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Comics panels at WisCon

Comics panels at WisCon

Karen Healey of GirlWonder reports on a few comics-related panels in which she’ll be participating at the upcoming annual WisCon feminist SF convention, May 25-28.  Here’s the full panel schedule.  My favorite is the one she’s moderating:

Sarcasm and Superheroics: Feminism in the Mainstream Comics Industry

2006 was declared the year of Women in Comics. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was one of Time’s 10 Best Books, best-selling authors Jodi Picoult and Tamora Pierce were signed up to write for DC and Marvel, and DC announced a new Minx line for girls. However, 2006 was also a year of increased feminist activism in mainstream comics. New websites "When Fangirls Attack" and "Girl-Wonder.org" collected and encouraged feminist debate on issues of diversity and sexism in comics, and there seemed to be plenty to talk about. Moreover, the Occasional Superheroine confessional memoir recounted a disturbing tale of abuse and misogyny within the superhero industry that was reflected on the pages of its comics. What has improved in the comics industry? What is yet to be done? What challenges are posed by the industry’s peculiar institutional structure? How can women break into the comics mainstream? How can we critique it? And what comics can you buy for your kids? M: Karen Elizabeth Healey, Charlie Anders, Rachel Sharon Edidin, Catherine Lundoff, Jenni Moody

There’s also an interesting-sounding X-Men panel on Sunday.  I’m officially jealous; it sounds like another great year for the WisCon folks.

Women visible in Lulu awards

Women visible in Lulu awards

As mentioned here and on many other news sites, the voting is now open for this year’s Friends of Lulu Awards.  Since the awards are all about enhancing women’s visibility in an industry that too often marginalizes and downplays them, and since there’s a lot of discussion currently going on about what real women look like, I thought I’d present the nominees pictorially:

For the Women Cartoonists’ Hall of Fame (left to right): Colleen Doran, Lily Renee Phillips, Donna Barr

For Lulu of the Year (left to right): Alison Bechdel, Abby Denson, Donna Barr (Torvald not eligible)

For the Kim Yale Award (for Best New Female Talent): Top row, Rachel Habors and June Kim; bottom row, Rivka and Joelle Jones

For the Women of Distinction Award (left to right): Jennifer deGuzman, Joan Hilty, Karen Berger

Links to all the fine work done by these women are at the FoL voting site.

 

MIKE GOLD: Sometimes the good guys win

MIKE GOLD: Sometimes the good guys win

As our Elayne Riggs reported this weekend, Derek McCulloch and Shepherd Hendrix earned themselves four Glyph Comic Awards at this weekend’s East Coast Black Age of Comics Convention for their ground-breaking graphic novel, Stagger Lee. They won Story of the Year, Best Writer, Best Male Character, and Best Cover.

Their efforts have also received an Eisner Awards nomination (“Best Reality-Based Work,” which is slicing the onion rather thin) and a British Eagle nomination (“Best Original Graphic Novel). The Eisners will be announced at the San Diego Comic Con this July; the guys lost the Eagle last week to Pride of Baghdad. But, as the old saying goes, it’s an honor to be nominated, particularly against Fables, Lost Girls, and Five Fists of Science.

As the headline says, sometimes the good guys win. However, I take their success as a personal vindication. Anybody who had come within 20 feet of me during the last year heard me proselytize about Stagger Lee. And, lucky devil that you are, now it’s your turn.

If comics are ever going to escape from the Retard Ghetto, and we are slowly doing so, it will be because of the reach of graphic novels. Outsiders and an increasing number of insiders simply do not see very much in the way of sophisticated storytelling in literature that consists of bizarrely enhanced people dressing up in even more bizarre costumes in order to beat the shit out of one another. Actually, there are more “sophisticated” superhero stories than one might think, but they’re farts in the blizzard of such product.

In order to reach out successfully, we have to reach out in all directions. Here’s what Derek and Shep did in Stagger Lee.

They painstakingly searched out dozens, maybe hundreds, of versions of this classic folk song. They painstakingly researched the reality of the story, or realities, actually, as lots of folks have lots of different opinions. They got their reference straight, they lined up all the different versions, and then sculpted a story that contains its own multiverse of alternate realities, investigating the story from a great many of its folklore roots.

Then they did it as one solid novel. A graphic novel that will appeal to comics fans, to music fans (blues, roots, rock and folk in particular – although that pretty much covers it all), to those with a passion for American history, to those with a passion for black American history, and to people who are interested in a damn good story told in an entertaining and seductive manner.

That’s no small achievement, believe me. You try it.

In fact, I really wish you would. The future of the medium depends upon it.

Congratulations, guys.

Mike Gold is editor-in-chief of ComicMix.com

Artwork copyright 2006 Derek McCulloch and Shepherd Hendrix. All Rights Reserved.

Our weekly haul

Our weekly haul

By the time this posts I should be nearing my comic shop (which I’m visiting for the first time in ages) to pick up the last couple weeks’ worth of comics, so why not treat y’all to the last week of ComicMix columns first?:

And crank up that MP3 player for Mellifluous Mike Raub‘s most recent podcasts:

That should keep us all pretty busy for awhile!

RIC MEYERS: Pan’s Labyrinth, Children of Men, Droopy

RIC MEYERS: Pan’s Labyrinth, Children of Men, Droopy

Oh, you lucky consumers. This week, all the benefits of DVD watching have come to the fore with four classics that come in four different varieties. First, celebrate all ye cinema-of-the-fantastic fans, for two of the greatest science fiction and fantasy films of the 21st century are now out on disc but only one in a way that shows how superior the DVD format is to virtually every other medium.

I love fantasy. My first non-pseudonyminous novel was a fantasy, Cry of the Beast. My latest novel is a fantasy, Murder in Halruua. My first non-fiction book was The World of Fantasy Films. So it’s a great pleasure to now write about Pan’s Labyrinth, probably the best fantasy film since, well, the director’s previous mixing of monsters and Spanish history, The Devil’s Backbone (2001).

Even after directing Blade II and Hellboy, Hollywood still gave Guillermo del Toro’s extraordinary Oscar-winning new film its due, and New Line Home Entertainment is no exception, crafting one of the great DVDs to showcase it (and they’ve had some practice, considering they also backed the Lord of the Rings special editions). There is a single disc DVD, which only sports the director’s loving audio commentary, but let’s pretend that doesn’t exist (along with the fullscreen version).

Instead, go right to the Two Disc Platinum Series, which envelops the already magical, monstrous, mystical, and majestic film with gobs of film-enhancing extras. All too often, even when a DVD has loads of extras, they’re not really film-enhancing. They may be film-promoting, film-marketing, film-indulging, or even film-smoke-blowing, but it only takes a few of those to know the real deal when it comes around. Each of the documentaries included on the Platinum Edition make successive viewings of the film all the more enriching and enjoyable.

There’s a discourse on the movie’s use of fairy tale mythology, an examination of the colors and textures del Toro uses to deepen his work, a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the movie’s creatures (spotlighting Doug Jones, the director’s favorite go-to man for these roles), multiple “director’s notebook” interactive menu pages, and, not surprisingly, considering del Toro’s avowed love for comic books, animated prequels establishing back-stories for four of the film’s fantasy favorites.

They’ve also added the memorable episode of PBS’ Charlie Rose Show, which interviewed the friends now known as cinema’s “Three Amigos” – del Toro, Babel director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, and the next man on our DVD hit parade, Alfonso Cuaron. Using the clout he acquired after directing Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Cuaron threw it all into his remarkable adaptation of famed mystery writer P.D. James’ recent science-fiction novel Children of Men.

I love science fiction. My second non-pseudonyminous novel (Doomstar) and non-fiction book (The Great Science Fiction Films) were science fiction. I didn’t feel there was a huge difference between SF and fantasy, but apparently tinseltown disagrees. For, while New Line gave Pan’s Labyrinth its due, Universal treated the bleak yet exhilarating Children of Men like a red-headed stepchild.

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Shrek the Third is Number One

Shrek the Third is Number One

Even though most movie theaters haven’t opened yet, nor sold Sunday tickets, Variety is already reporting that Shrek the Third will rule the charts this weekend.  They do this because Friday ticket sales were $38.8 million, in 4,122 theaters.  That comes out to a per venue average of $9,423 — just for Friday.

Spider-Man 3, on the otherhand, earned $7.98 million, down 54% from last week.

UPDATE: Variety now says that, for the weekend, Shrek sold $122.9 million.  Spider-Man 3 came in second at $28.5 mil, down 51& over last weekend.  And 28 Weeks Later was third, with $5.1 million this weekend.

MICHAEL H. PRICE: Alley Oop’s Stagebound Texas Homecoming

MICHAEL H. PRICE: Alley Oop’s Stagebound Texas Homecoming

 

He’s got a chauffeur that’s a genuine dinosaur…

And he can knuckle yo’ head before you count to four.

– Dallas Frazier

“Alley Oop” (1960)

 

The formidable dinosaur-replica standing guard at the entrance to the Museum of Science & History in Fort Worth, Texas is a native Southwesterner in more ways than one. The creature goes by the academic name of Acrocanthosaurus atokensis, and as such it was not discovered until around 1950.

But a Fort Worth cartoonist named Vincent T. Hamlin had in fact discovered that unknown monster in the fertile substrata of his imagination – almost a generation’s span before the first Real World unearthing of any fossil remains. Hamlin called the creature by less of a mouthful of a name, and he made Dinny the Dinosaur a prominent player in a rip-snorting comic strip called Alley Oop, about a prehistoric Everyman. Dinny’s resemblance to the Acrocanthosaurus, or high-spined lizard, is uncannily prophetic.

This tidbit of provincial history took on a manifold relevance a couple of years ago with a smart accident of timing. No sooner had the Museum of Science & History opened its epic-caliber Lone Star Dinosaurs gallery, than Fort Worth’s Hip Pocket Theatre launched a stage adaptation of Alley Oop, in August of 2005. The bold juxtaposition of provocative science-fact with adventurous science-fantasy is one of those nowhere-but-Texas coincidences that would leave Vince Hamlin beaming with pride. If he were still around to do any beaming, that is.

In the interest of B.F.D. (Belated Full Disclosure), I should mention that I hold a stake in all these developments. I composed the musical score for Hip Pocket’s Alley Oop. My own book of prehistorical lore, a restoration of the late George E. Turner’s 1950s dinosaur comic strip The Ancient Southwest (TCU Press), had its rollout at the Science & History Museum. And V.T. Hamlin (1900-1993) was my first major-league mentor in the cartooning profession. Sooner or later, everything comes full-circle.

After all, it was the West Texas landscape, with its outcroppings of prehistoric remains and its air of primeval antiquity, that had given the Iowa-born Hamlin an inspiration for Alley Oop, ’way back during the 1920s. He was working as a newsroom cartoonist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram at the time, producing a comics-panel series called The Panther Kitten, a chronicle of the ups and downs of a tenacious baseball team called the Fort Worth Cats. And Hamlin’s nearness to the natural history of West Texas became a springboard to Alley Oop.

“Y’know, I really created the blueprint for Alley Oop there at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram,” Hamlin told me in 1990. The occasion involved Frank Stack’s and my efforts to compile and annotate a set of Alley Oop reprints at Kitchen Sink Press. Hamlin added: “Well, I suppose I had been drawing the guy who would become Oop ever since I was a kid.

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System of a down

System of a down

Even if you have a pretty new computer these days, you might be out of luck when it comes to new diversions.

A brand-new web-only science fiction series called Sanctuary has debuted, and I couldn’t even get the preview to play on my new Macbook without it freezing and reloading four times in two minutes.  And that’s with the most updated version of Flash.

And Blizzard has just announced StarCraft II — which also freezes up the machine when we try to play the trailer.

Heck, I can’t even grab any artwork to show you, it’s all Flash and fancy stuff.  If you think your machine can take it, you now have the links.

Have I mentioned there are tons of computer users (like my mom) still on dial-up?

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