Tagged: comics

Comics panels at WisCon

Karen Healey of GirlWonder reports on a few comics-related panels in which she’ll be participating at the upcoming annual WisCon feminist SF convention, May 25-28.  Here’s the full panel schedule.  My favorite is the one she’s moderating:

Sarcasm and Superheroics: Feminism in the Mainstream Comics Industry

2006 was declared the year of Women in Comics. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was one of Time’s 10 Best Books, best-selling authors Jodi Picoult and Tamora Pierce were signed up to write for DC and Marvel, and DC announced a new Minx line for girls. However, 2006 was also a year of increased feminist activism in mainstream comics. New websites "When Fangirls Attack" and "Girl-Wonder.org" collected and encouraged feminist debate on issues of diversity and sexism in comics, and there seemed to be plenty to talk about. Moreover, the Occasional Superheroine confessional memoir recounted a disturbing tale of abuse and misogyny within the superhero industry that was reflected on the pages of its comics. What has improved in the comics industry? What is yet to be done? What challenges are posed by the industry’s peculiar institutional structure? How can women break into the comics mainstream? How can we critique it? And what comics can you buy for your kids? M: Karen Elizabeth Healey, Charlie Anders, Rachel Sharon Edidin, Catherine Lundoff, Jenni Moody

There’s also an interesting-sounding X-Men panel on Sunday.  I’m officially jealous; it sounds like another great year for the WisCon folks.

The Big ComicMix Broadcast watches the tube

The Big ComicMix Broadcast slides into the weekend with a wrap up of the big week of TV News, the scoop on a few new variant covers to hunt down, more things to watch on the web and the return of two popular indy comics. Plus we sit down with former DC superstar DAN MISHKIN and get the story on a new line of young reader books done by some very familiar comic pros.

And if that wasn’t enough, The Big ComicMix Broadcast digs up – Tony Danza! All you have to do is (all together now) PRESS THE BUTTON!

MICHAEL DAVIS: Ask Michael! Because I know.

michael-davis100-7476977Last week’s article on privilege and other ranting produced quite a few responses – so many, in fact, I feel it’s my duty to respond and elaborate on my views. So with that in mind, welcome to the first installment of Ask Michael! Because I know. 

The “What about me? What about my needs?” article garnered these important comments.

Terry at 7:58 AM on Fri May 11, 2007 writes:

“I hate that show more than slavery,” is the best sentence I will read this month.

Yes Terry, yes it is.

But let’s look deeper; let’s look to why? Do I really hate the show Sweet 16 more than slavery? Well, if given the choice to be a slave or to watch that show, it would be a tough decision but I will most likely have to go with watching that show. Yeah I think by a 51 to 49 vote I would have to go with the show. Unless we are talking about a MTV Marathon. Then it’s “take me to the cotton fields, because a marathon would be worst than Adam West thinking he can still play Bat-man.” Yes, that show is that horrible.

Mike Baron at 8:11 AM on Fri May 11, 2007 writes:

Ditto.

“Ditto?” This from one of the greatest writers in the history of comics? Ditto? Well, Let’s look deeper; let’s look to why. Maybe, Mike, you are realizing that the world is an eternal flame of duplication where nothing is left to say. With a simple Ditto. You can say to the world “There’s no originality left. Woe is me.” Or maybe you just agreed with Terry. Both would be right.

Rob at 9:22 AM on Fri May 11, 2007 writes:

Hey Michael!
I am new to this site. I thoroughly enjoyed your column and look forward to many more. I agree with you on Paris. The letter for leniency to the governor, made it seem like she thought she had been given a death sentence. Perhaps she should read up on people who spent time in prisons for things they were later exonerated for (then maybe doing time for something she did would make sense).

Yes, Rob. But Let’s look deeper; let’s look to why. You did enjoy my column and I will write many more. You know why you enjoyed my column? You know why you are looking forward to many more? Because you are a smart guy, Rob! I like you, Rob. Not in a Brokeback way but in a kind of “Hey that Rob is a smart guy who knows a good writer when he sees one” way.

Josh at 5:23 PM on Fri May 11, 2007 writes:

Agreed. 
The degrees of elitism and entitlement you see around these days is nothing short of disgusting. I’m really hoping the judge reneges on giving her a more private cell for her own security. Let her get some common sense the old-fashioned way – by having it beaten into her. And seeing some rich, white, no-sense punk get smacked feels great; DOING the smacking feels SOOOOO much better. (more…)

It’s Rex Morgan vs Doonesbury in Virginia

The world has come to this: The Hampton Roads, Virginia Virginian-Pilot is in the mood to drop some comic strips; Mutts is already on probation. Now they’re asking their readers to choose between Rex Morgan MD and Doonesbury.

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I’ll run that by you again: kill one – Rex Morgan MD, by Woody Wilson and Graham Nolan, or Doonesbury, by Garry Trudeau. Vote now.

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O.K. Now I can understand choosing between any number of mindless talking animal strips (note how I just exempted Mutts). Or any of those mindless "my wife’s a bitch" strips. Or any of those strips that think running a golf gag four times a week is the height of humor. But if you don’t think Rex Morgan MD and Doonesbury is apples and oranges, then I’m not letting you anywhere near my cherry orchard.

Rex Morgan MD copyright 2007 King Features Syndicate. Inc. All Rights Reserved. Doonesbury copyright 2007 G.B. Trudeau. All RIghts Reserved.

 

DENNIS O’NEIL: The kryptonite reality

Once again, life has imitated comics. Maybe comics should sue.

This latest instance was reported in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago and has to do with kryptonite, the stuff from Superman’s planet or origin which can lay the Man of Steel low, or even all the way down. As far as I know, kryptonite was introduced in the early 40s by the writers of the Superman radio show. Since I was only a year or two or three old at the time, I’ll forgive them for not getting in touch with me and telling me why, exactly, they introduced it. But a guess might be: to facilitate conflict, which is widely considered to be a necessary ingredient in drama, and especially melodrama.

These guys – I assume they were guys – and their comic book counterparts were facing a fairly unique problem: how to get their hero in trouble and thus create conflict/drama, and do it not only once, but several times each month, or even more often.

Oh, sure, there had been superhuman characters in world literature and myth before Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, but they were in self-contained stories, and not many of those, and the problem was pretty limited. But with Superman… well, here was a fellow who was faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound – and that was when he was in his infancy. (For the record: Superman is only a year older than me. That is, he appeared only about a year before I did, though I gestated for the customary nine months and Supes took a leisurely four years to progress from the imaginations of Joe and Jerry to the public prints. He was a slow developer, but once he got started…) And he literally become more powerful with every passing year. And he had to have a lot of adventures.

So, okay, how do you get this guy in trouble, often, and thus create suspense and interest? The question has been answered in many ways, many times over the years. Kryptonite was one of the earliest of these answers. According to the mythos, it is a fragment of – I guess mineral – from Krypton, where Supes was born. Something in the gestalt of our planet makes kryptonite dangerous to natives of Krypton. (All of which you almost certainly know, but we do try to be thorough here.)

We thought it was fictional. Some of us, of the professional writing ilk, further thought that it was neither more nor less than an answer to a plot problem and at least one of that ilk thought it was overused and temporarily retired it. But now, a Chris Stanley, of London’s Museum of Natural History, analyzed a substance some of his colleagues discovered and, according to the Times, “found that the new mineral’s chemistry matched the description of kryptonite’s composition in last year’s film Superman Returns.”

It is not known whether or not anyone collapsed near the stuff.

At this point, you can either shrug and get on with your life, or pause, and engage in some pretty wild speculation about the nature of reality.

Be warned: We probably aren’t finished with this topic.

RECOMMENDED READING: The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins.

Batman, The Question, Iron Man, Green Lantern and/or Green Arrow, and The Shadow, as well as all kinds of novels, stories and articles.

Dennis O’Neil is an award-winning editor and writer of comic books like

MICHAEL H. PRICE: Movies Is Comics and Comics Is Movies

price-brown-100-1768211I’ve gone into some detail elsewhere about how my Forgotten Horrors series of movie encyclopedias (1979 and onward) dovetails with my collaborative comic-book efforts with Timothy Truman and John K. Snyder III. More about all that as things develop at ComicMix. This new batch of Forgotten Horrors commentaries will have more to do with the overall relationship between movies and the comics and, off-and-on, with the self-contained appeal of motion pictures. I have yet to meet the comics enthusiast who lacks an appreciation of film.

Although it is especially plain nowadays that comics exert a significant bearing upon the moviemaking business – with fresh evidence in marquee-value outcroppings for the Spider-Man and TMNT franchises and 300 – the greater historical perspective finds the relationship to be quite the other way around.

It helps to remember a couple of things: Both movies and comics, pretty much as we know them today, began developing late in the 19th century. And an outmoded term for comics is movies; its popular usage as such dates from comparatively recent times. The notion of movies-on-paper took a decisive shape during the 1910s, when a newspaper illustrator named Ed Wheelan began spoofing the moving pictures (also known among the shirtsleeves audience as “moom pitchers” and “fillums”), with cinema-like visual grammar, in a loose-knit series for William Randolph Hearst’s New York American.

Christened Midget Movies in 1918, Wheelan’s series evolved from quick-sketch parodies of cinematic topics to sustained narratives, running for days at a stretch and combining melodramatic plot-and-character developments with cartoonish exaggerations. Wheelan’s move to the Adams Syndicate in 1921 prompted a change of title, to Minute Movies. (Don Markstein’s Web-based Toonopedia points out that the term is “mine-yute,” as in tiny, rather than “minnit,” as in a measure of time. No doubt an intended sense of connection with the Hearst trademark Midget Movies.) Chester Gould showed up in 1924 with a Wheelan takeoff called Fillum Fables – seven years before Gould’s more distinctive breakthrough with Dick Tracy. (more…)

The Secrets Behind The Comics debuts!

Just in time to butter up good ol’ Mom, the Big ComicMix Weekend Broadcast is here – and the debut of our Secrets Behind The Comics feature – we take a look at the guy in charge of making Catwoman and Wonder Woman look their best, plus news on how you can write your own ending to your favorite TV show, where you could soon find some great classic TV and how to survive Life Without Heroes, plus a trip back to when Spawn was red hot on the comic shelves.

Press The Button. Mom said it was OK!

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RSS feeds good, online comics better

RSS feeds are funny things.  They let folks with newsreaders and busy lives know when you’ve posted something new, but they (either the feeds or newsreaders) can be spotty at times and you almost miss stuff.  Take Gene Yang’s terrific responses to MySpace making American Born Chinese a featured book, an essay he calls Does acknowledging a stereotype perpetuate it?.  It was posted on May 1 but didn’t show up on my newsreader until a few days ago.  I’m still shaking my head that Yang’s essay was even necessary, as it addresses people who haven’t even read his book but are complaining about a character deliberately portrayed as offensive.  (There’s actually a blog term for folks like this; we call them "concern trolls.")

ctdwn_50-4-2035590Speaking of MySpace, all 22 pages of DC’s Countdown issue 51 are now up on the Comicbooks blog, as well as the first half of issue 50.  MySpace blogs do have site feeds (here’s the Comicbook blog’s feed) so you can read at least partial blog entries without joining the service.  The feeds are often tricky to find (you often need to be on the blog in the first place to see the "RSS" choice at the top right), but worth it if you want alerts on new posts.

I grabbed Vulture’s site feed from New York Magazine as soon as I saw they were featuring weekly graphic novel excerpts the same way many magazines feature prose novel excerpts.  This week it’s Nick Bertozzi’s The Salon.

Were it not for Becky Cloonan (who has a site feed) I wouldn’t have known at all about Amy Kim Ganter serializing the second issue of Sorcerers and Secretaries, because Amy’s site doesn’t seem to cater to RSS readers.

One of the best things about having an RSS reader is that you get to save posts to write about later.  Thanks to this site feed report, I’ve now closed four or five saved posts.

And yes, ComicMix has a site feed — stable but ever evolving, like the rest of this site.

(Artwork copyright 2007 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.)

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MARTHA THOMASES: Mom’s the word

martha-arthur-1683535Tomorrow is Mothers Day. To some, it’s the most important day of the year. To others, it’s a crass exploitation, using real feelings to sell flowers, brunch, and long-distance calls.

In superhero comics, it’s pretty much a non-event. Good mothers are almost non-existent, if not dead. The good moms send their children away (see Lara) or die in a rain of pearls (Martha Wayne). Living moms are over-bearing control fiends (Phantom Girl’s mom in the 31st Century) or distracted career women (Queen Hippolyta). Recently, the mother in Blue Beetle looks like she has the most realistic relationship with her kids.

Except for Sue Storm, there aren’t any premiere super-hero moms.

The best moms in comics are those who adopt. Martha Kent, Aunt May, even Alfred Pennyworth did fabulously maternal jobs raising children who would grow up to make the world a better place.

Why is this? Some of it may be a remnant from folk tales, where heroes are orphaned so they may have adventures without familial responsibilities or ties to complicate the quest. More to the point, superhero comics are power fantasies, often aimed at adolescents (of all ages) who are extremely frustrated with their bodies. Imagining super-strength, flight, and other extraordinary abilities is comforting and satisfying to someone experiencing growth spurts, hormonal fluctuations and acne.

This is not compatible with feeling like somebody’s baby. And you will always be your mom’s sweet baby.

A mother is an even more uncomfortable reminder of sexuality. Until recently, one couldn’t be a mother without having sex. Children don’t like to think about their parents having sex. (Parents also don’t like thinking about their children having sex, even when their children are grown.) An adoptive mother can be pure and untouched, at least in the mind of her child.

And yet, being a mother is an astonishingly sensual experience. It’s more complicated and more pure than could be easily conveyed in a 22-page story, even by an expert, and almost certainly not by a man. The smell of your child’s head, the smoothness of a baby’s skin, the music of a toddler’s laugh – these are glorious sensations. Beyond this kind of intimate contact, having a child permits a mother to experience the wonders of life all over again. As an adult, you expect to see snow or rain or flowers in the spring, but these are new and awe-inspiring to a child. You know why a fire fighter wears red suspenders, but it’s all new to your kid.

(more…)

JOHN OSTRANDER: The Secret Death of Bees

ostrander100-1072015Okay, I’m officially getting freaked out now.

It started with a small remark from the redoubtable Bill Moyers when he appeared on Bill Maher’s Real Time show on HBO. I started to do some research based on his remarks and it came to a head recently with an MSNBC report on their website. It’s a real life event called “Colony Collapse Syndrome.” What’s it about?

The sudden death of honeybees.

“And this affects me – how?” you might ask. “I don’t use honey. I’m strictly a Splenda man. (Or woman.)” The fact is, a lot of food crops need to be cross-pollinated to come to maturity and the principle way of doing it is with the honeybee. About one-third of the American diet depends on cross-pollination and the honeybees that do the job are dying out and nobody really knows why.

According to the MSNBC article, 80% of the cotton crop is pollinated by commercial honeybees. Same for 50% of the soybean crop. Use cotton or soybeans much? 60% of the alfalfa crop is pollinated the same way. Alfalfa hay is a staple for cows – low cost, good nutrition for the bovines. Drink milk? Having a Big Mac attack? Scarcity of an item increases its price and you can bet a jump in the price of alfalfa hay will be passed on to the consumer. Same for cotton or anything made with soybeans. How much do you feel like paying for your jeans? I haven’t even gotten into the fruit and nut cross-pollination done by bees – almonds, for example, are 100% dependent on bee pollination.

Cereal grains aren’t affected so we wouldn’t starve. We’d have to do without a number of items, though, or pay a heck of a lot more for them. Oranges, grapefruit, and tangerines, for example, are all 90% dependent on commercial honeybees for the cross-pollination. You could have your Cheerios in the morning but having milk to put on them or an OJ to go with it might be tougher to get or a lot more expensive to use.

As my Mary, a farmer’s daughter, also pointed out to me, alfalfa, soybean and clover crops (clover is also cross-pollinated) put nitrogen back into the soil. Very important in crop rotation. If you just plant corn all the time, you deplete the soil and – wham! – you’re headed for a dust bowl situation. There are indirect as well as direct effects from the death of honeybees.

What’s really weird is what’s happening with the hives. The onset is sudden. The beekeepers, after a few days, find that a hive suddenly is empty except for the queen and some very young workers. Bees don’t do that. They protect the hive at all costs. In the case of hives afflicted with CCD, the workers just disappeared. (more…)

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