feeling of community that means so much to me in this industry prompted me to finally get down to it. After three introductory paragraphs, naturally. Has the time finally come for me to say a few words about The 99 from Teshkeel Comics? Well, yes and no. I’m not going to do a structured, formal review per se, but discuss the series more in terms of its inspiration and ideas. (more…)

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Is Iron Man Mike Hammer? by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • November 27, 2007

schepper__mike_hamme_60417h-4232768So where we at?  For the past month or so, we have, in a scattershot and disorganized way, been discussing the various elements involved in the evolution of superheroes.  I don’t think we’ve come to any conclusions worthy of being preserved for the ages, nor should we: things change, darnit. But maybe a little tentative upsumming would not be inappropriate.

Upsumming:

Haberdashery: There is currently a trend away from putting superdoers in costumes, though the big bucks movie heroes are still wearing the suits and, judging from the films I know about that are in development, this will not change in the foreseeable future.  But most entertainment consumers — I’m excepting comics fans here — get their heroism, super and otherwise, from television and maybe because of tv production hassles, costumes aren’t common.

Powers: We’ve agreed (haven’t we?) that for a long time the superbeings of mythology and folklore got their powers from some supernatural agency: they were gods, or demi-gods, or friends of ol’ Olympus,  or something.  Or they were agencies of darkness — black magicians of one kind or another.  Then science became the rationale, most famously with Jerry Siegel’s extraterrestrial origin of Superman.  Last, and decidedly least, there was technology allowing the good guy to do his  stuff. And now…well, it’s anything goes time.  Look at the current television offerings: we have a superhero private eye whose abilities are due to his vampirism, which we can call magic; a technology-enabled superhero(ine); and a whole bunch of peripatetic whose gifts have “scientific” explanations, or so it currently seems.

(more…)

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