Archive for March, 2010
As most of you know, one of my current projects is writing and all-new, original mini-series based on the characters and settings from James Patterson’s new YA book series, Witch & Wizard. The series is called Witch & Wizard: Battle for Shadowland, and outside of my own creator-owned stories, this has been one of the most exciting projects I’ve worked on. The artist on the book is the immensely talented Victor Santos, who is just tearing it up on the pages. Starting with issue #2, Fabio Moon will be providing the covers. And my editor is Bob Schreck, who makes sure we both bring our best to the project.
The first issue hits stores in May. Below are the covers and solicitation text for the books. Please ask your comic book store to order them.
Witch & Wizard #1
Dara Naraghi (w) • Victor Santos (a) • Victor Santos. J.K. Woodward (c)
In a blink of an eye, their world has changed, with the oppressive New Order declaring all magic as evil incarnate! In this action-packed first issue spinning out of best-selling author James Pattersons’s #1 novel, sibling teenagers Whit & Wisty Allgood use their newly discovered magical powers to infiltrate into enemy territory of the New Order to gain control of the inter-dimensional Shadowland. Witch & Wizard is a brand-new series taking best-selling author James Pattersons’ hit characters from the Witch & Wizard novel on all-new exciting adventures in this four-color comic book series.
Diamond Order Code: MAR10 0986
Witch & Wizard #2
Dara Naraghi (w) • Victor Santos (a) • Fabio Moon (c)
The iron fist of the New Order has declared all magic banned from society, and sibling teenagers Whit & Wisty Allgood are on the run and using their magical powers to attempt to gain control of an inter-dimensional nowhere called Shadowland. But while Wisty faces a horde of Lost Ones—soulless creatures hungry for the warmth of the living—in Shadowland, her brother Whit finds himself in the N.O.’s stronghold, face-to-face with an even greater evil: The One Who Is The One! Continuing this brand-new story that takes place in the world from best-selling author James Pattersons’ hit novel.
Diamond Order Code: APR10 0372
This is from last summer, but a former coworker just brought it to my attention. Illustrator Neill Cameron’s project: A-Z of Awesomeness. Neill explains it thusly:
“Each day I would post a new drawing, based on suggestions from followers of my blog, Facebook and Twitter. 26 drawings over 26 days, one for each letter of the alphabet. There were no rules as to what people could suggest, merely that it be… Awesome.”
A couple of my favorites:
So the word on the street (aka Internets) is that the Smoke Monster could be a Djinn, aka a Genie. I suppose that makes a lot of sense. It appears as smoke, can grant wishes, is trapped in a “bottle” (the island, especially given Jacob’s metaphor of wine in a flask with a cork to “trap” the evil inside). Djinns have free will, so some can be good while others follow a darker path. So maybe Jacob and MIB are both Genies. Jacob has been shown to grant wishes, after all. One is tasked with keeping the other trapped on the island. If going by the Arabic interpretation, then this would all tie-in nicely with the Egyptian hieroglyphics and imagery that we see on the island as well.
Of course, it still remains to be seen if they are truly good vs. evil. MIB claims that he’s lost a loved one and his mother was crazy and he just wants to go home (to a different dimension?) Maybe that’s all there is to it. He’s not “evil” and has no plans for corrupting the world or anything grand like that. He’s just a prisoner, and like all prisoners, is doing whatever it takes to escape, including manipulating and killing anyone associated with his “captor”. For whatever reason, Jacob’s keeping him imprisoned, and those reasons could very well turn out to be selfish, misguided, or even wrong. If there’s one thing this show revels in, it’s showing the various shades of gray and not setting anyone up as explicitly good or evil.
Now, if that theory holds, then everyone on the island, from the candidates to the Others, has been a pawn in this struggle. Everyone has been negatively affected by this, probably for no good reason at all. Maybe at the end of the series, they somehow reject both sides and truly break free of the manipulations of these entities. With that act, they get their lives back and set down the path of free will, as opposed to fate/manipulations.
Or something like that. All I know is that I’m really enjoying the ride.
A lot of my thinking on how to write comics comes from reading David Mamet’s “On Directing Film,” on Andy’s suggestion. That book is addressed to film, but the two media overlap to a significant degree. The book urges you to tell a story visually, “tell the story in the cut,” and don’t rely on narration.
The flipside of this argument is that comics is a different medium, that includes both text and pictures. So it’s more forgiving of narration — or you could argue that narration is an essential part of the medium. I’m using narration in the general sense, including both narration boxes and thought balloons.
You guys have seen me struggle with how much narration to use in my Lake Superior story. I don’t feel I have these issues sorted out yet.
Anyway, the reason I’m writing is I saw a long memo written by Mamet to writers of “The Unit,” a TV show he was involved with somehow. It touches on his “show, don’t tell” bit, but spends most of its time talking about what makes a scene dramatic.
I’m not sure how much film and comics overlap, but I do think the cross-fertilization of the two media is helpful to me.
Oh, Vice President Joe Biden, you make me smile when most of the news makes me cry otherwise.
But you know what? He’s right. The Health Care Reform, though far from perfect, is a big f***ing deal. Especially given how low the Republicans went to distort and kill it.
Looks like somebody thinks replicants are the way to go. Oh wacky DARPA.
Marvel Feature #2
Strange things are happening on Bald Mountain. The locals speak in whispers about the mysterious red glow that has occasionally illuminated it’s peak since that first night back in 1937. They tell of the two farm families that disappeared from their homes, dinners uneaten on the table, sometime around 1890. Then there was the revolutionary war deserter who died there, whose ghost is said to still be hiding somewhere on its slopes. Even the Iroquois avoided Bald Mountain long before the white men came, calling it “a place of uneasy spirits.” A cloak of fear has settled about its summit, and one man has come to the town of Rutland, Vermont to pierce the veil of mystery…
Roy Thomas.
Okay, he’s actually there for the halloween party. Back in the days before continuity-obsessed fans and the notion of a “Marvel Universe”, it was generally accepted that these funny book stories were set in our own world. As such, it occasionally happened that the writers and artists chronicling the adventures of the characters would appear in the stories themselves. My personal favorite is the time Lee and Kirby were taken hostage by Doctor Doom as bait to trap Reed Richards; In the pages of Iron Fist and the X-Men, Byrne was beset by street gangs and caught in the crossfire between warring mutants; Gerber and Claremont each saved the universe in different issues of Man-Thing, and the latter was even briefly transformed into the swamp creature.
So it is that Rascally Roy wanders into the second appearance of the Defenders to provide some exposition by way of soaking up the spooky ghost stories passed around by the residents of the sleepy hamlet nestled in the shadow of Bald Mountain. Given the loose “non-team” structure of the group I believe this earns him honorary status as a member, though I doubt he’s listed in that category on Wikipedia. The roster this time is limited to Marvel’s surliest trio, Dr. Strange, Hulk, and Namor, three characters who could only function in a group like this. For me, it’s not a Defenders story without Nighthawk and Valkyrie, but those characters hadn’t enlisted with the group this early in the game.
Ross Andru provides the pictures, still a couple years away from the run on Amazing Spider-Man for which I revere him. His style doesn’t convey the spooky haunted forest setting as well as the urban landscape of New York, but it’s still always nice to se him in action. The story is a straightforward Doc Strange vs. Dormammu tale, with the sorcerer supreme having to call in some muscle for backup when he gets in a jam. An odd moment of drama arrives when in a moment of crisis Bruce Banner has trouble transforming into the Hulk because he has been taking Quaaludes to suppress his alter ego. In a code approved book, even!
Doc whips Dormammu while the Hulk and Namor get the task of beating up on some robed henchmen, a serious waste of their talents. The comic is basically a standard Doc Strange story made worth seeing for having Roy wander through the panels. Extra credit for any reader who can point me to the Batman story featuring Jim Aparo– I’ve been trying to locate that one with no success.
I came across this product listing on Amazon.com by accident: Uranium Ore
But the best thing about the listing are the Customer Reviews. Here’s a sample:
Great Product, Poor Packaging – I purchased this product 4.47 Billion Years ago and when I opened it today, it was half empty.
So glad I don’t have to buy this from Libyans in parking lots at the mall anymore – I bought this to power a home-made submarine that I use to look for prehistoric-era life forms in land-locked lakes around my home town in Alaska.
I bought it for my Cat – I bought this for my cat and put it with a flask containing poison, in a sealed box. Do you think he likes it ? I’ve not opened the box yet.
And they say nerds don’t have a sense of humor!
Sorry for the brief hiatus with this feature. But now that the blog is moved and more-or-less set up properly, we can dive back into our weekend looks at comic book crossovers. This week, a double-dose of of those famous 80s toy/cartoon franchises: G.I. Joe vs. The Transformers.
There were several instances of this obvious crossover. I think Marvel Comics even did one, with Jae Lee on art duties. This one if from Devil’s Due Publishing.
There’s been a few interesting footnotes on breaking in or what not…
Transcript from a recent ‘Breaking In’ panel with CB Cebulski.
How to write for comics (per Anthony Johnston)
How to not write for comics (per Sara Ryan)
Overwhelmingly the best tip, is to be easy going and a slave to the board. Interesting footnote from C.B. is that he wants to see a complete story. He’s also hired an assload of new talent. All styles, which I find refreshing. Preferably not involving Marvel characters, which makes sense for legal reasons. (for both writers and artists)
From a Stephen King interview about his upcoming DC Comics series:
One example:Thought bubbles—those puffy, dotted clouds that were a staple of early comics—have been phased out. “I got this kind of embarrassed call from the editors saying, ‘Ah, Steve, we don’t do that anymore.’ ‘You don’t do that anymore?’ I said. ‘No, when the characters speak, they speak. If they’re thinking, you try to put that across in the narration, in the little narration boxes.’” So King happily re-wrote to fit the new style—though he still laments the loss of the thought bubble.
Beyond the f*%#ing enormous balls a DC editor must have had to tell Stephen King what kind of tools he could use to tell his story, what got me about the quote was the confirmation that the self-loathing imitation of cinematic storytelling in modern mainstream comics is actual editorial policy. Also, the stupidity of removing a tool for the writer to communicate with his audience. Using the first person “thought caption” style narrative only allows the reader to see into the head of a single character in the story; a means of expressing the thoughts of any other characters has been eschewed.
Part of the language that makes comics comics has been removed so that someone can imagine their stories about crime fighting men in tights with magic rings seem more real. I noticed their absence a long time ago, but to hear it as actual editorial policy makes my head spin.