Tagged: DC

Burning the candle, by Elayne Riggs

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  • December 5, 2007

elayne100-9533021This column is finally up to installment #42. As you well know, that’s said to be the answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything. And now that I’m 50 years old, I’m supposed to be ever much smarter than I used to be, and ever so much closer to achieving the enlightenment that’s supposed to help me understand the questions to that answer.

Don’t you believe it. It’s a good thing life is a constant learning experience, although it’s a bit disheartening that the more I live the more there remains for me to learn. I can’t be the only one who constantly feels like I’m treading water, or running in place just to keep up.

Last night many Jews began the annual commemoration of Chanukah (or Hanukkah or Channukah or Throat-Warbler Mangrove), the Festival of Lights, not to be confused with Diwali, the Festival of Light marking the victory of good over evil, and uplifting of spiritual darkness, which seems to predate it by a good many centuries. Chanukah marks the rededication of the Second Temple (after it was desecrated by Antiochus IV Epiphanes at the time of the Maccabee rebellion, a couple hundred years before that Jesus guy came along) and the miracle that one day’s worth of consecrated olive oil wound up burning for eight (the length of time it took to process a new batch). So instead of celebrating something cool like the uplifting of spiritual darkness, in the hands of the Jews the festival became the glorification of frugality, of making a little go a long way.

Then the Christians came along and, within another few centuries, had converted massive populations and co-opted their festivals so that Midwinter (the winter solstice) practices became part of Christmas, which grew and grew into a general celebration of plenty and excess and cheer (except for those people who insist on missing the point by suggesting Santa is a "bad role model" because he’s fat and jolly; no no, can’t have any happy large people around during the months when it’s customary to fatten up to stave off cold and hunger!). And you know, given the choice between a whooping it up over how fortunate one is to have enough to eat and how dire one’s circumstances are that one has to burn the midnight oil for a week — well, let’s just say it’s easy to see how one can become so popular it’s no longer solely Christian or even pagan but practically secular, where the other is forever relegated in the public consciousness to second-place status and an excuse to teach lessons in multicultural inclusion.

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Speaking Ill Of The Dead, by Mike Gold

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  • December 3, 2007

51zhqnwb11l-_ss500_-2489854As we were driving back east from two weeks in Detroit, Columbus, Chicago and Toledo – next time, I’m getting a campaign bus – we heard the news of Evel Knievel’s death. No, this blather isn’t about him, although I do think that saying you’re going to take your motorcycle and jump over 50 school buses loaded with nuns and orphans and then strapping rockets to the bike is cheating. Nope, this blather is about Irwin Allen, noted dead movie and television producer/director/writer and former cover story in Modern Asshole magazine.

Allen was best known for his disaster movies, “disaster” in the sense that the plots involved some sort of serious event (The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure). His connection to Knievel? When I was at DC Comics back in 1976, he called me in a fit of pique about his upcoming movie, Viva Knievel! It seems he heard we were doing a big ol’ comic book teaming Superman up with Muhammad Ali, and he thought a Batman vs. Evel Knievel companion volume was a lovely idea.

I didn’t, and as it turned out somebody quoted my arguments to him. Irwin was more than mildly annoyed. He called to try to talk me out of it, not that the decision to make or not make such a comic book was anywhere near my capabilities at the time. His technique was rather unique: instead of sweet-talking me or convincing me of the error of my ways, he used invective and attack. He wanted to know where some 26 year-old pissant got off sabotaging (honest) a big Hollywood macher like him. He started screaming an unending list of curse words that would have impressed George Carlin. He threatened my unborn children, promised to destroy my career (coming short of “you’ll never have lunch in this town again,” as I was in New York City) and I think there was something in there about my mother and an orangutan.

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Baby, It’s Cold Outside, by Martha Thomases

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  • 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…)

More on Z-Cult and the torrenting mess

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  • 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.

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…)

Jack of Fables V2: Jack of Hearts Review

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  • November 27, 2007

Brand extensions can be tricky things. Sometimes you end up with Lucifer, but sometimes you get Witchblade Takeru Manga instead. Jack of Fables, from DC, was a clear attempt to extend the brand identity of the Fables series, written by Bill Willingham and mostly penciled by Mark Buckingham, with a companion series about one of the more interesting characters from that world. As far as brand extensions go, it hews most closely to the Sandman Mystery Theater model: the writer of the main series is involved (though it’s always difficult to tell, from the outside, just how much involvement that is) and the tone and style is very close to the original.

I wasn’t completely thrilled with the first Jack of Fables plotline (which I reviewed on my personal blog), finding it a bit too heavy-handed and dark. Jack is an unrepentant rogue, and to care about a rogue, he has to either not be too nasty to people, or mostly run into much worse folks than himself. Either way, he has to have a lightness of touch – the story can’t focus on his worst impulses. (See Jack Vance’s novels The Eyes of the Overworld and Cugel the Clever for one of the best examples of the form.)

Jack is mostly acted upon in the title story of this volume, which is good: a rogue off balance is more interesting, and his scramblings add a feeling of urgency to the proceedings. But that’s actually the second story in this volume, so I have to backtrack.

Jack of Hearts, the book, starts with a two-issue story called “Jack Frost,” framed as a tale Jack tells some of his fellow escapes from the magical prison from the first volume. They’re hiding high in the mountains from those who would recapture them, and Jack mentions that he was once Jack Frost…and so of course has to explain. (more…)

Raiders of Lost Knowledge, by Mike Gold

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  • November 26, 2007

A couple weeks ago, Linda and I were at the Norman Rockwell Museum for the opening of their graphic novels exhibit. If you can get to Stockbridge Massachusetts before the end of May, I highly recommend it. Even if you can’t get there by then, I highly recommend the Museum.

Well, I think I managed to break my record. I actually went off-subject in my very first paragraph. When I read this online, ten days from now (I’m writing ahead because I’ll be at the Mid-Ohio Con), I will really be embarrassed. But, again, I digress.

We were there at the invitation of the Museum and of Mark Wheatley and Marc Hempel. We did a graphic novel called Breathtaker, which was both published by and loathed by DC Comics. Joke’s on you guys: we were at the Rockwell. Anyway, it seems I’m digressing once in each paragraph. I promise I’ll be more linear.

Dave Sim, of Cerebus fame, was among the dozen or so honorees. Well deserved; he’s possibly the only single cartoonist to pull off a 6,000 page graphic novel. Dave, Linda and I got into a lengthy conversation about the medium and its future – occupational hazard, that – and in the course of discussion Dave suggested it was possible – possible, mind you – that it takes a higher level of intelligence than average to be attracted to the graphic storytelling medium (I think Dave called it “comics”). The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy isn’t the exception, he may be the rule. And I’ll admit that most of the Mensa people I know are into comics, but that’s probably because a lot of comics people I know were in Mensa. And most of them couldn’t get laid there, either.

But we, as a micro-society deviant or otherwise, do seem to have a thirst for knowledge. So, with the kind permission of our DVD Extras columnist Ric Meyers, I can highly recommend the Young Indiana Jones DVD box sets. Not so much for the teevee movies contained therein, which I rather liked even though they lacked the action and pacing of the theatricals, but for the documentaries. The first box set (of two) contained 12 discs and some 38 documentaries, each running about 15 to 30 minutes. (more…)

Thank you. Thank you very much… by Michael Davis

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  • November 23, 2007

Every Thanksgiving the media does reports on what makes people thankful. It’s always the same things. Husbands are thankful for their wives and kids. Wives are thankful for their husband and kids. Older people are thankful for good health. Kids are thankful for their Mom & Dad. Blah, blah, blah…

blahblahblahblahblahblah!

Give me a break. I mean come on; everybody loves his or her family. Well almost everybody. I forgot about the Menendez Brothers.

I love my family, as I’m sure you do but besides them, I wonder what people are really thankful for?

I think I may know…

Men are thankful for women and power tools. Women are thankful for shoes and power tools (…give it a moment). Skinny people are thankful for fat people. Fat people are thankful for meat. Black people are thankful for Lincoln and videotape, especially in Los Angeles. White people are thankful for golf and vacations. Super models are thankful for books on tape. Liberals are thankful for rent control and gun legislation. Conservatives are thankful for gated communities and guns. (more…)

Doctor 13: Architecture & Mortality Review

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  • November 21, 2007

Modernism and self-referentiality have been rampant in superhero comics for a good twenty years now; Alan Moore was the main instigator, with his great final Superman story and the Watchmen “pirate comics” motif. Some of the best and most entertaining stories since then have been knowingly "comics," from Grant Morrison’s "The Coyote Gospel" in Animal Man to John Byrne’s pleasant run on She-Hulk. But self-referentiality can also curdle like milk, or gnaw away its own belly like the fox under the Spartan boy’s cloak. There’s a huge streak of allegory in modern superhero comics – actually, "allegory" gives it too much credit; what we actually find are naked bids for audience identification and equally naked scornings of any connection to or interest in the supposedly puerile and retrograde wishes of that audience. (Pop quiz: who does Superman-Prime represent and why?)

Mainstream superhero comics have become a high-speed whirlwind of reader-response feedback done mad, with convoluted continuity one week and shredded history the next, and, no matter what, the anvil chorus of comics bloggers complaining that something or other is “raping their childhoods.” Doctor 13: Architecture & Mortality is not the first series to dive into the middle of that debate – hell, most of the big crossovers now are thinly veiled attempts to seduce the audience into believing in one propaganda version of continuity or other. (“Marvel has always been at Civil War with Eastasia.”)

But Doctor 13 does have the advantage of trying to be fun – and, even better, at generally succeeding. It does feel a bit like special pleading in the end; Azzarello is yet another guy who grew up with comics and wants to celebrate the stuff he loved as a kid. (Exactly the kind of comics writer, I’m afraid, that we need less of today.) The art is also very nice: Cliff Chang has clean, confident black lines defining crisp space, and is particularly good at drawing people. (more…)

The days of miracles and wonder, by Elayne Riggs

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  • November 21, 2007

elayne100-1554533I’ve taken a break from my promised sequel about comic book artists whose current work I like because (1) I still haven’t made it through the most recent DC comp box, (2) it’s not like there’s a huge clamor for it. and mostly (3) I’ve been in a sort of weird transition mode and needed to write about that because it’s never far from my mind, but is thrown into special relief during the upcoming holiday season.

In truth, I feel like this entire year has been a transitional one for me. Losing my best friend then my father in rapid succession threw me for such a loop it seems doubtful I’ll ever fully regain my equilibrium. Then there was The Job Thing. I’d been looking for a new position for awhile but the timing never worked out. Every time my job search gained momentum, my boss would return from Europe and I had to put everything on hold. Meanwhile, lots of little downturns became bigger ones and, to make a long story which I’ll be happy to tell you in a bar sometime short, on November 9 my employer of ten years and I officially came to a parting of the ways.

I have enough severance pay for awhile and am still interviewing for a new position back in Manhattan, so this isn’t a lamentation on my lack of current employment. It’s more a realization of how lucky I’ve been again this year. Even with deaths in the family and among my circle of friends, I have so very many blessings in my life. And with my half-century mark looming ever closer (a week from Sunday, in fact) I thought it would be a nice and perhaps inspirational idea to count those blessings.

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