Tagged: creators

Saturday was 24-Hour Comic Day! Did you celebrate?

  • News
  • October 19, 2008

02-553290224 Hour Comics Day is an annual challenge for cartoonists to produce a 24-page comic book written, drawn, and completed in 24 consecutive hours. The event was founded in 2004 by Nat Gertler, prolific author and publisher of the About Comics company. Currently, the event is organized each year by the comic book specialty retailer trade organization ComicsPRO, and hosted by independent comic stores around the country.

The idea of the 24-hour comic comes from Scott McCloud, who originally came up with it as a creative exercise for himself and Steve Bissette. McCloud’s rules for the challenge were thus: The comic must be begun and completed within 24 consecutive hours. Only one person may be directly involved in its creation, and it must span 24 pages, or (if an infinite canvas format webcomic is being made) 100 panels. The creator may gather research materials and drawing tools beforehand, but cannot plan the comic’s plot ahead of time or put anything on paper (such as designs and character sketches) until he is ready for the 24 hours to begin. Any breaks (for food, sleep, or any other purpose) are counted as part of the 24 hours.

Numerous notable comic creators have attempted the challenge over the years.  Dave Sim published his 24-hour comics in the back of his popular book Cerebus the Aardvark. Neil Gaiman and Kevin Eastman tried and failed, and became the namesakes for the two varieties of “noble failures”: Gaiman stopped his comic at the 24-hour mark; Eastman continued to the full 24 pages. McCloud maintains a site for the challenge and also keeps an official list of recognized 24-hour comics. ComicsPRO reports that over 1,000 people have completed the challenge. Compilation books are available of the completed challenges for the past few years, and McCloud has a book on the subject as well.

While most participants are amateurs, many pro cartoonists take part as well. In addition to the most common black-ink-on-white-paper drawings, participants have done full color painted comics, computer-drawn comics, photo comics, comics made of pictures of posed action figures, a series of painted stones with captions, and a Daredevil superhero comic made by cutting pictures of Ben Affleck’s head out of magazines and pasting them onto stick figure bodies. The biggest single event was in Austin Books in Austin, Texas in 2005, with 70 cartoonists. 2006 saw event sites in 17 countries, and the reports for 2008 are still coming in.

My favorite 24-hour comic? Scott Kurtz’s take on Batman.
 

typhon-cover-7946221

Review: ‘Typhon’ Vol. 1

typhon-cover-7946221Typhon

Dirty Danny Press, $24.95

At 50, I’m pretty set in my comic book reading habits.  Having been raised largely on the output from DC Comics and Marvel, I have fairly mainstream tastes.  Now and then, though, I push myself to see what else is out there. As a result, reading Danny Hellman’s recently published [[[Typhon]]] anthology was an eye-opening experience.

The 192-page full-color trade paperback allows me the chance to see who else is producing comic book work.  Typhon takes its name from Greek mythology and is a creature with hundreds of hissing serpents, outdoing the Medusa. Venom was said to drip form their eyes and lava to be spit from their mouths. There are no super-heroes, no continuing characters, nothing based on a media property (although Droopy appears in one story).  Each tendril from the creature’s head is the product of the fertile imagination of the 42 creators who contributed to over the course of several years.

Hellman may be best known for his [[[Legal Action Comics]]] in addition to his own work at Time, Newsweek, Fortune, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and the Village Voice. Promoting the book, he said, “I realized that I was looking at a far more ambitious book than what I’d done previously. The work presented in Typhon covers a wide spectrum of what’s possible in comics, from zany, offbeat humor to unnerving existential angst, and on to chilling horror, all of it brought to life with breathtaking, cutting-edge artwork.

“Anthologies give us the opportunity to enjoy work by talented cartoonists who, for whatever reason, don’t produce enough material to fill out solo books. As an editor of anthologies, I’m excited to provide a showcase for artists and work that we might not see otherwise. Diversity makes for a richer comics scene.”

Everything he says is correct and to be applauded. I really enjoyed the colorful, inventive use of the page from Hans Rickheit, Rupert Bottenberg, Tobias Tak, and Fiona Smyth.  They created visually arresting images and used color in appealing ways. On the other hand, I could not make heads or tails out of Bald Eagles’ eight page head trip that is hard on the eyes and unreadable.

On the other hand, way too often I’d reach the end of these short works and scratch my head.  “What the hell was that all about?” was a repeated refrain. I’m used to stories about character or stories about something.  Yet, these works seem to be characters and situations that begin and end and say nothing.  Too frequently, I think the creators were out to amuse themselves, forgetting their audience. Rick Trembles’ “[[[Goopy Spasms]]]” feels like it was done because he could not because he had something say or share and was generally off-putting.

Hellman told Tom Spurgeon, “…It can be tough to pin down precisely what ‘good drawing’ is. Ultimately, beautiful art is a matter of taste. Drawing chops, anatomical knowledge, the ability to recreate the natural world in two dimensions and have it be both accurate and pleasing to the eye; these are important. But what’s really vital is that we connect with the art on an emotional, perhaps spiritual level.”

I’m all in favor of creative freedom but if someone wants my $24.95, then the editor of the collection has to step up and guide the talent to make certain their point, if there is one, gets across, from page to reader.  Here, Hellman spectacularly fails.

He kicks off the collection with his own “[[[The Terror in Peep Booth 5]]]” which looks and reads closest to a mainstream comic, complete with beginning, middle and end. After that, though, it’s all over the place.  Perhaps the most moving piece is Tim Lane’s “The Manic Depressive from Another Planet”.

I enjoyed being exposed to new voices and talents but come away disappointed that there are all these people with very little to say.

Smoke Gets In Your Brain, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • October 7, 2008

 

Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette / Puff, puff, puff until you smoke yourself to death. / Tell St. Peter at the Golden Gate / That you hate to make him wait, / but you just gotta have another cigarette. – Merle Travis 

I was getting ready to leave the office and walk over to NBC, where I planned to tape a reply to someone who had accused Batman of being in league with the Big Tobacco. It seems that in one panel Batman is standing on a roof, and in the background, on another roof, there was a billboard with a fragment of what might have been a cigarette ad visible. Our accuser said that putting Batman proximate to a cigarette image amounted to Batman – and his creators – endorsing tobacco products and advocating their use to children.

Well, no. Had I kept my rendezvous with the microphones and cameras, I would have probably observed that we agreed that smoking was bad and none of our characters ever actually smoked – Bruce Wayne abandoned his pipe early in his career – and, in fact, we had just done a pro bono anti-smoking ad for the American Heart Association. I might have taken my screed just a bit further and argued that we had always presented Batman’s turf as a realistic American city and – sorry! – urban areas are full of cigarette ads.

I didn’t have to do any of that. At the last moment, cooler heads prevailed and said that if I went on the air, our accuser would answer my answer and prolong the story’s life, whereas if we simply ignored it, the story would not survive into the next news cycle, which is exactly what happened.

One might ask why I allowed the billboard to appear in the first place. For the sake of realism? Or did I just miss it when I edited the artwork? Or did I see it and decide it wasn’t worth the hassle of a change? Humbling answer to all of the above: I don’t remember.

But this pretty inconsequential incident does raise another question: Where do the obligations of good citizenship and moral behavior end and the obligations to storytelling begin? Some kinds of people smoke and drink and take drugs and they’re not all hideous monsters, and some kids are influenced by what they experience through the media. I’ve heard recovering alcoholics say that the movie images of glamorous, witty sophisticates swilling booze prompted them to emulate the swillers and led, eventually, to badly damaged lives. But people do drink, and in a fictional world that mirrors the real one, shouldn’t drinkers – and smokers and druggies – be presented? Or does the potential harm of these behaviors outweigh aesthetic and narrative considerations?

I don’t know.

Sometimes, the coexistence of storytelling and responsible citizenship is painfully troubled, and sometimes I’m glad I no longer sit in an editor’s chair.

RECOMMENDED READING: The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World, By Matthew Stewart. 

Dennis O’Neil is an award-winning editor and writer of Batman, The Question, Iron Man, Green Lantern, Green Arrow, and The Shadow– among others – as well as many novels, stories and articles. The Question: Epitaph For A Hero, reprinting the third six issues of his classic series with artists Denys Cowan and Rick Magyar, will be on sale any minute now, and his novelization of the movie The Dark Knight is on sale right now. He’ll be taking another shot at the ol’ Bat in an upcoming story-arc, too.  

Artwork by Kim Roberson, from Underworld. 

Review: ‘Flight, Vol. 5’ edited by Kazu Kibuishi

 flight-51-4889565Flight, Volume Five
Edited by Kazu Kibuishi
Villard/Random House, July 2008, $25.00

As always, the stories in the annual [[[Flight]]] volume are gorgeous and fun, created by a group of artists who worked on storyboards and other art for animated movies, and Flight is easily the most visually diverse of the new breed of mass-market comics anthologies.

But I can’t help but think that most of these stories are square watermelons – the products of creators trained and taught to run their imaginations down narrow channels to produce upbeat, kid-friendly stories with defined beats and clear morals. Nearly every story in Flight 5 could be seen as the treatment for a big-budget “family” animated movie, and many of them feel explicitly like the first scene or two of such a movie. Even once these guys – and all but two of them are guys, which some people may find notable – have been given the freedom of Flight, they continue to tell stories in that one, confined mode, like so many victims of Stockholm syndrome unwilling to leave their own prisons.

The stories are each well-told, but, as they pile up one after another, the number of naïf protagonists learning about the world (often under mortal peril) become just more variations on the same theme. There’s the fox-like world-saver of Michael Gagne’s “[[[The Broken Path]]],” the anthropomorphic fox-man of Reagan Lodge’s “[[[The Dragon]]],” the self-consciously ironic Bigdome of Paul Rivoche’s “[[[Flowers for Mama]]],” Dave Roman’s series of folks who could all be “The Chosen One,” the probably-delusional child Princess of Pluto in Svetlana Chmakova’s “On the Importance of Space Travel,” and – the youngest and most obvious lesson-telling of all of these – boy hero of Richard Pose’s “Beisbol 2.”

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Review: ‘Shmobots’ by Adam Rifkin and Les Toil

shmobots_tpb_7-5396725Shmobots is a pretty stupid book on its face. And it’s pretty stupid inside too.

Government negligence leads to a city full of worthless robots (termed [[[Shmobots]]]), and three of the laziest ones hang out with a guy and do pretty much nothing with their lives.

The humore here — from writer Adam Rifkin — is all pretty obvious, heavy on robot cliches and slacker jokes we’ve heard before. Yet the book has an undeniable charm, no doubt because its creators acknowledge those faults and even celebrate them.

Sure, the lead robot character is a carbon copy of Bender from Futurama, but he’s used (at least this is my guess) to make fun of the stupid humor genre even while revelling in it.

There is a more involved plot than I let on: the robots and human friend are constantly looking for money, while unknowingly they’re being stalked by the Shmobot Killer. The plot advances at a marijuana-soaked pace.

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Platinum Buys Wowio

  • News
  • July 23, 2008

herobynightcover1-series-2090810It’s official. Platinum has purchased Wowio. I won’t have a chance to get into details on the numbers yet, but expect something soon.

Under the terms of the Agreement the Company acquired from the Members 100% of the membership interests of WOWIO for a total purchase price of $3,150,000 payable in shares of common stock of the Company.

Over at his blog, D.J. Coffman, creator of Hero by Night and formerly of Platinum Studios, goes through what he says is the new contract for creators from Wowio, the Web comics outlet that is reportedly going to be purchased by Platinum.

Perhaps not surprising after his acrimonious falling out with Platinum over late payments, Coffman takes issue with several aspects of the contract.

"For revenues derived from Ecommerce Option, Publisher shall receive 50% percent of the quarterly gross revenue generated by sales of Ebooks of the Publisher’s Content.
For revenues derived from Sponsorship Option, Publisher shall receive (i) 50 cents ($0.50 USD) per download for eTexts of less than 100 pages; and (ii) One dollar ($1.00 USD) per download for eTexts of 100 pages and above.
All Royalties shall be paid to Publisher on a quarterly basis, within 45 days following the end of each calendar quarter."

* Couple things here… again, the thought of splitting 50/50 profits on an ebook sale with anyone is ridiculous to me. And the part about when you’re SUPPOSED to be paid, turns my stomach a little in the light of the situation I was in with Platinum. I’m guessing everything will go smoothly during the “transition” period when the old Wowio people are still managing things.. but when the keys are handed over to Platinum, I’ve got a BADDDddddddd feeling about people being paid on time. That’s not an assumption, that’s a proven fact, regardless of the articles written about creators owed, printer representives telling me they were owed and COMIC BOOK NEWS sites telling me they were owed money… and the Drunk Duck kids over there, there was a bunch of “mobile wallpaper” people never paid. I have a really good friend who had his wallpapers up through their service before, and when he asked, he was told that “none sold” but he knew better because his own family had boughten them from the site!!!! — Anyways, THAT’S who will be running this shindig now. That’s who owns them. You have been warned.

Review: ‘The ACME Novelty Date Book, Vol. 2’ by Chris Ware

The ACME Novelty Date Book, Vol. 2: 1995-2002
By Chris Ware
Drawn & Quarterly, December 2007, $39.95

In typical Chris Ware fashion, this is an attractively (and extensively) packaged book – so much so, in fact, that what this book precisely is isn’t immediately clear. Is it some kind of notebook, journal, or calendar, perhaps? No, it’s Ware’s sketchbook, or perhaps selected pages from that sketchbook, from the years in the title.

Drawn & Quarterly published the first volume of the “[[[ACME Novelty Date Book]]]” in 2003, which included sketchbook pages from 1986 through 1995. That book covered most of Ware’s twenties, starting when he was in college in Austin, Texas and following him forward as he developed the early ACME characters and themes. That first book also had a wide variety of materials; Ware was young and trying out different art styles, but he’d mostly settled down into his current mode by 1995.

So Vol. 2, as Ware mentions himself partway through it, is mostly made up of three kinds of entries: drawings from life, journal entries, and some short comics strips (mostly autobiographical). There are also some sketches and ideas for [[[ACME Novelty Library]]], and the occasional joke or reference to older comics, but, mostly, it’s those big three.

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Review: ‘Green Lantern: The Sinestro Corps War Vol. 2’

sinestro2-7811134This past weekend at Heroes Con, a panel of some of comics’ biggest stars weighed in on collaboration and, eventually, the art of the crossover.

Mostly, that meant griping about the impossible task of tying into a Final Crisis or Secret Invasion. Matt Fraction went so far as to say he opted out of some crossovers because the stress of it would take years off his life. Jimmy Palmiotti essentially acknowledged the failure of DC’s Countdown.

Clearly, it’s not that hard for a big superhero event to careen right off the tracks. Which means we should all pay attention when one works particularly well, as in Green Lantern: The Sinestro Corps War (Volume 2 is out now in hardcover at $24.99).

The story is simple enough: Sinestro breaks loose and raises the most terrifying army ever seen, including all of DC’s strongest villains except for Darkseid. And the Green Lanterns fight back.

In this second half of the story, we see the classic turning of the tide back in the heroes’ favor, although Geoff Johns and crew add enough wrinkles to make the inevitable victory quite shadowy, if not outright pyrrhic.

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Review: ‘MuZz, Vol. 1’ by FSc

MuZz, Vol. 1
By FSc (Foo Swee Chin)
SLG Publishing, May 2008, $14.95

There’s a train that runs to MuZz – or, at least, it’s supposed to – carrying ideas and thoughts whose creators have lost interest in them. They’re all pretty odd and motley, as you might expect: a black whale, a phantom cat, and things I couldn’t even begin to describe.

But, on this particular train, there’s also a figure that looks like a teenage girl missing an eye. She’s Modorelin Farllee, she’s an actual human, and she’s not even dead. (Well, I don’t think she’s dead, but I don’t want to be too definite about any plot points concerning [[[MuZz]]].)

Farllee remembers nothing of her past, and wakes up on the train in such a frantic, grouchy mood that she shakes her elf guide to death and has to rely on the standard pamphlet and the advice of her fellow passengers to figure out what’s going on.

And so she quickly learns what I’ve just told you – she doesn’t believe that she’s actually a figment of someone else’s imagination, but she can’t prove that, and drops the subject. None of them are precisely sure what will happen to them in MuZz, but, for nearly all of them, it has to be better than their previous lives.

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Review: ‘The Joker: The Greatest Stories Ever Told’

This summer is a big one for Batman’s deadliest foe, the Joker, with the deceased Heath Ledger giving an apparently mesmerizing take on the clown prince of crime in [[[The Dark Knight]]].

And just in time comes the latest printing from DC of The Joker: The Greatest Stories Ever Told ($19.99), which offers some of the character’s legendary moments from his debut in 1940 in Batman #1 to last year’s macabre Christmas tale from Paul Dini.

First, lets dispense with the hyperbole of the title. There are some great Joker moments here, but several of the character’s biggest aren’t included. There’s nothing from [[[The Killing Joke]]],[[[ A Death in the Family]]] or [[[Dark Knight Returns]]], for example.

More than anything, this is a great primer on the Joker, charting his characterizations over his six-plus decades of existence as he became quite likely the most recognizable evil-doer in comics.

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