Welcome to the weblog of the writers and artists of Ferret Press (a publisher of fine comix) and PANEL (a Columbus, Ohio comic creators collaborative.) Here you will find our musings on comics, art, the creative process, politics, the web, and life.
Read Dara's free webcomic every Wednesday @
Komikwerks.com
Graphic Novel News!Lifelike will be collected and published as a deluxe full-color, hardcover graphic novel by IDW Publishing this December. But you can pre-order your copy now via Amazon.com and save 32% off the cover price!
"PANEL: MUSIC & PANEL: LUCK by Ferret Studios ($3.00@)
PANEL remains of the more adventurous mini-comics (for lack of a better term), sometimes trying to create comics that double as artifacts. So MUSIC shaped like an old 7" record sleeve to match the theme, but the real draw is that the level of work has jumped considerably since the last issue I saw, and the vignettes, mainly built around how different people experience music, are nice attempts, though, curiously, it's Dara Naraghi's photoessay on a New Zealand rock festival that works best. LUCK is more standard, with more standard if somewhat better crafted stories, and though some of the art slips, most is of pretty good quality. Unfortunately, I can't find credits for the best two pieces, but they're the final stories in the collection. PANEL has stepped up its game. Check it out."
I'd venture to guess the reason he liked my Music contribution is because he used to be a rock journalist in his formative days. And it seems he didn't reference the TOC for Luck, because all the credits are there (albeit we don't have story page numbers marked on the pages themselves.) But overall, a positive review.
"In 1999, Jeremy Adolphson, then 17, began sending artists that he likes 4" x 6" notecards in the mail with a stamped return envelope and a request to draw him a picture. Now, he has hundreds of amazing artworks from the likes of Dan Clowes, Hunt Emerson, Chester Brown, Seth, Chris Ware, Roberta Gregory, Will Eisner..."
You can check out all the cool art on his site, 4x6-art.com It looks like there are over 500 pieces of art in his collection. Certainly the envy of many comic book and art fans.
(below, left to right: Paul Chadwick, Jon J. Muth, Duncan Fegredo)
Here's a 10 minute clip of what is purported to be the pilot for a Plastic Man cartoon. Not sure if this show has been picked up or not. Tom "Spongebob" Kenny provides the voice of Plas, but it somehow seems...not right for the character. I dunno, it's hard to say with these things.
(If the clip doesn't load in the frame above, try this link)
The Ineffables: Political Science Here's the b&w cover art for the Political Science tpb which will be available shortly; Tom has graciously offered to color it. In an attept to defray printing costs, I've offered it for presale at my website. The first 50 people to shell out their hard-earned $14 via Paypal will get a signed-and-numbered print of the very same b&w cover artwork, followed by the book itself in early October. I've been pleasantly surprised to already get some nibbles on the offer.
The book will contain:
Ineffables#0: The Dawn of Reason Ineffables #4: Patriot Act The 24-Hour comic from 2004 (never printed) Political Asylum (never printed) Moon Tunnel, an 8-page story originally made for Oh, Comics which never saw the light of day.
The majority of the plot centers around Abraham Lincoln's return to The Ineffables and his subsequent campaign for the Mayor's office. It also has rampaging monsters, zombies, and intelligent design advocates.
I was on the fence about whether to attend Mid-Ohio Con this year until I saw Herb Trimpe’s name on the guest list. Holy shit, Roger, my check’s in the mail! In anticipation of the arrival of the definitive Hulk artist, I’ll shelve my comparison of the Kirby Eternals vs. the Gaiman Eternals (which was really hard on Neil anyway, and I have nothing against him personally), and spend a few moments with a comic which may be chiefly responsible for the sickness that drives me to wax nostalgic on comic weblogs, one of the first comics I ever laid eyes on:
The Incredible Hulk # 187. The issue previous to this is actually, by my reckoning, the first comic I ever saw. This particular issue is a much better example of everything good about Hulk comics in general, though, so I figured I’d skip ahead to it instead.
Most readers misremember this character as “the Savage Hulk”, when in fact the persona he kept for two decades was more akin to an angry child hounded by bullies. While his earliest appearances certainly were in the form of an angry misanthrope, he soon morphed into a modern version of Karloff’s Frankenstein, with Betty Ross standing in for that girl by the river and General Ross favoring fighter jets over pitchforks and torches. Here’s a favorite sequence of panels: See? He even tried smiling! Who among us hasn’t felt at one time that no matter how hard we tried, the world wouldn’t cut us a break? There’s much more to identify with in this version of the character than in the simple revenge fantasy of recent depictions.
The Hulk’s backstory, more than any other Marvel character, is rooted in the Cold War world of Soviet spies, bomb tests, and military hardware. Add to that the cast of Godzilla movie monsters that regularly paraded through these pages and you get the recipe for one of the coolest comics ever made. Trying to adapt the character to a more modern setting takes away much of what makes him great; like James Bond, the character is best served in stories set in the decades of his origin. Check out these technical diagrams of some cutting edge stealth aircraft—though not cutting edge enough to thwart those dirty commies: This issue’s story revolves around a rescue mission is deepest, darkest Siberia. Betty Ross’ husband, Glenn Talbot, was thought dead until it was discovered the deceased was a Soviet spy impersonating the army officer. Nick Fury sends a team of Hulkbusters into the Soviet Union to rescue the missing man, and Bruce Banner stows away in hopes of aiding his lost love (Betty, not Glenn). Banner is ejected from the aircraft during a firefight, and approaches the gulag known as Bitterfrost from the front in his jade form while the heroic agents sneak in the back. All does not go well: a brainwashed Talbot gets the drop on Ross and his men, while the advanced superscience of the Red army subdues the Hulk. Here’s the villain, Bitterfrost’s resident twisted mutant, The Gremlin:
The Gremlin is a prime example of why Marvel villains were always cooler than DC villains. DC Villains were basically just dicks, guys who thought tying a guy to a giant boomerang or carrying a trick umbrella were clever ideas. Marvel villains were all twisted freaks you could be repulsed by, the kind of horrors you hoped you had a superhero around for. Doctor Octopus? A freak. The Abomination? A freak. The Toy Man? A dick. The Gremlin? Definitely a freak, and pretty angry about it.
Herb Trimpe’s tenure on the book spanned about eighty issues, and saw collaborations with writers such as Len Wein, Steve Englehart, Harlan Ellison, and Stan the Man himself. I’m looking forward to getting the chance to thank the guy who helped start my interest in comics and cartooning when I was a wee lad when I see him in November.
Class of 2006 I’m looking for submissions of artwork for my third volume of Class of 2006. Class of 2006 is a small publication filled with bizarre, funny, and stupid quotes from high school student essays written for a standardized test. For the first issue, I used scanned yearbook pictures. The second issue featured artwork by Steve Black and Tim McClurg on the covers. For this third volume, I’d like to use artwork throughout the whole book.
What I’m looking for are portraits of typical, anonymous high school students (both male and female). Print size of the artwork is approximately 1.75"W x 2.5"H. You can submit black and white or color art.
Following is an example of art by Steve Black to be featured in the next volume along with a quote from a previous issue and my snarky headline:
They Traded Madison Avenue for Beads and Blankets "Not everyone will agree that Columbus discovered America first. Others will argue that the Native Americans had discovered it first, they just did not publicize it like Columbus had."
All contributors will receive a copy of the book. Deadline for the artwork is Friday October 6, 2006. The book will premiere at SNAP! on Saturday November 4. Please send submission and any questions to me at smcgurr [at] gmail [dot] com.
Copies of the first two volumes are available now at my Web site. Pick up both now for only $3 (includes shipping).
I was excited to find Gipi's website. One of my favorite european cartoonists to come to light, thanks to the Ignatz series. Verbally, it doesn't make a lick of sense to me as I don't speak anything other than english. But there are loads of drawings.
Also on the Gipi page, I found a link to Baru's site. Not much there but worth a look.
Hopefully I'll come to enjoy more translated work from both creators. I've been torn about purchasing the original books which I did find on amazon.
A few weeks back I picked up Jack Kirby’s Galactic Bounty Hunters, a new series based on some old concepts The King had lying around but never used. It doesn’t have much promise as a series—a much better idea would have been a series of one-shots with more prominent writers and artists, each showcasing a different “lost” Kirby creation (of which I believe there are plenty, and I’m sure it wouldn’t have been hard to round up contributors for such a project), each with one of those old concept sketches Jack made for the cover.
Something on one of the ad pages did catch my eye, however; a new Jack Kirby tpb available only online, a share of the profits of which benefit the Kirby Museum. I snagged it from Amazon.com and have devoured it a couple times, and would recommend it to anyone who hasn’t yet heard of it:
Kirby’s last original creation that he himself worked on was featured in a six-issue miniseries for Pacific Comics called Silver Star. Originally developed in the form of a screenplay that was never sold, the story is another sci-fi concept dressed in the trappings of a superhero story: A scientist, fearful of the threat of nuclear annihalation at the height of the Cold War, tampers with a number of embryos, producing the next step in human evolution—Homo Geneticus, a new breed of superhumans capable of living through a nuclear holocaust. Their powers are broadly defined and border on omnipotence, and of course one of them, evil cult leader Darius Drumm, is bent on destroying all the others and remaking the Earth according to his vision.
While even the foreward of the book acknowledges that Silver Star isn’t exactly the pinnacle of Kirby’s career, the format of this edition makes it a must-have for any Kirby fan. Apparently, Jack adopted the habit at some point in his career of photocopying all his pencilled pages before turning them over to be inked; a large portion of his body of work is thus preserved in pencil form, and TwoMorrows Publishing has given us a taste of it in this Graphite Edition tpb, as well as a Captain Victory edition I haven’t yet seen.
The results are wonderful—Kirby’s dramatic layouts, coupled with a surprising nuance that isn’t carried over into inked pages. It’s easy to compare because some pencil photocopies were lost, so inked pages are scattered throughout the volume; about 80% of the trade is in pencil form. The uninked material appears just as energetic and detailed as the best of his work at Marvel in the ‘60’s; the only minor quibbles I have are the uncharacteristic lack of cosmic double-page spreads, as well as the infrequent use of four-panel pages; most pages have six or more panels, the crowded space leaving less room for his usual dynamic compositions. Nevertheless, all the Jack Kirby glory is presented in these pages in its purest form, undiluted by the hands of an inker, straight from the King’s pencil.
An added bonus: as two characters argue early on in the book, it also features the line “Come on, Mister Big! Don’t rattle your gonads in my ears!” What more could you ask for?
Just a note for you iBook and PowerBook owners who are heading over to Apple's support website for their battery recall program: if your battery model number and serial number fall within the ranges posted on the website as the bad batteries being recalled, and you enter it on the form along with your valid iBook serial number, but it still comes back with the message "Your battery serial number is invalid..." and doesn't let you proceed any further, it's their ass-backwards way of saying "Actually, your battery serial number is correct, we're just fucking retards who don't know how to simply say 'your particular battery is good and doesn't need to be exchanged,' so instead we'll display some vague, general error message."
Which it took me 45 minutes on hold for their tech support department to find out.
45. Fucking. Minutes.
So much for the legendary Apple simplicity and intuitiveness.
One simple fucking message that says "hey, your particular battery is fine" would have done the trick, asshats.
..is quite possibly one of the biggest disappointments I've ever read. Thank God for the Columbus Library system. I had been debating buying this book for weeks now and it showed up before I plunked down $20. Wait for it to show up in the half price bin for $8 or $6. It is very funny in moments but lacks the punch of previous efforts by Nilsen. Highlighting this fact is the not so charming doodles on a cocktail napkin approach Anders has taken. Gone is his previous style from Dogs and Water. Seemingly get it all down on paper as fast as humanly possible. Worse still it's all single panels?!? Single pages are not panels ya asshat. I hate this whole miserable Kolchalka approach to comics. Though Anders comes off way smarter than magic elfs scraped out of bong resin. This is so typical of the overproduced indie book. Alternative Comics was probably the worst case as far as this goes. Putting out really handsomely produced books but not being very selective in their output. No editorial input what so ever.
Everyone has an off day. I hope that this is the case with Anders. Anders mistake was trying to string all these separate stories into one random narrative. Is it a narrative? The stream of consciousness humor I could find in any handful of well made zines or mini's. Notably Icecreamlandia. The tightly constructed (but deceptively loose) work I've admired falls apart in Monologues. When I read the back, it's noted that it's all pieced together from previous works and sketchbook pages. WTF?? This book should of never come out or been edited down.
(this review is a week late because Blogger was giving me trouble the last time I was able to attempt to post.)
Strangely enough, I owe my entire spectrum of musical tastes to the single We Are The World. During a trip to Record Town at the local mall when I was about 14, I spotted a tape in the cutout section by that guy whose voice sounded so funny on the USA For Africa song. I took home Bob Dylan’s Shot of Love as a joke, expecting to get a few good hours of ridicule out of it. Instead I was floored by what I heard; I went on to devour everything I could find by Dylan, and before long I memorized the lyrics of It’s All Right, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) like it was John 3:16. The second concert I ever attended was a Dylan show in Akron, backed by Tom Petty, opening for another band I’d never heard of called The Grateful Dead. As a kid coming of age in the early ‘80’s while MTV was being born, Dylan’s mix of politics, social commentary, poetry and rock n’ roll was a welcome respite from the awful, shallow British synth-pop dominating radio playlists at the time.
The first concert I ever attended was a trip with my brother to the Ohio State Fair to see the Fabulous Thunderbirds while they were touring behind the album Tuff Enuff. While they were unfortunate enough to be saddled with one-hit wonder status based on the crossover success of that album, most don’t realize that it was actually their fifth studio effort. The previous four records were bare-bones roots rock and blues, heavily influenced by the likes of Slim Harpo and refined over countless nights in Texas roadhouses. This group provided my introduction to blues music and made me a fan for a decade through several incarnations. The engine driving the band through its earliest and best days was Stevie Ray’s older brother Jimmie Vaughan, who left the band after it drifted too far into pop music and released several scintillating solo albums that brought an edge of spaciness to his bluesy roots.
So what did I get at Cooper Stadium this past Sunday? One of the coolest concerts I’ve ever attended, as Jimmie Vaughan opened for Bob Dylan with country music’s answer to Dick Dale, Junior Brown on the bill as well (it was a pleasure to finally hear his cover of Highway Patrol performed live). If someone had thrown in a jazz horn section, I think every kind of music in creation would have been represented—there was even an Appalachian fiddle band kicking off the show. I was in Heaven.
The set I most anticipated was Jimmie Vaughan’s, since he’s only made it this far north a handful of times in the two decades I’ve followed him. The Good Texan ripped through a number of his original tunes and even dipped into the Thunderbirds songbook with Sugar-Coated Love, for which he brought out fellow Texas roadhouse veteran Lou Ann Barton. I swear I could close my eyes and feel my feet sticking to the beer-stained floor as her brassy voice belted out from behind the chickenwire. The dust in my nostrils told me I was still standing on the Clippers’ second base, however.
Jimmie could have stopped there and it would have been one of the most memorable shows I’ve seen in years. Really, I was perfectly happy after hearing him tear through Motor Head Woman and the cover song he adopted from his brother, Texas Flood. But noooo… Halfway through his set, he had to go and make an announcement:
“I’d like to bring out a good friend of mine… Eric Clapton.”
Holy shit.
While Clapton’s studio efforts over the last fifteen years have been rather tepid, check out his live performances on the John Mayall 70th Birthday Celebration CD or his own Crossroads Guitar Festival DVD and you’ll find he still has all his blues chops. There I was, standing on a baseball diamond in front of the stage while the two best white boy blues players in the world jammed together in a set that included So Long, another trip to the Thunderbirds catalog for the instrumental Extra Jimmies, and the rockabilly-tinged Boom-Boppa Boom. Wherever you get to after you’ve gone to Heaven, that’s where I was at that point.
And when they left the stage, I still had a Bob Dylan concert to go before the night was over. Oh my god.
The Poet Laureate of rock n’ roll emerged before too long and wisely did what the Crowes screwed up a couple weeks ago: mellowed out the crowd when they’ve been hyped up by the opener. He’s made a concession to his age by standing behind a keyboard instead of a guitar these days and his nasal whine has taken on a gravelly edge, but the band he’s put together is absolutely incredible and the material he has to draw from for a set list is unmatched by anyone, anywhere. The rocker Maggie’s Farm opened his set, but he then drifted into some of his more low-key, introspective material, which worked splendidly after the adrenaline shot of the previous act. His angry side briefly reared its head with a driving reworking of It’s All Right Ma (making my evening complete. I could’ve died happy right then) before segueing into hopeful-sounding renditions of New Morning and Shelter From The Storm. Then, when the crowd was all cozy and comfortable, out came the scathing king of protest songs, Masters of War, followed soon after by an urgent Highway 61 Revisited; his verse about setting bleachers out in the sun to observe the staging of the next World War seemed surreal when heard in a baseball stadium in the present political climate. He returned for an encore with a soaring version of the greatest rock and roll song ever written, Like a Rolling Stone, and I was delighted to not have died happy a few numbers previous.
One day I'll sell my comics collection for a snazzy $100
But this guy did much better. He inherited his dad's collection.
"The shelves were just piled high with comics," said Mr. Crippen, a freelance editor living in Montreal. "I knew they were worth money, but I thought, $50,000, maybe $100,000."
Mr. Crippen was wrong."
Yep, he was way off. And there's an interesting side story about a contractor working on their house decades ago who stole parts of the collection and sold them to a dealer in new York.
I'm usually a big supporter of arts in Columbus, so it pains me to pan any local artistic endeavor. And I've been going to the Shakespeare in the Park productions since I was a kid, and I think it's one of the nicest amenities this city has to offer. I've no doubt that I will see another show there next summer.
Keeping that in mind ... I have to ask you to skip the production of Twelfth Night that's going on in Schiller Park until Sept. 3.
The main problem is that they took this venerable old Shakespeare comedy -- and turned it into a musical. This causes three problems: First, the songs don't replace any dialogue, they just stretch the play out to three hours. Second, they keep the actors from finding any rhythm in the play. And third, the songs just aren't ready for prime time.
There were several serviceable performances, and I could tell there was a lot of talent on the stage. And maybe they were having a flat night, and the songs are better under different circumstances.
Did I miss something, or is there not going to be an SPX anthology this year? We're less than 2 months away from the con and there's no info on their site regarding anthology submissions. The only post is about last year's contributors.
Just wanted to share a few pics from the roadtrip that Wendy, Hanna, and I took these past 2 weeks. 1300 miles, 12 nights of camping in various locales, museums in Washington DC, the Naval Academy in Annapolis, parasailing in Ocean City, Maryland, and camping on the beach at Assateague State Park with the wild horses.
If you'd like to see the full set, they're located here.
Franklin County I know there aren't a ton of sports fans in our group, but if you are, you need to check out Deadspin which offers a hilarious take on sports on a regular basis.
Unfortunately, they've have a lot of fun lately making fun of Central Ohio. In addition to the whole Maurice Clarett situation, they've also had quite a time with Mike Cooper, an Ohio State fan who was caught on a hidden camera masturbating to porn in a public library (video available on YouTube).
The latest fun comes from this rap video simply entitled Franklin County. Yep, this is where Panel hails from.
Hey Tom, you are from Kenton, right? I see Kenton is in the news for letting a couple of kids not serve their sentence until after football season (they are both on the team). They were charged with putting a fake deer in the road and causing a near-fatal accident.
