Art in progress at artist Nik Poliwko’s digital rendering.
A closer look at Poliwko’s art.
Airship 27 Productions has shared a sneak peek behind the curtains of illustrator Nik Poliwko’s first illustration for the upcoming The Ruby Files Vol. 2.
The award-winning The Ruby Files returns for a second volume of pulpy detective yarns in 2013 from Airship 27 Productions. The Ruby Files Vol. 2 features stories by Ruby Files creators Sean Taylor and Bobby Nash and authors Alan J. Porter and Ron Fortier. Interior illustrations provided by Nik Poliwko under a cover by Mark Wheatley. Rob Davis returns as book designer.
CARSON OF VENUS, an all-new full color online weekly comic strip of interplanetary romantic adventure by writer Martin Powell and artists Thomas Floyd and Diana Leto is now live at http://www.edgarriceburroughs.com/comics/
Brought to you by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Incorporated, Carson of Venus is part of ERB Inc’s comic subscription service. For the low price of $1.99 per month you get Carson of Venus and the all-new TARZAN comic strip by Roy Thomas and Tom Grindberg. And there are more new ERB comic strips on the way. Plus, fun free collectible premiums! If you love pulpy comic strips, subscribe today at http://www.edgarriceburroughs.com/comics/
I’m writing this while listening to John Williams’ magnificent score for Superman – the one and only Superman, starring Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder.
Why?
Well, this morning (Sunday, June 2, 2013) I was doing my usual routine, sipping tea at the breakfast table, working on the New York Times Sunday crossword and listening to NPR. (Yeah, I’m a media multi-tasker.) NPR’s Studio 360 series “American Icons” was about to start. It turned to be a rebroadcast of a program that originally aired on July 6, 2007.
And today’s icon was…
Superman.
I didn’t remember hearing the original broadcast, and I’m guessing the station chose to rerun it because Man Of Steel is about to be released. At any rate, being a comic geek, I was delighted. Commentators included Margot Kidder, Jack Lawson, Bryan Singer, Michael Chabon, Jules Feifer, and Art Spiegelman. It touched on many areas – of course Siegel and Schuster and the shitty way they were treated by DC (NPR never reins in its guests, which is why I love it!), the relation of Superman to Jewish mythology and the immigrant experience, the history of Superman in the media, from the comics to radio to the dynamic Fleisher Studios animated movie shorts to television to the big screen – although there was no conversation about Man Of Steel, since it was a rebroadcast from just before SupermanReturns was released.
Even though it is an old program, the content was still relevant – proving their point that Superman is an American icon. And the producers did their homework. A section that I especially liked was the discussion of Superman: Red Sun (by Mark Millar, Dave Johnson, and Killian Plunkett. The prestige format mini-series, which hit the bookshelves in 2003 and was later collected and released as a graphic novel, was published under DC’s Elseworlds imprint, and explored this particular “what if?” scenario: What if Kal-El’s rocket from Krypton had landed in the Ukrainian farmlands during the Cold War? What if Superman wasn’t raised to fight for truth, justice, and the American way, but – as Millar wrote – “the Champion of the common worker who fights a never-ending battle for Stalin, socialism, and the international expansion of the Warsaw Pact?”
This led to a really cool conversation on totalitarianism, fascism, World War II and the Nazis, and the use of Superman during that time as a propaganda tool by the American government to promote American ideals and values. As fellow columnist Robert Greenberger wrote here at ComicMix on December 7, 2009 , “a special edition of Superman…was produced for the U.S. Army.The Army had a problem at the time – they were drafting thousands of men a year, but many of them had no education to speak of, with large swaths of them functionally illiterate, and they were expected to operate complex machinery pretty quickly. They had to learn how to read, and fast. The troops also needed cheap and portable entertainment, something that could be carried through the battlefields of Europe and Asia.So with the cooperation of National Periodical Publications, the forerunner to DC Comics, this edition was produced by the War Department with simplified dialogue and word balloons. Hundreds of thousands of copies were distributed to GIs, and it helped them learn to read and to pass the time. And of course, copies of the comics were handed out to kids in faraway lands, as gestures of goodwill.”
The guests also discussed Superman and his role as the ultimate superhero, someone who has the power to do either enormous good or enormous evil. Either way, isn’t his decision to act at all, to interfere in the lives of the mortals beneath him, that of Nietzsche’s “übermench,” who will decide the fate of society?
IM-always-Not-So-Ho, Studio 360 did a great job dissecting what it is about the Kryptonian that makes him an American icon, and I totally recommend going to the NPR website and either streaming it or downloading it for podcast for your listening pleasure.
Meanwhile…
Williams’ score is still playing.
What really strikes me as I sit here, scenes from the movie replaying in my head – the oh-so-cool opening with the kid reading a comic and the camera zooming in on the Daily Planet as it transitions from comic page to “reality,” Superman rescuing the cat from the tree, of course Superman’s first rescue of Lois (“You’ve got me? Who’s got you?!”), the finale with Superman flying in orbit around the Earth and Christopher Reeve looking at us and smiling as he zooms off camera – is the impressive way that Williams leads the music from a grand, baroque science-fiction scenario (Krypton) to the down-to-earth gentleness of the Kent’s farm to the majestic sweep of the Kansas prairies as Clark follows his destiny to the romantic, impossible reality of Superman in Metropolis.
The BBC announced officially this weekend that Matt Smith, current star of Doctor Who, will be leaving the series in the Christmas episode.
Both Matt and showrunner Steven Moffat have already been quoted heaping glowing praise on each other, and rightly so. Doctor Who fandom has already kicked into overdrive, showering tumblr and other blog pages with a deluge of tribute graphics, please to remain, and other spontaneous eruptions of raw emotion.
Doctor Who fans will now once again pass through the seven stages of grief, a process that some have never experienced, being new to the show, some have already seen once or twice, or for older fans (raises hand), seven, eight, or as many as eleven times.
One of the most amazing things about Doctor Who is this process of regeneration. While other actors have been replaced on television shows, Doctor Who invented a process that made it a part of the narrative. Time Lords, the Doctor’s people, have the ability to completely rejuvenate themselves in times of extreme trauma, completely reborn, with a new body and a new personalty. It allows the show to not only move on past the departure of its star, but forge into brand new directions.
Along with the regeneration process will be an equally traditional series of events:
The news media will kick the rumor mills into high gear – Names will be floated, denials will be made, and actors will play coy, taking advantage of the publicity to get their name in the sun.
The betting will begin – Gambling is legal in the UK, and the local bookies have traditionally taken wagers on the identity of the new Doctor. And the aforementioned media will report the current oddsmaking, as if it has some connection to reality. As in the rumor mill, new names will emerge and rise and fall in the rankings, and it’ll be a delight to watch.Unless you’ve put money down, in which case it’ll be harrowing.
The discussions about making The Doctor a woman will re-emerge – So too making him black, or Asian, or any of the other “types” of people a character can be. Both Mike Gold and Yr obt svt. have discussed the recurring meme, more about the fervor and hysteria around it.
The fans will swear blind it will never be as good as (insert name here) – Nothing is ever as good as what you have now, or if you are older (just leaves hand in air), than what you had when you were younger. Each Doctor was perfect, and nobody can ever replace him, until about five minutes into the first new episode when the new guy grabs you and rubs your tummy with his acting and makes you forget the last guy’s name for a moment. The show will careen off in a new direction, just like a trip in the TARDIS itself, and the trip will be thrilling and terrifying, and ultimately satisfying.
Someone’s life will never be the same again – Moffat has it right – “Somewhere out there right now – all unknowing, just going about their business – is someone who’s about to become the Doctor“. The show was popular during its original run, but now it’s dead center in popular culture, and the person selected to play The Doctor will shoot to super-stardom before a frame’s been shot. Matt Smith has already taken advantage of the opportunities the role has afforded him – he’s currently filming Ryan Gosling’s directorial debut How to Make a Monster, and plans to direct himself.
With six months to go before the final Smith adventure airs, and several weeks before it starts filming, fandom will be filled with many emotions, a rampant desire to learn new details, and will spent a great deal of time trying to separate reality from fantasy. Moffat and the BBC will begin the arduous process of choosing the actor to entrust with their golden franchise (if, indeed, they haven’t already started…or even finished), all the time trying to ride the line between keeping it all a secret and letting just enough details slip to keep the media hungry.
There may be an important wrinkle to the new Doctor’s story that may take the show in a dramatic direction. Matt’s Doctor is the eleventh regeneration, but events at the end of the final episode of the series suggest that there’s one more to be accounted for. John Hurt was revealed to be playing The Doctor as well, and fans has surmised he may be (have been) a regeneration between Eight (Paul McGann) and Nine (Christopher Eccleston). If so, even though Matt’s calls himself the eleventh Doctor, he’d be the twelfth…and the next one would be the thirteenth. According to the show’s history, a Time Lord can only regenerate twelve times, for a total of thirteen bodies, which would make the next Doctor…the last.
Which will likely never occur. Russell T. Davies has already said that when the time to get around that little plot device that seemed SO far away when they came up with it decades ago, “I’m sure someone will wave the Amulet of Zog and sort it all out”. But it’ll be the process to get to that eventual happy end that will make the show all the more exciting,.
I caught the movie musical version of Les Miserables recently (and I will thank my brain to stop playing snippets of the soundtrack over and over and over again) and was struck by a line sung by the hero, Jean Valjean, late in the story: “To love another person is to see the face of God.” That line has always pierced me (I’ve seen the stage version of the show several times).
I was raised Roman Catholic but I am now a Practicing Agnostic by which I mean that I don’t know that there is a god but I don’t know that there isn’t, either. Lately, I’ve come to accept the possibility of something like a god out there without subscribing to any of the versions that different religions put out as the One True Version. Even within Christianity, there’s no one vision of Jesus. There are wars over that vision; my Jesus can beat up your Jesus. Within the Moslem community, Sunni makes war on Shi’ites and vice versa. And so on.
In each case, the face of god reflects the belief of the believers and the society out of which that face was carved. Is one truer than another? Not for me. Look, I like the Bible (mostly). The stories in it are the tradition with which I was raised and that means something to me. Do I accept it as the literal truth? No, any more than I accept the Norse gods or Marvel’s version of them as “truths.” Walter Simonson’s depiction of Thor as the Frog of Thunder enchanted me, but I don’t worship it.
One of my proudest achievements in writing comics was the run that Tom Mandrake and I did on The Spectre over at DC. In it, I explored the issues of redemption, of divine punishment, of good and evil that were rattling around in my soul. Even though I was no longer a practicing Roman Catholic, my quibbles were more with the practices of the Church than the beliefs. I was able to explore theological questions I had about those beliefs.
I don’t think I could write The Spectre today as I did back then. I’m not the same person; I’ve changed. I don’t have the same beliefs as I did then so the theological questions and quibbles I had when I wrote the Spectre are no longer relevant to me.
How people see God tells me less about God than it does about those people. Stern, capricious, loving, aloof – these can all be faces of God. God is a reflection of that God’s worshippers and it changes over time. Take a look at all the portraits of Jesus over the years – he’s morphed from a Jewish rabbi into the blonde haired, blue eyed Jeffrey Hunter in the movie King of Kings. I’ve seen striking images of Jesus as a black man; strong and necessary images re-interpreting Jesus as part of the African-American community. Latino as well. Asian. Female. Why not?
I’m not trying to tell anyone that their version of God is wrong; I’ll leave that to Bill Mahr. My doubts are my doubts. However, I have issue when someone tries to tell me I have to think, act, or believe as they do because that’s the truth. That’s their truth and I accept it for that but it’s not my Truth and I don’t accept it as the universal Truth many of them claim it to be. One person’s religious beliefs do not trump another person’s rights. Your God is not my God.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ve just seen the Flying Spaghetti Monster drift by my window. I may have just become a Pastafarian.
Yup. I said it. I’ll say it again. Star Wars? It sucks. Of course I should clarify: I respectthe Intellectual Property. I admire George Lucas for spinning a billion dollar franchise out of a single movie – appropriated from so many better films, novels, and concepts. And hell, I own a fair share of Star Wars merchandise (a run of John Ostrander’s Way Better Than Anything On Film comics, a lightsaber, and a handful of vintage videogames). But this past weekend, whilst looking for something to keep on in the background of yet-another drawing marathon, my dial ended up on Episodes I, II, and III.
Given that I recall astutely not liking them in theater, on DVD, or rebroadcast in any incarnation, I’ll freely admit I let them play because I was jonesing for a one-sided fight. And you, my dear readers (who I can plainly see unlocking the safety on your blasters under the table, and preparing to force-pull the ceiling down on top of my head…) get to listen to me rant a wee-bit.
First off, let me parry the obvious incoming attack. Episodes I, II, and III are canon. One is simply not allowed to pretend they didn’t happen. Midichlorians? Happened. Anakin acting like a whiny bitch? Happened. Padme acting worse than a CGI droid? Happened. And no amount of jamming ones fingers in their ears and screaming will make them disappear. Therein lies why I am so adamant at being so blunt in my opinion. By their very nature, this new trilogy drags down the series for me. I think I might be safe to say for many others… this may also be the case.
No matter how good the Clone Wars cartoon may have been… when it ends, you still end up with Episode III. Yes, John Ostrander and a plethora of other amazing writers have contributed to beautifully written comics, novels, and other in-canon fiction. Either way? Episode I, and II are there in living-breathing-CGI. Jar Jar exists, and no comic, video game, or brilliant fanzine will remove him from my mind.
Let me also sidestep your obvious escalation attempt. What about The Matrix, Star Trek, or any number of other brilliant-at-one-point-but-obviously-tainted-by-my-asshat-logic franchises? Perhaps I’m just being a dick, but somehow? I forgive them both. For what it’s worth… the least successful jaunts in each of those large franchises had a given quality to them that still made their respective parent properties still feel valuable. Sure Neo is Jesus, but at least he’s a badass Jesus, right?
The key to my argument comes from Lucas’ own love of technology. In every aspect, those episodes embody what can be so wrong with modern movies and our culture. Lucas opted to slight the artisans who once took his black and white screenplay and made a visceral universe in lieu of videogame artists. Not to slight those who make pixel-art mind you… but even with all the advances of computer-aided movie-making, there’s nary a person I know who doesn’t look at the The Phantom Menace, The Clone Wars, or Revenge of the Sith and not make a fleeting comment on how “it looks like a video game” in a very negative way. Combine with with absolutely wooden performances (from Oscar nominated actors and actresses mind you!), and the new trilogy clearly chose spectacle over heart.
The best examples of Star Wars all share a commonality; they present the fantastic grounded in very human emotions. Lightsabers are cool. X-Wings are too. But find me one person (over the age of 13, to be fair) who prefers Yoda backflipping like a crack-addled spider-monkey to the soul-filled voice and puppet work of Frank Oz? I’ll gladly argue them into submission. The crapulence of I, II, and III degrade IV, V, and VI in ways I wish weren’t true. As I said: you can’t ‘unmake’ them, and therefore everything they set up feels tainted to me.
The fact that they were the product of Lucas, and his team of yes-man make it feel all the worse. It wasn’t as if he’d handed the reigns to a new writer and director, wiped his hands of it, and shrugged off three profitable but largely uncelebrated films. Here, he presented what set up an amazing series of adventures, and pulled back the veil of mystery to uncover a story so dull, it actually weakened existing canon! How I wish I could fear Darth Vader, but now all I see is a whiny douche who had sand in his boots.
Well, they say time heals all wounds. So now, we sit at the event horizon. J.J. Abrams has been given the keys to the castle. While some find his new take on Trek to be more boom-boom than think-bam… it may very well be what Star Wars needs to really move on. A mix of practical effects and CGI (perhaps light on the lens-flares, mmm kay?), blended with original and new casts that take time to put themselves into their roles, and a story that dares to challenge its audience with more than trade politics and council debates could very well be the blaster-shot in the pants the franchise needs to be back on top. For the sake of all who are presently seething at me? I sure hope so.
May the force be with you… ‘cause it certainly ain’t with me.
THE VENTURE BROTHERS kicks off a new season on Adult Swim this Sunday at midnight. we talk to the brains behind the cartoon to see what is coming up, plus there is more summer TV this week with a new season of AMERICA’S GOT TALENT. Judges Howie Mandel and Mel B tell us why this season has a lot of differences. And Doctor Who…a racist? Really?
How was your holiday weekend last week? Mine was great. I spent Sunday sitting in the sun by a lake, talking about graphic storytelling.
There were six of us, plus a pre-teen who just wanted to play video games, a form of graphic storytelling perhaps but not one we are going to discuss. At least four of us had a jones for newspaper strips. Four of us liked comic books. And at least five of us liked gag panels. It’s also possible that all of us liked all forms, but I’m not sure, nor does it really matter.
I was especially intrigued by the love given to newspaper strips. When I was a girl, they were my favorite part of the newspaper. I read everything, even Mary Worth and Dondi. I loved Li’l Abner even when Al Capp went right-wing crazy.
But I loved the funny strips more. Peanuts,Blondie, and later Calvin & Hobbes My parents had a subscription to The New Yorker, and a book that collected New Yorker cartoons from 1925 to 1955, and it is from these that I learned what funny drawings looked like.
When I was old enough to appreciate the skills involved in graphic storytelling, I enjoyed Milton Caniff. And I wanted to like Little Orphan Annie and Dick Tracy, but they never grabbed me on an emotional level. I never had to read the next day’s strip.
By this time, I was rabidly into comic books. Instead of waiting weeks to read a whole story, as required by newspaper strips, I got the whole thing between two covers. I liked this better.
In modern times, there aren’t very many comic books that tell a complete story in a single issue. There are fewer and fewer newspapers comic strips (and fewer and fewer newspapers), and serial dramas seem much less popular than humor strips. And there are fewer and fewer markets for gag panels.
Each of these forms combine words and pictures. Each needs to communicate story and character quickly, in a small space. And yet, each is completely different, one from the other.
I personally don’t enjoy collections of newspaper story strips. I find that the form requires a grey deal of repetition, and it hurts my head after a while.
I frequently don’t enjoy collections of comic book stories for the same reason. The passing of time between individual episodes requires something that will jog the reader’s memory, but it is less effective in a collection. A graphic novel should stand by itself, and so should individual issues.
I love gag panel collections, and feel that is the best reason to have bookshelves in the bathroom.
Is there is any title that works best in all three genres?
