§ Nice Art: Sloane Leong’s ongoing SF comic Prism Stalker is coming from Image in March, and if the insides look as good as this cover we’re in for a treat.
§ Well 2018 is here and people are just rubbing the crap out of their eyes, putting on pants and going ack to work. So things are a little slow. I expect that to end by about noon today. Rounding up the Best of’s from the last week:
• The Verge
• Paste’s The Best Comic Artists of 2017
• Graeme McMillan for the Hollywood Reporter
• Chase Magnett offered The 10 Best Indie Comics of 2017
• And adventures in Poor Taste’s The top 10 LGBTQ comics of 2017
• SyFy got super on trend with The 30 best comic book artists of 2017 and The 30 best comic book writers of 2017 , both lists way more diverse than you might have predicted. The top five artists: Staples, Ward, Ormston, Pichelli, Gerads and that’s a list I could live with. The top 5 writers are Slott, Tom Taylor, Cloonan, Vaughan and Kelly Thompson.
• And Comicosity suggests the Most Anticipated Comics of 2018, a list that only scratches the surface, believe me!
§ More and more articles are talking about how important colorists are to the look of comics, and Bustle has the latest, Colorists Are The Unsung Heroes Of The Comic Industry with quotes and examples.
Chung agrees with Fitzpatrick that there’s a problem with treatment in the medium. ”I think colorists in general, male and female, all find their work under-appreciated.” she tells Bustle.“Colorists now have such strong and contrasting styles, that they play a key role in the art team.” More and more people are realizing this, though, and colorists are showing off their signature styles.
“It’s really a newer side of the industry in terms of being an individualistic artist’s game,” Fitzpatrick says. “I feel like we are the tastemakers in the industry.”
Since colorists do at least half of the work in how comics look these days, I expect we’ll see more analysis of how and why they work, even as the role of the artist in comics contineus to be downplayed by larger companies.
§ And one more time: Marvel had a pretty crappy year and McMillan is back with a thorough timeline.
2017 has been a bad year for Marvel Entertainment’s comic book division. It’s not simply that sales have tumbled (the company’s traditional dominance in year-end sales charts is absent this year), but that Marvel’s comic book publishing arm has suffered through a year of PR disasters so unforgiving as to make it appear as if the division has become cursed somehow. Here’s how bad things have been over the last twelve months.
§ New York Comic-Con is hiring for a Brand Marketing Coordinator, which is basically a pretty important job.
The Brand Marketing Coordinator is responsible for the implementation and execution of the overall marketing, promotion, communication and publicity plans in order to create awareness in the market and drive attendance for the show. Ideal candidates must be passionate marketers with a true love for brand storytelling and building lifelong connections with an audience. You’ll have the opportunity to build marketing plans that cover traditional, new media, guerilla and ‘word of mouth’ marketing. You will also help design and produce a variety of projects including advertisements, posters, logos, event signage, infographics and much more. We are looking for someone that will really understand and embrace the fans that reside in the city that never sleeps!
All that from someone with a coordinator level job, usually an entry level position!
§ HAPPY! is apparently a success for SyFy and co-creator Grant Morrison is doing a little promo:
“I don’t think there’s anything unfilmable,” Morrison said. “I’ve got takes on everything I’ve ever done, so if Happy! does really well and the phone starts ringing, I’ve got them all. I don’t believe in the current climate that anything can’t be done. Every night I turn on my TV and I see things I’ve never seen before.” The difficulty, then, was juggling the needs of the story — which had a very definitive beginning, middle, and end, and which has a small but fiercely affectionate fan base — with the needs of a TV show, which wants to essentially leave the door open to go on indefinitely.
§ They are making a Shazam! movie and director David Sandberg is apparently a bit of a wag on social media. Which is good. We need the laughs.
