17 April 2014
[comics] Heads or Tails … a wonderful new comic strip from Chris Ware about the life of a penny.
9 April 2014
[comics] The Twelve Best Covers Of Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen … ‘If I could own one piece of original comic book art, this would be it. In one image the entire run of Jimmy Olsen, and the entire Silver Age of DC Comics is encapsulated. The caption on the cover proclaims Jimmy Olsen to be “The Red-Headed Beatle of 1,000 B.C.!” and the screaming girls reinforce it. Everything about this cover is great, but the best bit is Superman declaring that Jimmy has become as popular as Ringo.’
7 April 2014
[comics] Lew Stringer’s 7 Ages Of Fan! …
6 April 2014
[comics] Here Is the Greatest Collection of Superhero Dancing GIFs the Internet Has Ever Known … ‘That Rhythm Is Infectious!’
3 April 2014
30 March 2014
26 March 2014
[comics] Watch Alan Moore Do Magic… … ‘But yes, I can definitely, definitely do like, real magic…’
25 March 2014
[comics] Matt Fraction on Batman #405 … interesting analysis of two pages from Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s “Year One” arc on Batman … ‘Miller’s still calling shots here more often than not. The longer and longer I’ve written comics the less and less interested in that control I become; besides, if you write your shit the right way the variations of interpretation any artist worth a good goddamn will come at you with will all be what you wanted or better anyway… There are no significant coloring notes at all nor environmental ones – the rain it would appear was entirely Mazzucchelli, the time of night and everything else Lewis, smartly working backwards from the following issue.’
23 March 2014
[comics] Script Robot Moore and Art Droid Gibson Celebrate Their Eagle Award For Halo Jones … ‘The celebration’s over! Back to work’
18 March 2014
[comics] Katsuhiro Otomo and the Perfect Panels of ‘Akira’ … ‘Otomo takes the basics of comics art and executes them so well that he elevates a scene that could’ve been seen in any comic into something divine.’
16 March 2014
[comics] It’s Affable Alan Moore… His Stories Never Bore! … Lew Stringer on Alan Moore … ‘Behold! He’s breathing new life into the genre!’
7 March 2014
[comics] League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Nemo: Roses of Berlin annotations … more LOEG annotations from Jess Nevins … ‘Panel 2. “Heil, Hynkel.” As shown in the previous issues of League, there is no Adolph Hitler in the world of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, just as there is no Mussolini and various other major world figures. What we have instead are literary or filmic analogues for these characters. In this case, Hitler is replaced by Adenoid Hynkel, the Hitler analogue from Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940).’
1 March 2014
[comics] Clintonlovespizza: “Wolverine, bring me a cheese pizza.” …
17 February 2014
[comics] Cover Version: Daredevil 230 and Cutting Techniques … an analysis by Matt Fraction of one issue of Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s classic “Born Again” arc … ‘Miller’s work, which at its most baroque during this phase could be almost Faulknerian in its narrative shifts, tells “Born Again” across multiple plotlines and times. There are two different first person narrators and a close-third omniscient narrator. there is literally one instance of a nondiagetic narrative insertion in the issue of three total across the whole storyline. And the cuts come anywhere and everywhere – at some points across four different locations/times/storylines on a single page. what i really wanted to do was pick his sense of cutting apart a little bit, just to get a feel for how they did it. i wanted to pay attention to that tonight.’
13 February 2014
[comics] Garry Trudeau On Extended Break From Doonesbury … ‘I’ve always thought of myself as a comic-strip lifer, which is common in our industry and an annoyance to younger cartoonists. I love working for newspapers, and can’t imagine life without them. Which is why I’m keeping one foot in with the Sundays.’
11 February 2014
[comics] The UK Government is now *literally* getting its immigration policy from Judge Dredd … ‘Citizenship is a privilege – Not a right!’
3 February 2014
[batman] Batman is a Hoarder! … ‘No! I might wear that again!!!’ …
2 February 2014
31 January 2014
[comics] In The Comic-Book Pages Of 2001, Two Sorts Of Genius Collided … comparing and contrasting Stanley Kubrick and Jack Kirby’s versions of 2001: A Space Odyssey … ‘The 2001 comic also caught Kirby at a low creative ebb. He’d poured a lot of himself into his Fourth World saga for DC, without much to show for it, and by the time he returned to Marvel, Kirby was back to thinking of himself as a hired gun, sweating to fill as many pages as his bosses required, governed by the mentality of a boy who grew up in a ghetto during the Depression. Where Kubrick was a meticulous planner, taking years to develop a project and fussing over every detail, Kirby was a disorganized workaholic, who according to his wife Roz would accidentally throw away about half the good ideas he scrawled onto notepaper and napkins, and who felt like he was on the verge of destitution if he didn’t generate at least 20 pages a week.’
23 January 2014
[comics] Stan Lee, The Man And The Myth … Chris Sims on Stan Lee’s legacy… ‘Stan Lee’s greatest talent, for good or ill, was never writing comics, or even editing them. It was promotion. I touched on this in an earlier column, but the real magic of Stan Lee’s contribution to Marvel wasn’t just filling Kirby and Ditko’s panels with five-dollar words and screeds against the commies. It was that brash, aggressive style that put a face (not coincidentally, his own) behind the comics. From very early on, the letters pages were clear to let readers know that “Stan and Jack” were the ones behind the adventures of the Fantastic Four, and again, you can’t really overstate how revolutionary that was. This was a time when creators were rarely if ever credited, but Lee – ironically, given the reputation that would come out over the years for stealing credit and hogging attention – was part of the crowd putting their names right there on page one.’
22 January 2014
16 January 2014
[comics] Last Alan Moore Interview? … Pádraig Ó Méalóid posts an epic Alan Moore interview – Alan covers criticisms about rape and racism in his comics and provides what is likely to be his final word on Grant Morrison … ‘As for the use of ‘problematic’ figures in the pages of The League, a great number of the literary figures which we’ve appropriated or re-imagined in the course of the book, have been to my mind every bit as problematic as the Galley-Wag. They just haven’t been black. As an example I remain somewhat unsure, in light of these current issues, as to why our use of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu in volume one seemed to have passed by without a murmur, given that here we have a character who was actually intended by his original author as a crude racial caricature of the most negative and xenophobic strain, and for whom our only act of rehabilitation was to suggest that Rohmer’s ‘Devil Doctor’ may have been motivated by a hatred of the British justifiably inculcated during his childhood in the years of the bestial and shameful Opium Wars. And yet, hardly a word said, as I recall.’
14 January 2014
[comics] Wertham was right… Batman and Whitey share a tender moment …
12 January 2014
[moore] Lego Alan Moore … ‘Your Argument Is Invalid.’
10 January 2014
[comics] The Art of Bill Sienkiewicz … great collection of art showcasing the legendary comic artist.
8 January 2014
[science] Scientists Tell Us Their Favourite Jokes … ‘Sodium sodium sodium sodium sodium sodium sodium sodium
Batman!’
6 January 2014
[moore] Epic Small Talk Fail …
4 January 2014
[moore] A Moment Of Moore: My name’s Alan Moore. I write comics. … ‘Goodnight Children, and sweet dreams, wereever you are.’
11 December 2013
[comics] Eddie Campbell on From Hell and The From Hell Companion … interviewed by Pádraig Ó Méalóid … ‘From Hell is like a huge big machine with a nice clean orderly front panel. And when you unscrew it and take that off, beneath it you see a complex of wires and cogs and moving parts caked with lubricant. That’s the Companion. After only seeing the front panel for years, this new version of the machine makes the whole thing interesting in ways you never thought of before.’
4 December 2013
20 November 2013
[movies] 10 remarkable things about Superman IV: The Quest For Peace … looking back at the least sucessful of Christopher Reeves’ Superman movies … ‘The film’s most infamous money-saving location, though, is its use of a Milton Keynes bus station as a stand-in for New York’s United Nations Headquarters on 42nd Street. As Christopher Reeve gloomily put it in his autobiography Still Me, “…we had to shoot at an industrial park in England in the rain with about a hundred extras, not a car in sight, and a dozen pigeons thrown in for atmosphere.” It’s impossible to imagine just how depressing it must have been to set up this particular shot. You’re in Milton Keynes, you have a few dozen extras, and Christopher Reeve walking around in his cape, yet the location still doesn’t look like New York; it looks like a lonely part of a modern British city.’
7 November 2013
[comics] A History of American Comic Books in Six Panels … by Matt Madden …
31 October 2013
[comics] Neil Gaiman’s Sandman Rises Again … The Guardian reviews Gaiman and J. H. Williams III’s new Sandman comic … ‘Gaiman’s return to Sandman was always one of those idle “wouldn’t it be great?” things for me, alongside “wouldn’t it be great if they made a new Indiana Jones movie?” and “wouldn’t it be great if the Sex Pistols reformed?” Which goes to prove you should be careful what you idly ponder. The Sandman story doesn’t need more telling; Gaiman presumably doesn’t need the money. I can’t say I’d heard people clamouring for the untold story of what Dream was doing before he was captured by Roderick Burgess. Therefore there can only be one possible reason for this comic’s existence, and that has to be because it’s great.’
30 October 2013
[batman] The Many Faces Of The Joker … a nicely done animated GIF showing the many faces of the Joker in movie and television adaptations along with the actors who played him.
9 October 2013
[batman] Top 12 Moments From Grant Morrison’s Batman Run … Interesting list of high points from IGN … ‘Morrison established the idea of Batman as a redemptive force. For Damian, the idea of becoming a hero and battling evil proved more captivating than inheriting the world’s largest criminal empire. Batman inspired him to become something better than he was, just as it inspired every Robin before him.’
7 October 2013
20 September 2013
[comics] The DC New 52 Timeline of Departures, Firings, and Bridge-Burnings … a look at recent internal strife at DC Comics … ‘8/9/2013 – Justice League 3000 was to be a “dream team” book reuniting writers Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis with artist Kevin Maguire. Somewhere along the way, DC got cold feet with the lighter direction of the book (before the first issue had hit the stands, of course, because why wait for the fans’ reactions) and fired Maguire, replacing him with Howard Porter. “I’m still a bit perplexed as to how it got to this point,” said Maguire, reflecting the feelings of many fans who wondered why DC would even hire the beloved Justice League International veterans in the first place if they didn’t want a book that was anything like Justice League International.’
16 September 2013
[comics] Howard Chaykin on his lewd, depraved, banned graphic novels … a short interview with Chaykin but has plenty of pages and panels from his long career … Chaykin on digital illustration: ‘I work with and use Photoshop in my comics work. I also believe that web comics are the future of comics, a future with little or no room for me, since I produce a page-designed product, and web comics are aspect-ratio based. An iPad is either portrait or landscape, with zoom and click: a factor that obviates my primary skillset.’
15 September 2013
[comics] Twitter / MattBors: ‘The quintessential comics fan-reading books he can’t stand for 45 years.’
6 September 2013
[comics] The 50 Greatest Graphic Novels Of All Time … according to the Scotish Herald … ‘#3 Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid On Earth, Chris Ware (2000) – Eight years in the making, Ware’s graphic novel may on the page look like the most formally precise title in this list, yet that perfection can be misleading. It moves so easily between the past and the present, reality and imagination that you can get lost in its labyrinth. “Sophisticated like free jazz,” suggests Metraphrog cartoonist John Chalmers. “It changed the way I looked at the world, at comics, the way I drew,” adds Stephen Collins.’
23 August 2013
[batman] Wondermark: A Knight is Technically an Aristocrat … ‘I want to dress in a bat costume and punch individual muggers.’…
22 August 2013
[comics] Grant Morrison on bringing back Wonder Woman … Morrison also discusses Rebellion’s reprinting of Zenith.
…one particular title from the late 1980s made headlines earlier this year. Rebellion, the publisher of 2000AD, announced it was planning to reprint Zenith, Morrison’s subversive superhero strip. Shallow, sarcastic and frequently used as a way for Morrison to criticise the Conservative party, the hero’s five-year run in 2000AD ended in 1992. Zenith has been out of print ever since, due to a legal dispute over who owns the rights. So Rebellion’s announcement of a £100 preorder-only hardback complete collection raised rather a lot of eyebrows, with Morrison unable to comment. But, choosing his words carefully, the writer is now able to talk a little about what’s happening.
“Well, it’s very simple,” he begins with a wince. “We, uh, we spent five grand on lawyers’ fees. They sent [Rebellion] letters. We were very keen to discuss it and we’ve never heard back from them. All I can say is that we tried to get into a discussion with them and they just didn’t reply. I don’t know what to do at this stage.”
20 August 2013
[comics] Chris Ware Q&A … a live chat with Guardian readers …
Q: Did you base Jimmy Corrigan’s looks on Piers Morgan? Come on, you can tell us.
Chris Ware: Honestly, I don’t know Piers Morgan, though I suppose I could google-image-search him. Jimmy Corrigan has my grandfather’s hair, Charlie Brown’s eyes, Tintin’s pants and my self-doubt and that’s about it, I’m afraid.
19 August 2013
[batman] The Killing Joke Ending Revealed? … Grant Morrison has an interesting theory about the conclusion of The Killing Joke … ‘That’s what I love about it- Batman kills the Joker… that’s why it’s called The Killing Joke… The Joker tells the ‘killing joke’ at the end and Batman reaches out and breaks his neck… and that’s why the laughter stops… the light goes out because that was the last chance of crossing that bridge. Alan wrote the ultimate Batman Joker story… because he finished it… the laughter stops, it abruptly stops, it’s quite obvious.’
7 August 2013
[watchmen] Five More Notes About Before Watchmen … more from Tom Spurgeon on Before Watchmen … ‘I doubt I’ll ever be convinced that Before Watchmen was an awesome project. I don’t think it was evil; I think it was sad. That was a lot of talent aimed at books whose nature allowed only the tiniest chance that remarkable art would result; talent that probably could have gone to bolstering the new superhero comics line or that could have been pushed in the direction of their own, similar achievement. So much of it smacked of parody — they really did a Dollar Bill comic book! With Steve Rude art! — that the whole thing was hard to fathom.’
6 August 2013
[comics] I Am NOT the Beastmaster: Morrison in Glasgow … notes from a keynote lecture Grant Morrison gave at the University of Glasgow last month … ‘Morrison argued that shared-universe, corporate-owned superhero stories ought to be generational, circular, and repetitive-since they cannot be brought to an end, writers might as well play up the mythic angle and retell stories for each new generation of readers. One young guest wanted to know what Morrison’s favorite comics from his own catalogue were. (His answers: The Filth, Doom Patrol, and Superman Beyond 3D.)’
24 July 2013
[comics] Comics Are Educational, Part One: How to Kill Juggling Nazis … ‘Yes, Kurt, you are good at juggling apples… But how good are you at juggling — A… A GRENADE?!’
20 July 2013
[comics] Explorers on the Moon 1969 … Tintin and Gang greets Neil Armstrong on the Moon in 1969 …
15 July 2013
[batman] A Reader’s Guide To Grant Morrison’s Batman
… useful guide to Morrison’s recently concluded long run on Batman … ‘If there is one question I’ve answered more than any other in the past few years in regards to Batman, it is “what is the reading order of Grant Morrison’s run”, or some variation thereof. So I have created this list as a permanent resource and answer to that question.’
9 July 2013
[comics] MAD MENTAL CRAZY! The True Life of the Fabulous Zenith Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 … a three-part history of the British super-hero Zenith and a look at the murky legal situation regarding ownership of the character … ‘2000 AD maintain that they own the rights while Grant Morrison contends that they do not have the paperwork to prove that. This is not an argument that Morrison had at the time of initial publication, rather one he put forward in later years in greater understanding of the situation, so early interviews with the writer at the time are not entirely illuminating. There are however other pieces of the jigsaw that help build a larger picture. 2000 AD maintain that they have never sought creator owned work and the implication was always that comics were created on a work for hire basis. However, they also operated without contracts in many cases before the early ’90s, and under UK law a creation belongs to the creator until the rights are signed away – regardless of publication or payment.’