Kibbles ‘n’ Bits 1/23/17: Sean Spicer’s not so secret otaku past

§ Nice Art: The Black Hammer Annual came out last week, and Dean Ormston’s art on the regular series is pretty amazing, but this bit by Mtt Kindt is nice too. Other stories in the ish by Dustin Nguyen, Emi Lenox, Nate Powell and Ray Fawkes, with colors by Dave

§ BTW the reason sI run “nice Art” at the top of K’n’B is so that all the beed that pick up from it will have a nice graphic at the top – as well as to promote nice art. If you have a submission for nice art email me at comicsbeat at gmail.com.

Best #katsucon EVER w @timodc @kakukowski #nationalharbor see PIC pic.twitter.com/6F0hnrCK

— Sean Spicer (@seanspicer) February 15, 2013

§ Sean Spicer made a memorable debut as United States Press Secretary to the Trump administration Saturday by coming out blazing insistiing that several easily disprovable things were in fact true. However, I guess we can’t be too hard on him since he might be one of us, as this tweet from 2013 shows. Katsucno is a big anime show held in the Baltimore/Washington DC metro area. Spicer’s past is in the naval reserve, a congressional aid and PR; who he likes to cosplay as is unknown at this time.

§ Hey remember that compilation of all the best comics lists of 2016? I guess it’s done and the weighted top 10 are:

.) The Vision by Tom King, Gabriel Hernandez Walta and Jordie Bellaire (276 points)
2.) March: Book Three by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell (245)
3.) Paper Girls by Brian K. Vaughan, Cliff Chiang and Matt Wilson (202)
4.) Patience by Daniel Clowes (190)
5.) Rosalie Lightning by Tom Hart (170)
6.) Monstress by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda (162)
7.) Ghosts by Raina Telgemeier (152)
8.) Rolling Blackouts by Sarah Glidden (139)
9.) Saga by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples (129) ⇧
10.) The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye by Sonny Liew (128)

§ Speaking of top 10s, the Beat’s own Rosie Knight has a list of Ten Of The Best Times That Someone Punched A Nazi In Comics – there have been many!

§ Esquire’s list of 80 Books Every Person Should Read contains ONE graphic novel, but I won’t tell you what so you will have to go through whole list and once again tell yourself you MUST read As I Lay Dying.

§ Emma Houxbois has started a reread of Warren Ellis and Darick Roertson’s Transmetropolitan:

The first time I read the series, it struck me that Spider’s first issue transformation from wild haired, bushy bearded hermit to utterly hairless and sporting bizarre sunglasses more or less took him from Alan Moore to Grant Morrison, which is probably accidental. The preference for living in relative isolation and grudging return to the city is all self parody on Ellis’ part, however. In 2015, Ellis took to Medium to offer up a contemplation of how geography informs his worldview that harkens back to Transmetropolitan’s debut. He parallels the shifting sands he’s observed living on the coast his whole life with his changing fortunes as a freelancer, putting Spider firmly in an ebb tide when we first meet him. Ellis’ thoughts on how this relates to aging puts him more or less in line with what he conceived of for Spider twenty years ago.

 

§ How Much Money Do Cartoonists Make? Colleen Doran will tell you.

§ The latest book in the “Next Persepolis Derby” is Soviet Daughter by Julia Alekseyeva – here’s a nice piece on the book for NPR:

Author Julia Alekseyeva’s great-grandmother Lola lived to be 100 years old, long enough to see the birth, and eventual collapse, of the USSR. In 1992, she and her family — including young Julia — moved from Kiev to Chicago. Unbeknownst to her family, Lola began to write her memoirs, recording the stories of her life as a Jew in the Soviet Union, filled with vivid details and enlivened by a strong, independent spirit. Upon Lola’s death, Julia discovered her great-grandmother’s memoirs, and has now transformed them into her debut graphic novel, Soviet Daughter.

Don’t worry, most of the books in the Next Persepolis Derby are pretty good!

§ The first reviews on Wilson, the adaptation of the Daniel Clowes graphic novel are in, following its Sundance debut, and they are mixed. Variety:

If suburb-bashing sounds a little…I don’t know, 1985 to you, then welcome to Wilson’s world. He’s not dim, but he’s stuck in a soggy bubble of fraying boomer insights: technology is bad, hanging out is good, corporate homogenization is bad, saying whatever comes into your head with no filter is good. The hook of Wilson’s personality is that he’s an oddball-outsider who cuts through the bull. In truth, though, he sounds like an aging cranky white male whose arbitrary complaints boil down to the world no longer being the one that he grew up in. (If this were 100 years ago, he’s be griping about cars and telephones.) All of which is to say that in “Wilson,” Daniel Clowes’ voice, which was once acerbically hip, sounds dated.

Hollywood Reporter:

The universe of graphic artist and screenwriter Daniel Clowes, with its curmudgeons, misfits, ranting neurotics and dyspeptic visionaries, is a tricky place to inhabit. Terry Zwigoff nailed it best with the cool detachment of Ghost World but then missed the mark almost completely with Art School Confidential, which veered into self-conscious misanthropy and snide skewering of easy targets. Director Craig Johnson, following up on his dark but disarming The Skeleton Twins, gets only a fraction closer in the patchy Wilson, which boasts some funny vignettes but fails in the crucial test of making us care much about the title character.