A new week and a new line up of surprises, including a peek at the big Blue Beetle Companion, 50 or 60 ways to spend money on comic books and DVDs, and we dissect The Doctor’s third season opener. Plus – the ComicMix line-up of what’s been delayed and when it’s going to happen. Plus – Neal Adams is all over Timeline.
As always, you can hear the ComicMix Podcast by clicking on this very button:
Meet Anthony Tollin.
I did, more than 30 years ago, at DC Comics. Anthony was tall, friendly, didn’t look like a New Yorker, and wasn’t. He came to Manhattan from Minneapolis in 1973, worked a couple of jobs, and then landed at DC, where he stayed for 20 years, proofreading, color-coordinating, helping Jack Adler manage the production department – necessary chores, done well away from the spotlight, that transform the raw materials of artwork and script into a printed artifact. Along the way, Anthony got married, and divorced, moved to another state, and when he retired from DC, settled in Texas, where he lives and single-parents his lovely and gifted daughter, Katrina.
If you talked to Anthony much, you soon discovered that he had a number of pop cultch enthusiasms, not the least of which was comic books. But his real passions – I don’t think the word is too strong – were always The Shadow novels, mostly written by Walter Gibson under the pseudonym Maxwell Grant and published in the 30s and 40s in the pulp magazine format, and old radio shows, particularly the crime and adventure programs that were the first cousins of the pulps and comics. If ever I had a question about either of these subjects, Mr. Tollin was always my first go-to guy. I never needed a second.
Those passions are still part of the Tollin gestalt, and now he’s found a new way to both share and make a living from at least one of them. Since July, a company Anthony started has, in partnership with something called Nostalgia Ventures, been issuing reprints of The Shadow books. The price is $12.95, quite modest considering that in one volume you get two novels and reprints of the original illustrations, a feature that’s both unusual and, I think, a real value-adder. The book that’s on the desk next to my computer would certainly be mistaken for one of the old pulps – same size, same kind of cover and font – until you picked it up and found that, in fact, both the cover stock and the interior stock are considerably better than anything that bore the original work. Inside, there are the novels, plus a couple of pieces by Will Murray, another expert and go-to guy, and an adaption of a Shadow radio show.
And as a comics fan you should care… why?
I like Martha Thomases’ idea of 365, as reported on ComicMix yesterday. A full-length comic book story each and every day for a year. Now that would be an event.
Sadly, most such comic book events aren’t worth the effort, let alone the price. The stories are overblown, their effects on their “universe” temporary – either in the sense that they will be countermanded or, at best, castrated in the next such event.
(Hmmm. There’s a phrase I’ve never written before. “At best, castrated.”)
By the time they’re over, most events turn out to be nothing more than marketing gimmicks, and an endless sea of marketing gimmicks doth not a universe make. As of this writing Captain America is dead but Bucky is alive – something he’d managed to avoid for over 40 years. As Denny O’Neil pointed out in his recent ComicMix column, death has no permanence in comics. As a plot point, it is hackneyed: it may have collectibility, but it has no credibility.
Wonder Woman has been redefined, resurrected, rebooted, and retold differently so many times since 1965 (arguably her first real reboot) that I’m surprised she doesn’t bump into Tony Soprano at her shrink’s office.
Of the two major universes, Marvel’s is the most consistent – but only by comparison to DC, whose universe had to be cobbled together retroactively by combining the efforts of five publishing houses over 70 years: DC, All-American, Quality, Fawcett and Charlton – and maybe Fox, depending how you, ahhh, look at Phantom Lady. But by and large, in the past couple decades Marvel’s change has been evolutionary and not stop-and-start-over. Spider-Man went step by step from being a four-eyed high school wallflower with a secret identity to becoming a publicly known married-to-an-actress superhero and, oh yeah, menace to his nation. Marvel never stopped and said “Oh, now everything you know is wrong; this is the way it is and the way it will be until we need to burrow into your pockets again.”
We’d like to bring your attention to this fascinating comics event, courtesy of the Bibi’s Box website:
The on-line exhibition from the Bibliotèque nationale de France Comics Before Comics (La BD avant la BD) presents precious panorama of the comics beginning. The visual travel begins with the ancient illustrated bibles made for Kings and the aristocracy’s books, inquires about its style origins, it shows the story of narrative, the page layout procedures and it ends with the use of sound in images – dialogues and onomatopoeia.
The exhibition gives a short vision of the comics pre-history, using great examples, like the Bible of Stephen Harding, Danse macabre, Cantigas de santa Maria, Histoire de la fondation de l’ordre cartusien and Little Sammy Sneeze by Winsor McCay, among the several other examples. For a fast visual panorama try iconography page.
There seems to be a whole lot of people who get to tell us what they think we should see, what they think we should buy what is the best, worst, the must haves and the stay away froms. Most of these experts put out a list so that we can revel in their genius. How many lists are we subjected to? Let’s see, off the top of my head…
David Letterman’s Top Ten List, the only list I pay any attention to
The Top Ten Movie List
The Hollywood Power List
The richest people in the world list
Blackwell’s worst dress list
The Sexiest Man List (I can’t believe that I have not made that one)
Joan Rivers best / worst dress list
The New York Times Best Seller list
AFI greatest movies of all time list
Rolling Stones greatest albums ever list
These are just the ones I can think of while waiting at LAX for a flight to Chicago. There are a multitude of lists out there. Everybody has a list, every magazine, every TV news show, every critic, every commentator, every Tom, Dick and Harry has a list. Well why can’t we have a list? You, me everybody? What makes Rex Reed’s list better than yours or mine? With all due respect to Mr. Reed, I seem to remember he hated Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Need I remind everybody that that film is one of the greatest Sci-Fi films of all time. Well I think that it’s time we all have a list. Let’s start with mine. My list will not be a Top Ten list. Nope. I’m twice as cool, so mine will be a top 20!
Comics:
1. The greatest comic book ever: Avengers #66 (My first comic!)
2. The greatest superhero ever: Batman
3. The second greatest superhero ever: Captain Marvel (Shazam!)
4. The greatest super team: 60’s Teen Titans
5. The greatest superhero fight ever: Hulk vs. Thing
6. The second greatest superhero fight ever: Hulk vs. Sub-Mariner
7. The greatest team up ever: Spider-Man and Superman (the first one)
8. The greatest graphic novel ever: Watchmen
9. The second greatest graphic novel ever: The Killing Joke
10. The third greatest graphic novel ever: The Death Of Captain Marvel
11. The fourth greatest graphic novel ever: Marvels
12. The saddest event in comic books: The death of Gwen Stacy
13. The saddest event in the comics industry: The death of Jack Kirby
14. The greatest writer in comics: Denny O’ Neal
15. The greatest artist in comics: Jack Kirby (DUH!)
16. The greatest publisher in comics: Milestone
17. The second greatest publisher in comics: DC (love them or hate them, they do great books)
18. The smartest man in comics: Mike Richardson
19. The guy with the best job in comics: Paul Levitz
20. The sexiest man in comics: Michael Davis (finally!)
Movies:
1. The greatest movie ever (Tie): My Best Friend’s Wedding / Team America (long story)
2. The greatest movie superhero ever: Batman
3. The second greatest movie superhero ever: Superman
4. The greatest movie team: The Magnificent 7
I’m a big fan of The Dresden Files. Which is why I can’t take The Dresden Files.
Maybe I should explain.
About a year ago or so I picked up a novel by Jim Butcher about a wizard-for-hire working out of modern day Chicago. It meshes the hard-boiled detective genre with the wizard and fantasy genre. If you know me, then you know I’m already into what I’ve called narrative alloys – the blending of genres. And I’m still a Chicago boy at heart so of course I was drawn to the book series. Butcher, not a Chicago native, sometimes gets his Chicago geography wrong – one book refers to what is obviously Hyde Park as Lincoln Park which is a very different neighborhood – but he generally gets the feel right.
As the series has progressed, the world of his hero – Harry Dresden – gets richer. He has an army of wonderful supporting characters and an overall interlocking story has emerged. While each book can be read on its own (I read them way out of order); they’re all connected and events in one book have ramifications in later books. Butcher has thought out his magic pretty well, its consistent and believable. In short, he’s created not only a wonderfully interesting main character but his own world that just happens to intersect the real world in a city that I love a lot.
In short, I’ve become a fan and I was really excited when I learned that it was going to be made into a series on the SciFi network. I remained excited – up until I started watching it.
Jimmy Gimli gives us a first look for Free Comic Day, Carmine Infantino says there’s too much sex in comics, and the Isley Brothers riff on Bruce Willis — all this, plus validated parking in this edition of the ComicMix podcast.
Click here to listen:
While some of us in the New York area are starting off I-CON weekend by listening to live streaming of The Comic Book Novice tonight at 9 PM Eastern (penciller and Dreamchilde Press head honcho James Rodriguez is the guest), we understand that things are actually happening in the rest of the world. I don’t quite believe it, but I’ll take these people’s word for it:
At 5:30 PM today, you can catch cartoonist Keith Knight at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Hey, Michael Davis is black, why wasn’t he invited to this?
Seeing Things: The Art of Jim Woodring opens tomorrow at Seattle’s Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery.
In addition to TMNT, the kids movie The Last Mimzy bows today nationwide (Matt Raub reviews it on ComicMix Podcast; scroll down), and Jenna Fischer assures folks "It is a very cute kid’s movie…better than most in the sense that it isn’t cut and paced like a rock video. It is actually sweet and magical and interesting. Oh…and you get to see Rainn’s ass. Well, you see him in his undies bending over at the fridge. Angela and I were giggling like schoolgirls. Were were like, ‘Woah! There is Rainn’s ass on a giant movie screen!’ (I’m sure the boys from The Office will be saying something similar about my ‘ladies’ when we see Blades of Glory next week.)" Glenn can have his Sopranos; I’m just loving that The Office actors all seem so much like their characters. Cool Office cast photos accompany that blog entry, by the way.
Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing (who’s just discovered American Born Chinese, so congrats Gene Yang, you’ve been BoingBoinged!) mentions that artists Rob Sato (Burying Sandwiches) and Ako Castuera have a new show going up at the LA comic shop The Secret Headquarters starting next Friday. By the way, Cory also mentions he’s signed a deal with IDW to sell comics based on his stories, and had his agent write a clause spelling out that "those stories are already under Creative Commons Attribution/ShareAlike/Noncommercial licenses that allow fans to make non-commercial comics," so it’s whatever the opposite of an "exclusive" is. ("Loss leader," perhaps?)
And although it’s slightly past rather than upcoming, I wanted to mention Trina Robbins’ astounding news that "comics are alive and well in Scandinavia, and women are drawing them," as she reviews her lecture tour through Malmo, Copenhagen and Stockholm. Brr, Scandinavia in March, glad someone looks happy in those photos!
For the past few years I have hosted a panel at various conventions called The Black Panel. Before that, every so often I used to be a part of a Blacks in Comics panel.
I started the Black Panel to try and avoid all the “Marvel and DC are racist” dialogue that seemed to be the theme of some of the “Blacks in Comics” panels.
As you can see from the stunning photo that accompanies this column, I am a black man. I am a black man but I do not speak for all black people. Nor do I expect any other black person to speak for me. My views are my views and I am solely responsible for what I say. To that end I have a question to ask some of my fellow black creators:
What’s your problem?
I am very proud to be a black man and I hope by my work I have done my race proud. But here’s what I try not to do. I try not to diminish by words or actions anything that other black creators are trying to do. In other words I don’t talk bad about other black projects regardless of if I think their projects are any good or not. I am proud and glad that other black creators are doing some great work in this field. But they are responsible for what they do, not me.
That said, I have been hearing quite a bit of rumblings about my Black Panel. The complaint I hear the most is that my panel is exclusive. Some black creators have been complaining about not being represented. Well, yes it is exclusive. I put the panel together; I bring it to the con. I am responsible.
Here’s a reality check. If I don’t know you (or your work) how am I to include you? And frankly why should I? Should I include you just because you are black? Just because I drive a sports car, should I be able to race in the Indy 500?
The idea of sports comics has always appealed to me. I wish we had more of them. Okay, any of them. Sports is such a great method of portraying action without having the characters fight each other (by only having them metaphorically fight).
But Japan, with its vast array of comics subject matter, has the flare to not only pull off a sports manga but make it innovative and cutting-edge. And now that the live-action version of Ping Pong is coming out, many are doubtless eager to see how it lives up to the original.
Folks in New York, Chicago and Seattle will get that chance, as Viz Pictures will be screening the comedic sports film for limited runs in those cities over the next couple of months. In New York, you can catch it at the ImaginAsian starting on April 6; in Chicago it debuts at Facets Cinematheque on April 27; and in Seattle it’ll be at the Grand Illusion Cinema beginning May 25 (which is a bit far in the future so no info is available yet on their site).
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