Archive for September, 2004
You shall know our voter-osity!
In a literary-politico twofer … A group of McSweeney’s authors will speak at a voter registration event at Ohio State tomorrow as part of the lit mag’s “Operation Ohio.”
The group, led by Dave Eggers, will speak at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Mershon Auditorium. As part of Operation Ohio, the authors promise to make personal phone calls to college students reminding them to vote Nov. 2.
For more information, click here.
It doesn’t matter …
While we were at the Studio 16 Art Fair, several of us got to chat with the artist to be featured at this Friday’s Gallery Hop. His name is Brandon Kukan, and his last show included a number of vaguely demonic marionette-type things. They’re very good, kind of reminiscent of Jim Henson’s monster work.
Steve asked if Kukan if he’d ever thought of using them in some sort of puppet show, and he said no. We were all disappointed, because if there’s one thing Panel members know, it’s this:
It doesn’t matter how good your art is if you can’t tell a story.
Ann Telnaes
One of my favorite political cartoonists. She brings a clean, fluid, animation-influnced style to a field dominated by scratchy caricatures.
Half the fun is in the comments
Over on the Fanboy Rampage blog, there’s a post about Zeb Wells’ new New Warriors comic (wow, that was an awkward sentence…) It goes a little something like this:
“Zeb Wells makes a million fanboys happy:‘[My] New Warriors project with Skottie Young got the green light. The premise is that the New Warriors have trouble getting work, and they hook up with a TV show, like ‘Extreme Home Makeover,’ and when people around the country get menaced by a Z-grade villain, the Warriors zip off in their van and save the day.’
Did I say a million fanboys? I meant three.”
Which is funny enough, until you see the comments below it:
“You think only 3? I’d say less. After the absolute failure of the Fight Club Thunderbolts you’d think Marvel would think twice before trying to squeeze another high concept pop culture phenomena onto a 3rd tier company-owned superhero book”
and
“I want a book where they makeover ugly female superheroes. Oh, wait… there aren’t any…”
What if the folks at Marvel were cluless asshats?
Oh, wait. We already know the answer to that. From their December solicitations:
“WHAT IF THERE WERE SEVEN MORE COMICS YOU HAD TO BUY?? What if we could say, “due to popular demand” and mean it? Well, True Believer, we ain’t lyin’! You wanted the craziest, most far-out What If extravaganzas we could find, so we sent some interns up to the attic of this old House of Ideas and we never heard from them again! So, we warned the industry’s BEST CREATORS we’d send THEM to the attic next if they didn’t come through. And they did! Look at this all-star lineup, gang, and you’ll notice the only What If missing is the one about Forbush Man becoming EIC!”
That’s right folks, seven quality books like “What if Dr. Doom Had Become The Thing?” Yes, seven. All released in the same month. Because, you know, they’re not already churning out enough books to compete for your dollars…
Go, Spider-man, Go!
“A French urban climber who calls himself “Spider-Man” scaled a 59-story Paris office building Wednesday with his bare hands and without using any ropes.
Alain Robert took less than 45 minutes to climb the nearly 700-foot-tall Montparnasse Tower building, gripping the metal girders on his way up.
Robert, renowned for climbing without ropes or other equipment, has scaled the Eiffel Tower and more than 30 skyscrapers, including the Empire State Building in 1994 and Malaysia’s Petronas Twin Towers in 1997.”
Grant Morrison on today’s comics audience
Disclosure: I’m not a big Morrison fan. I enjoyed his Doom Patrol run, but most of his other work has left me cold. I think too often he writes weird/obtuse stuff for the sake of just being weird/obtuse. And his whole “magick” philosophy is equally unappealing to me.
Having said that, he makes an interesting observation in Arthur magazine, as seen in Rich Johnston’s column:
“I’m hoping the prose stuff will be the next continuation of where I want to go. The comics audience is becoming more and more compressed and unpleasant. It’s really sad. After I did ‘Seaguy’ and so many people said they didn’t get it, I felt completely exasperated. ‘Seaguy’ is based on medieval quest literature which always has the young hero setting out and he has his companion who gets killed, the questing beast, but many of my readers seem to now be unaware of storytelling structures beyond the Hollywood three-act, and the literalism is so rife that nobody seems to be able to deal with symbolic content anymore. It’s strange. One of the symptoms of schizophrenia is the schizophrenic can’t process metaphor. If you say to a schizophrenic ‘a rolling stone gathers no moss’ he takes it utterly literally! He doesn’t see it as having any kind of secondary meaning. My thesis is that everybody’s gone kind of schizophrenic, which also explains the rise of reality TV. Because people cannot deal with a symbolic approach anymore-they have to see the ‘real deal.’ And the real deal is incoherent and it lacks catharsis or dramatic structure.”
I’m all out of Bone jokes
So I’ll make this a simple link to Time.com, where Andrew D. Arnold reviews the Bone collection.
“Combining the instant gratification strong cartooning with the deep engagement of epic storytelling and the universal appeal of humor, Jeff Smith’s “Bone” has becomes the best all-ages graphic novel yet published. While older readers will tune into such themes as the folly of blind fanaticism and the corrupting nature of power, the younger set will simply thrill to the adventure and delight at the huge cast of characters. Hardly a folly anymore, “Bone” now deserves to go from hipster cult item to mainstream literary success.”
V is for Vote
V-Day, the global movement to end violence against women and girls, is taking its grassroots voting campaign — V Is For Vote — on the road to inspire women to vote and to elevate violence against women as an important issue in the 2004 Elections. Eve Ensler, V-Day Founder and Artistic Director/Playwright of the “Vagina Monologues,” will lead the V-team through Florida, Ohio and Colorado. In each city, the V Is For Vote delegation will meet with local women’s shelters and programs, activist groups, students, politicians, anti-violence, arts and community leaders to promote voting as activism and a vote to end violence against women.
September 22, 2004 — Eve and local Columbus politicians and prominent figures in the arts community will hold a press conference downtown at the Hyatt, 4:00pm, to discuss local violence against women issues and voting as activism. A V Is For Vote rally with Eve, local politicians, and prominent figures in the local arts community, as well as a Vagina Vote Essay reading, will take place at 5:30pm at the Ohio Statehouse in Capitol Square.
…
Also, Studio 16 is hosting a Kerry fund-raiser Friday night.
Bendis in the New York Times
“Apparently not content with seeing his work published in every comic book published by Marvel, Brian Bendis has gone in search of finding a new outlet for his words and pictures, and found it in The New York Times.”
You can read the whole autobiographical strip about his small business instincts here.
I am pleased to announce we almost made enough to pay for the table at the Studio 16 fair on Sunday. Most of that was from postcards of Steve’s Point Pleasant painting — who knew so many West Virginians frequented Studio 16?
I personally made 97.5 cents on the day, so moneywise it wasn’t a great success. Still, I think it was worth it. Comics are such a small field, I’m happy anytime we can get in front of a different audience. More importantly, I like the idea of us being part of the wider Columbus art scene.
Again, special thanks to those who spent more time there than I did. I’ll try to pick up the check from Studio 16 this week and divvy up the money at the next meeting.
FBI Guide to Concealable Weapons, 2003
Here’s a link to an 89 page PDF document produced by the FBI detailing dozens of concealable weapons. A great resource for fiction writers, as well as intriguing look into a field most of us don’t know much about. Belt buckle knives, crucifix pendant knives, umbrella swords, coin knives, plastic push daggers, you name it. Even something right out of the pages of Daredevil: all-metal, razor sharp pack of playing cards, meant for throwing!
(link courtesy of BoingBoing)
The Arizona Republic on Mini-Comics
Newspaper article covers the mini-comic scene in Phoenix, plus commentary from retailers across the US, including the ubiquitous James Sime. Not a bad story, but unfortunately, the writer feels the need to pepper his article with words like “Blam!”, “Fwip, cra-dink!”, and “Fwap!”
Stupid Asshat.
(link courtesy of the Comics Pimp)