15 July 2014
9 July 2014
[batman] The Real Dynamic Duo: Kane and Finger … Mark Evanier on Bob Kane, Bill Finger and Batman … ‘For those who don’t know: Bill Finger wrote the first Batman story and most of the early ones that established key things about the character and his world. He was a friend of Kane’s and a very good writer, and while Kane argued with some accounts of exactly what Finger had invented, even Bob had to admit that Bill made a vital contribution to the property.’
29 June 2014
[comics] Chris W’s Cerebus Character Index … a comprehensive index of all the characters who appeared more than two times … ‘Missy (52): #114, #118, #124, #136, #141-2, #144-57, #162-70, #173, #191 (flashback), #218 (dream), #230-4, #237-8, #242, #246, #254, #261, #265, #300 (flashback)’
26 June 2014
[comics] Alan Moore Early Career Timeline … … ‘Swamp Thing 24 – Roots (February 1984) … Monster (Scream #1 – March 1984) Boy buries his father, then goes to investigate the mysterious locked door upstairs which his father was killed going up to. Story ends with a to-be-continued, and was picked up by John Wagner – was about a deformed man living in the attic who was gentle but usually homicidal, apparently.’
18 June 2014
[comics] Alan Moore’s Lost Comic Miracleman Has Returned … ‘A Dream of Flying is lovely, but the truly jaw-dropping stuff is just a few months away. You’ll get to see “Scenes From the Nativity,” in which Moran’s wife gives birth to a superpowered infant in an infamously (and, in its way, beautifully) graphic manner. You’ll experience the astounding conclusion of Moore’s run: a city-demolishing fight between Miracleman and Johnny Bates that will turn your stomach and expand your mind, followed by an issue in which Miracleman assumes his rightful role as a god and creates a worldwide quasi-socialist utopia. You’ll delight in Gaiman’s series of short stories about life in that utopia — one of which is a gorgeous little tale narrated by an undead Andy Warhol. You’ll read about modern myths and see better worlds. And soon, God (Miracleman?) willing, you’ll find out how it was all supposed to conclude. ‘
16 June 2014
[comics] The Joker’s Utility Belt … I wonder what the Joker does with the small cork? …
15 June 2014
[comics] Five Great Comic Book Adaptations Of Movies … some great comics to watch out for on this list. On Kirby’s 2001: ‘It’s hard to imagine two sensibilities more opposite in tone than those of Jack Kirby and Stanley Kubrick. Kirby’s grandiosity acts as a stark contrast to the calculated distance of Kubrick and for this alone, his eight-years-after-the-fact adaptation of 2001 really shouldn’t work. Against everything, though, the adaptation succeeds by choosing to take a new path, mashing up three different versions of the material — novel, screenplay and final product — and adding Kirby’s off-kilter dynamism to create a final product that’s as wonderful as it is “wrong.”The original film is (obviously) full of space, figuratively and literally. Kubrick allows the camera to rest, giving the audience an opportunity to breathe in the recycled air and vastness of the universe. An absence of dialogue and narration helps further the film’s atmosphere, providing a base from which the stunning visuals stand out even more. This draws the audience in, forcing them to pay attention to what’s not being said just as much as what is. This sort of subtlety is exactly the sort of thing that Kirby has no interest in; he’s going to tell you the story. With words and pictures. Deal with it.’
12 June 2014
[comics] Neil Tennant’s FURY… a fascinating look at a 1977 Marvel comic edited by Neil Tennant from the Pet Shop Boys … ‘The covers of Fury were also similar to the ones Battle had been running. Powerful images with a punchy message. None punchier than the brilliant one shown at the top of this post by Carlos Ezquerra. The artist had produced many similarly strong images for Battle’s covers so it was quite a coup for Marvel UK to commission him for Fury. Unfortunately, the company were not given a budget by their American owners to produce British strips so although Fury looked like a traditional UK war comic on the outside, the interiors were a different matter…’
10 June 2014
[comics] “A Funny Kind Of Relationship” … Alan Moore On Iain Sinclair … ‘So Iain had a profound effect upon my writing style, it’s probably more evident to me than to other people. It was more the fact that after reading Iain’s work I felt that I had to man up, I had to shift things up a gear, because knowing that prose of that quality was possible, unless you tried to address that, any other response is like, cowardice, or defeat, surrender… It was like when I read Burroughs as a teenager. It made me realise that prose was capable of doing certain other things than things that I had previously attributed to it. Later on I found that Iain’s kind of literary genealogy is not a million miles away from my own, its just that his has got a much finer eye attached to it and a much greater body of knowledge, but I think we were both inspired by the energy of the Beat writers and the culture that spread out from them.’
6 June 2014
[comics] The Weirdo “NO HOPE” Diagram … by R. Crumb … ‘Proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that there’s No Hope!’
3 June 2014
[comics] 43 Out-Of-Context Comic Panels That Prove All Superheroes Have Dirty Minds … Wertham was right … ‘Captain America! I Command You To — ‘
30 May 2014
[comics] Fan-Made Live Action Akira Trailer … ’38 Years After World War III…’
26 May 2014
[comics] “Kid… Comics Will Break Your Heart” … Jack Kirby by Dylan Horrocks … ‘In the 1980s, Romberger met Kirby at a convention in New York. Kirby kindly looked at Romberger’s work and then gave him a piece of advice: “Kid, you’re one of the best. But put your work in galleries. Don’t do comics. Comics will break your heart.”’
25 May 2014
[comics] MAD #21: Cover by Harvey Kurtzman (1955) … an incredibly dense cover of comic novelty ads … ‘It is one of the most glorious and ludicrous covers in comic book history.’
16 May 2014
[comics] Great War was world’s first sci-fi war, says Pat Mills … BBC News discusses Charley’s War. Pat Mills: ‘We often imagine that Armageddon is a horror that awaits us sometime in the future. But Armageddon has already happened. It was World War One.’
15 May 2014
[comics] Alan Moore’s unpublished scripts for Youngblood … contains scripts for Youngblood #2 to #7, notes on characters and an overview of Moore’s plan for two years of comics.
13 May 2014
[movies] Hollywood’s superhero movie binge explained in four charts … ‘It has been rare for fewer than six comic-book adaptations to be released in any one year. Despite the glut, audiences don’t seem to be losing interest. US box-office revenue generated by these films has cracked $1 billion on three different occasions. The Avengers, a film that packed as many comic-book favorites onto the screen as possible, made $623 million in the US alone two years ago.’
11 May 2014
[comics] Nemo and All Things “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” with Kevin O’Neill … great interview with one of British comics finest artists … ‘I think with the original League series, it just started with a small Charles Dickens reference, and some older Victorian comic characters. I remember talking about it and we felt, well, if we have a newstand scene, it would be great if all the publications are fictional publications from all over the place — and therein lies the path to complete and total madness, really.’
10 May 2014
[moore] 2048: The Alan Moore Edition … a special version of the 2048 game for fans of Alan Moore.
6 May 2014
[comics] Walt Simonson’s Groovy DC Days … nostalgic mini-gallery of Walter Simonson Covers from 1970s … ‘Please stay away — The love I need can NEVER BE!’
24 April 2014
[comics] A Letter from Denny O’Neill about working at Marvel Comics in 1966 … ‘The notes in the margin are Jack’s — he actually plots the story as he draws it, after an initial, and usually brief, plot conference with our leader. From the marginal comments, Stan does the script.’
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.’