September 8, 2011
[comics] Bargain Bin #6: Alex & Droogs … What If Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange was a comic book?
September 7, 2011
[comics] Go Look: First Page From Alan Moore’s V For Vendetta Script ‘Vengeance’
August 31, 2011
[comics] Masked Anonymous Protesters Aid Time Warner’s Profits … ‘The mask resonates with the hackers because it was worn by a rogue anarchist challenging an authoritarian government in “V for Vendetta,” the movie produced in 2006 by Warner Brothers. What few people seem to know, though, is that Time Warner, one of the largest media companies in the world and parent of Warner Brothers, owns the rights to the image and is paid a licensing fee with the sale of each mask.’
August 29, 2011
[comics] Grant Morrison on the Death of Comics … a non-standard interview with Morrison – well worth reading if you follow his work …
With comics, the quality now is better than it’s ever been, there are more people now who are really good at what they do, doing what they do. Everything’s available for free, I think that’s the real problem, nobody wants to buy it anymore. One comes out, you see it immediately online and you can read it. That’s the way people want to consume their information, the colors look nicer. I think that’s more the problem, but that’s a problem for everybody, it’s not just for comics, everyone’s going to start feeling that one.’ — Morrison discussing the death-spiral of superhero comic books
August 25, 2011
[comics] A post on Scans Daily revisiting the first issue of ROM Spaceknight from 1979 … ‘ROM SPACEKNIGHT issue 1 gives us all of the pieces of the story that will span nearly 80 issues. It starts out like a 50s sci-fi monster movie, only the strange being from outer space is actually here to help humanity, but because of his foreboding appearance and the ambiguity of his actions (and the general suspiciousness of folk in the Marvel universe), he’s believed to be a rampaging monster. Meanwhile, the enemy he has hunted for two centuries appears to be regular people, due to their shapeshifting abilities. An everyman human meets the “alien monster” and the beginning of a friendship is formed, and we learn the broad strokes of ROM’s origin: a highly advanced culture, with little to no martial presence took a great chance on an untested and dangerous technology, leaving its defenders with diminished “humanity” that they will always pine for.’
August 23, 2011
August 2, 2011
[comics] Go Look: Be Pure! Be Vigilant! Behave!
July 28, 2011
[comics] Alan Moore Takes League of Extraordinary Gentlemen To The ’60s … yet another wide-ranging interview with Alan Moore … ‘My position on punk was that I loved the music and I wanted to be involved in it. But unlike some of my associates, I wasn’t going to go out and get my haircut or spiked up. This was their generation, they were all much younger than me, and they deserved to explore it in their own way. Of course, I found out later that John Lydon was about, what, eight months younger than me! [Laughs]’
July 27, 2011
[comics] Annotations to League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume III Chapter Two, a.k.a. Century: 1969 … The Latest League Annotations from Jess Nevins … ‘Panel 2. If “Hot Chicks” is a reference to anything I’m unaware of it.’
[comics] Alan Moore and Demi Moore …
July 25, 2011
[comics] Grant Morrison: My Supergods From The Age Of The Superhero … Grant Morrison Chooses His Favourite Superhero Moments … On Marvelman: ‘There are beautiful sequences where the superheroes are escorting Thatcher out of No 10 and she’s sobbing helplessly: suddenly there’s this new power that bombs can’t stop, weapons can’t stop. The whole last issue is this fabulous liberal fantasy of what the good guys would do if they got in charge and got rid of all the bastards! I like it much more than Watchmen; it was a real triumph for lefties everywhere!’
July 17, 2011
[comics] Tugging Your Coat … Mike McMahon’s got a blog! … ‘I love Joe Pineapples, a real pleasure to draw. Wonderful piece of character design by Kev O’Neill.’
July 15, 2011
[comics] The Artists’ Artist: Graphic Novelists … with contributions from Peter Kuper, Bryan Talbot, Posy Simmonds, Ariel Schrag, Martin Rowson and Lynda Barry. On Chris Ware: ‘Chris Ware is an American cartoonist whose work is so unusual that some hesitate to call what he is doing “comics”. When I read his work, I get a Wright brothers feeling of being in something big, right as it’s being invented. Eventually we will know what to call what he does, but for now “graphic novel” is all we have.’
July 13, 2011
July 4, 2011
[comics] A Moment Of Moore [Twitter | RSS Feed] … six months of daily Alan Moore posts – check out the Archives … ‘Every Damned Link.’
July 1, 2011
[comics] Excerpt from “Irredeemable: Dave Sim’s Cerebus” … part of a longer-form essay in Comics Journal #301 … ‘Sim may well be a wackjob or an acid casualty, but he is also, I would argue, one of the greatest living cartoonists.’
June 25, 2011
[comics] Garen Ewing: from a Golden Age to a rainbow orchid … missed this when it was first published: comic creator Garen Ewing interviwed by Mondoagogo … ‘One of my very favourite comics was, and is, Charley’s War, but I’m not certain that I feel particularly influenced by Pat Mills — but I’m sure it must be there in the mix to some degree. What child that grew up in the 1970s and went on to make their own comics doesn’t have Pat Mills in there somewhere?!’
June 22, 2011
[comics] Mike Sterling: ‘I’m still kind of weirded out that I just saw a major Hollywood movie that featured Kilowog as a character. This is not the future I was expecting.’
June 18, 2011
[comics] “When I first heard about virtual reality I thought: is there any other kind?” … Alan Moore interview from the New Statesman … Moore on Books: ‘I accept that things change and that the future of reading might be in the form of a Kindle or an iPad, but somehow I tend to think that the book is perfectly adapted. It’s like a shark; sharks haven’t evolved in millions of years because they don’t need to. They’re really really good at being sharks I think the same is true of a book.’
June 13, 2011
[comics] Unpublished Tintin: The Hugged Face … by Dan Hipp … [via The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log]
June 8, 2011
[comics] Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol Run Began 22 Years Ago …
So in prepping my post for tomorrow, I realized that Grant Morrison’s DOOM PATROL run began 22 years ago. #fallingoverdeadfromoldage
Mike Sterling
mikesterling
June 7, 2011
May 25, 2011
[cartoons] Steve Bell On 30 Years Of Political Cartooning At The Guardian … ‘Nick Clegg, a rather poor clone of Cameron, who in turn is a tribute act to Blair, who is himself channelling Thatcher. And who was she channelling? Her father, Alderman Roberts, the grocer of Grantham town? Winston Churchill? Adolf Hitler? Beelzebub? Who can say?’
May 24, 2011
[comics] The AV Club Interviews Chester Brown …
AV Club: Is there some reason so many cartoonists have such idiosyncratic political and social views? Peter Bagge is a libertarian as well, and Steve Ditko is an objectivist, and R. Crumb has his odd open marriage, and then there’s whatever Dave Sim’s got going on.
Chester Brown: [Laughs.]
May 10, 2011
[comics] Howard Chaykin, Time and Time Again … Douglas Wolk On Howard Chaykin … ‘Chaykin’s ’80s comics are the work of an artist pushing himself savagely hard–especially Time2, an ambitious, densely packed 1986-1987 project that encompassed a one-shot comic book and a pair of slim graphic novels before vanishing.’
May 6, 2011
[comics] How 2000AD artist and MS sufferer John Hicklenton chose to end his life …
…he decided to finish the battle on his own terms. Even when we went to Dignitas,” Lavis recalls, “it was, ‘I’m pulling the pin on the hand grenade. I’m murdering MS. It’s not murdering me.’”
April 30, 2011
[comics] CR Review: Paying For It … another review of Chester Brown’s latest autobiographical comic this time from Tom Spurgeon … ‘There’s a jittery undercurrent to Brown’s work that shimmies to the surface at odd and unexpected times, a queasy energy unlike anything else in comics. That noted, it’s always enormously fun to read Brown, and Paying For It proves no exception. There’s little I can write that will ever do justice to the enormous visceral pleasure that can come with spending time in Brown’s version of reality.’
April 29, 2011
[comics] Moment Of Moore: A Wedding Blessing From Alan Moore … ‘I hearby bless your wedding, and all who sail in her.’
April 28, 2011
[comics] ‘Dark Knight Returns’ Page Up for Auction … ‘The original artwork for the splash page from issue No. 3, which features Batman leaping through the skyline along with his new Robin, Carrie Kelley, the first female to hold that role, is up for bidding at Heritage Auctions. The bid is currently at $100,000.’
April 14, 2011
April 13, 2011
[comics] Chester Brown’s Paying For It Reviewed … the first review I’ve seen of what will likely be the most controversial comic of the year … ‘The social cues he seems unable to pick up on, the rituals he is congenitally incapable of performing, the years and decades of accrued guilt and sense of failure he built up from missing out on potential romantic or sexual relationships, the elaborate and to-him draining emotional quid pro quo of sex within the context of the few relationships he was able to enter into and maintain (that’s the context in which he really “paid for it”) …all of that disappeared the moment he told his first whore “Uh, I’d…like to have vaginal intercourse with you.” (“Yes, that’s what I really said,” he assures us helpfully in the “Notes” section.)’
April 9, 2011
[comics] A Comic Book Lover’s Guide to Going Digital … some interesting pointers for managing digital comics … ‘For the record, I don’t mean by any of this that you should ditch paper comics altogether. I understand that for many fans, nothing beats the feel of paper, the accumulation of a big collection, and the pride of having gotten that issue “way back when it first came out”. I think both paper and digital comics are great, and have their time and place—and while I have pretty much switched to digital entirely, I in no way think everyone else “should”. I do think maintaining a digital collection, whether replacing or on top of your existing collection, is a great idea.’
April 7, 2011
April 4, 2011
[comics] Outstripping the News … a facinating retrospective looking at 40 years of Doonesbury …
Trudeau has always been able to take a situation and develop its possibilities over a long arc. Sometimes this has led to slapstick, as in the antics of Uncle Duke, whose drug seizures make the top of his head flip open to let bats fly out or release Mini-D, who is his Id. Sometimes it has led to gentle mocking of do-gooders, as in some of Lacey Davenport’s polite crusades. But he has never developed a situation more movingly or powerfully than in recent years with his treatment of wounded veterans.
April 2, 2011
March 30, 2011
[comics] Ten Great Moments In Cerebus … ‘I’m missing some of my favourites out here, like the whole prayer sequence (“Cerebus is a bad flyspeck!”) because the pacing of the series tends to mean a ‘moment’ can be ten or fifteen pages.’
March 25, 2011
March 21, 2011
[comics] Boy From The Boroughs … Alan Moore interviewed by Pádraig Ó Méalóid … ‘I would have been basically going through all the decades of her life, with her getting older in each one, because I liked the idea, at the time, of having a strip in 2000AD with a seventy or eighty year old woman as the title character.’ (Moore on the uncompleted books of Halo Jones)
March 8, 2011
[comics] 100 Comics To Read Before You Die … worth-a-look, left-field comic reading list. On Morrison and Yeowell’s New Adventures Of Hitler:
At the time it was published Morrison was accused of being a Nazi propagandist by people who hadn’t read the series, which lampoons Hitler constantly and mercilessly. He’s depicted as a buffoon and a lunatic, hallucinating entire conversations over cups of tea and convinced that he’s being remorselessly pursued by a trolleybus full of people with chairs for shoes. He’s as mad as a fish. At the same time he’s portrayed as a limited kind of visionary, finding the seeds of National Socialism in the rich, dark soil of the British Empire while hearing Morrissey and John Lennon singing songs from the future in his wardrobe (Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now and Working Class Hero, respectively). Morrison knew the kind of controversy he was courting, even titling the first chapter ‘What Do You Mean, Ideologically Unsound?’
March 7, 2011
[comics] BY THE TAIL OF GLYCON! IT’S ALAN MOORE’S CHIN! … Revealing Passport Snaps Of Alan Moore.
March 4, 2011
[comics] Fantastic Four #74 Splash … a close-up look at the original art for a Jack Kirby splash page … ‘It’s funny to look at original production artwork and see where before computers came into use, the production personnel would cut out the month and date, then tape it to the publication information at the bottom of the page.’
March 2, 2011
[comics] Dan Clowes Has A Website?! … ‘This website has been authorized by Mr. Daniel Clowes.’ [via Forbidden Planet]
February 24, 2011
February 18, 2011
[anime] Neon Genesis Evangelion: (Hideaki Anno) Reborn Again (and Again) … huge Metafilter post on Neon Genesis Evangelion … ‘What makes Eva so good is that as the series goes on, the deeper frameworks behind it become more and more apparent. It goes from a fairly standard ‘plucky teens in mechas vs giant monsters’; to a drama with explorations of growing up, shyness, cowardice, love, heroism etc; through a conspiracy reveal with betrayal and intrigue; to an all-out, reason-defying, biblically-proportioned eschaton.’
February 14, 2011
[comics] Deeply… Silently… And… For Too Many… Years … A Moment Of Moore for Valentines Day.
February 11, 2011
[comics] Bane … noted Batmanologist Chris Sims discusses the orgins and history of one of the Batman villains in the next Chris Nolan film … ‘Bane is essentially the most successful attempt at creating The Evil Version of Batman.’
February 9, 2011
[comics] Respect Due: former 2000AD editor Steve MacManus … ‘Writers like Wagner, Mills, Grant and Alan Moore blossomed. New scribes such as Grant Morrison and Peter Milligan emerged. Great artists like Gibbons, Gibson, Bolland and McMahon did some of their finest work in this period on 2000AD. Amazing new talents like Simon Bisley, Glenn Fabry and Steve Dillon were nurtured in the comic.’
February 5, 2011
February 1, 2011
[comics] I Am Thinking About The Old Man … a classic Moment Of Moore.