Tagged: comics

Mike Gold: True Convention Thrills!

  • News
  • February 26, 2007

mikegold100-2736036Great Caesar’s Ghost, my first comic convention actually was 38 and one-half years ago. I thought about that a lot this past weekend. I recall hearing about 300 people attended that show; we were completely astonished by the huge turnout.

It was one of the late Phil Seuling’s first Fourth of July shows in New York, and he established the standard by which I measure all comic book conventions. I helped run the Chicago Comicon for ten years, and I tried to hold us to that same standard. Phil’s shows were absolutely great, and of course they grew in size and importance with the times. (more…)

NYCC – Panel reviews

  • News
  • February 25, 2007

During the most crowded day of a comics convention (or even on the other days), it’s never a bad idea to take in some panels.  The best conventions offer a wide variety of programs in comfortable and intimate settings that you just can’t duplicate at a booth or exhibition hall.  They represent just about any interest and subculture related to comics and other "geek-centric" entertainment, and create a participatory and egalitarian feel among panelists and attendees.

This NYCC saw a diversity of topics to please everyone from moviegoers to Japanophiles to old-school aficionados to the creators of tomorrow.  One of the best things about it was the implicit acknowledgement that about as many women as men were expected to take in the programming.  At least four panels so far have dealt with women in comics (real women storytellers as opposed to fictional women characters), and yet other panels having nothing to do with that topic featured female panelists as a matter of routine.  This is the very type of situation advocacy groups like Friends of Lulu hoped to work toward for so many years, and it’s a real privilege to see it come to fruition.

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Here’s a photo from a Friday panel.  Some thoughts on it and a couple other panels attended so far: (more…)

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Performance art comics?

  • News
  • February 25, 2007

metronome-9364260Metronome  is described as "a 64-page graphic novel by Véronique Tanaka: a ‘silent,’ erotically-charged visual poem, an experimental non-linear story using a palette of iconic ligne clair images. Symbolism, visual puns and trompe l’oeil conspire in a visual mantra that could be described as ‘existential manga’ if it wasn’t for the fact that there is a very human and elegantly-structured tale providing a solid foundation to the cutting-edge storytelling." 

The graphic novel will be published next year by NBM, but it’s available to view as a 17-minute animated (actually, still-shots) movie on this site if you fork over the equivalent of about four bucks.  I confess I didn’t last more than a minute and a half, two minutes tops.  Not only did I see no storytelling, but it seemed to have all the earmarks of a pretentious performance art piece worthy of the likes of a young Yoko Ono. 

If Grapefruit were a graphic novel-imagined-as-an-animated movie, it might look something like this.  Only without the grapefruit, and with a lava lamp, a fly, a piano, and a metronome, among other things.

Ain’t I A Woman?

  • News
  • February 24, 2007

martha200-3734293For as long as there has been a comics’ press, people have been wondering why there aren’t more women reading comics. And often those people wondering are, themselves, women: Maggie Thompson (who in 1960 co-published Harbinger, one of the first comics-themed fanzines back), The Beat‘s Heidi MacDonald, Trina Robbins (whom I’ve loved since the days of underground comix), cat yronwode of Eclipse, among many others.

We stand on the shoulders of giants.

Yet, like these women, I read comics. In my case, I read superhero comics. And I loved them. For all that time, when I was a girl, then a young woman, then a woman, a wife, a mom, I loved them. I still do.

How can this be? Don’t women hate superhero comics? Don’t we hate mindless violence, shallow characterization, demeaning stereotypes? Don’t we crave emotional connection and involving storylines?

(more…)

NYCC — News in brief

  • News
  • February 23, 2007

Everyone’s getting into the podcasting act! Jamal Igle (see pictorial) will be participating in a serial podcast called The Mighty Mighty Adventures of Earl-Wayne and Chuckchuk (come on, you know you want to tune in on the basis of the name alone), which should be fun as he has such a terrific voice. And an old friend from college, David Levin, tells me his company, Brainstorm, Inc., is getting ready to do daily comics videocasts next month. With so much multimedia centered around comics, oversaturation might be a concern, but nobody ever complains about too much movie and TV coverage.

And in case you missed this news item amid the pictorial, Rob Walton’s Ragmop has been collected. This is huge news to those of us with very fond memories of that title. Lots of new words and art, updating ending, the whole shebang. Must dash and find out more stuff!

Michael Davis: Nut jobs

  • News
  • February 23, 2007

michael-davis100-5416924I said in my first article that I was a pretty simple guy. I see clear distinctions between right and wrong, good and evil, love and hate, and Republican and Democrat. Blah, blah, blah. To that end, I think there are some things that people don’t talk about but should. Clearly in comics there is a subject or fifty that we don’t talk about. Well I’m going to talk about one right now. That subject is… nuts.

Not the nuts that come in a can, but rather people who are nuts… as in crazy.

No, I am NOT talking about people who have a real mental illness. I am talking about those people who have convinced themselves (sometimes with plenty of help from friends and family) that they are entitled to something that nobody else sees. Or their way of doing something is the only way something should be done regardless of any logical reasoning. (more…)

The evolution of the comic book

  • News
  • February 22, 2007

Hard as it may be for some of us NYCC-centric folks to believe, comic book events are also happening outside of our little enclave.  Take Northridge, for instance, whose CSU branch’s Oviatt Library features a new exhibit starting this coming Monday mapping the evolution of the comic book.  The show’s curator, university archivist Tony Gardner, notes that comcs "have a very interesting history, and I’m trying to tell that history using our collection from the 1930s to the 1990s," with particular attention given to Senator Estes Kefauver, who led the public hearings on comic books in 1954. 

The exhibit runs through August 3, in case any San Diego Comic-Con attendees want to travel up the coast this summer…

Girl meets geeks at NYCC?

  • News
  • February 21, 2007

The Hey Lady isn’t about to let anyone disabuse her of the notion that comic book conventions are attended mostly by stereotypical male comic book geeks.  Not even when they have huge manga and anime contingents (very popular with girls and women), all sorts of tie-ins with other media, and are run by professional convention planners.  No sirree, she’s a’comin’ to the New York Comic Con with the sole intent of wranglin’ her a May-un!  She seems equally intent on not noticing the many, many, MANY women who will be attending, and most likely not even paying attention to all the cool stuff around (besides male geeks) that might even interest her.

Surviving NYCC: finding the panels

  • News
  • February 21, 2007

I was at lunch today with a bunch of comics people, and they were talking about the NY Comicon and complaing how hard it was to find things on the site, like when the panels were and the like. And we’re always happy to help out here.

New York Comicon Panels

See you there.

Seven Heroes of Victory

  • News
  • February 21, 2007

225px-ssov4-9127345Wired Magazine’s Annalee Newitz believes the plotline of Heroes bears more than a few similarities to that of the recent Grant Morrison-written DC series 7 Soldiers of Victory.  Because, you know, nobody’s ever done assemble-the-squad plotlines in the history of  television or comic books. 

Actually, her point is "the fact that I could fruitfully compare them means that Heroes is finally coming into its own as a good comic book story".  Or as, one would assume, a good dramatic story — period.

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