#Transformers vs #GIJOE pic.twitter.com/ky11h2R6FP
— Thomas Scioli (@tomscioli) February 5, 2016
Cobra Commander on Cybertron #Transformers vs #GIJOE pic.twitter.com/FUtVEbbyTu
— Thomas Scioli (@tomscioli) February 9, 2016
§ We live in a great time for comics when even Transformers vs GI Joe looks this good. Thanks, Tom Scioli.
§ Kickstarter has funded its 100,000th project and they released a bunch of stats for the occasion including a comics snapshot:
Number of comic books, comics events, webcomics, anthologies, and graphic novels created — from a 25th anniversary compilation of Tom Tomorrow’s This Modern World to Veronica Berns’ theoretical solid state chemistry doctoral thesis in comic book form: 3,521
Kickstarter lists more stats on projects by category, and comics are towards the bottom of projects funded, but it has about a 50% success rate (I gleaned that by eyeballing so don’t hold me to it) which is a better rate than some other categories.The lowest category? Journalism of course, because everyone knows you do that for free.
§ Alison Bechdel listed her 10 Favorite Books and only one of them was a comic, but it was Edward Gorey so that’s okay.
§ It’s Raina’s world, we just live in it. That’s a picture from Telgemeier’s recent appearance at the Berkeley Public Library.
§ Prof. Bart Beaty Dr. Ben Woo weighs in on….Rob Liefeld???
Chapter seven of our book, which we believe may be the first scholarly contribution devoted to his work, addresses Liefeld as an example of an author oriented to what Pierre Bourdieu calls the heteronomous principle of cultural production. That is, oriented to external measures of success, like sales. Thus, we placed him in the right hand quadrant of our “diamond” diagram of the field of American comics – representing a skewed composition of his symbolic capital towards economic, rather than cultural, sources.
§ And MORE! It’s Liefeld Week let’s face it. Comics Alliance examines the whole Deadpool creator credit question:
It’s a situation that gets a bit stickier as you expand past the murkiness of Kane and Liefeld, and apply it to other characters. No-one claims that Roy Thomas, Len Wein and John Romita aren’t the sole creators of Wolverine, but when so much of his backstory and personality was defined by Chris Claremont, in Uncanny X-Men and beyond, should he also receive some form of credit? Claremont has mentioned in the past that although the X-Men movies rely heavily on his work with Wolverine and the X-Men, the most recent Wolverine film didn’t even include his name in the credits. When Hugh Jackman thanked Claremont for his success in Hollywood, Claremont later remarked that he “would have preferred a check.”
As we mentioned in our own thoughts on the matter, it’s not clear if Fox pays creators for using their characters and stories in their superhero films and it sounds like no, they don’t. If anyone wants to give me the poop on this (even anonymously) the email is comicsbeat at gmail.com.
§ Oh yeah talking about the comic book movies, one that is best forgotten by most is the big flop Jonah Hex. Star Josh Brolin is ridin’ high now, esp. with his great role as Eddie Mannix in Hail, Caesar, but Jonah Hex is still a burr under his saddle. The movie went in for extensive, expensive reshoots and still bombed.
The experience of making it — that would have been a better movie based on what we did. As opposed to what ended up happening to it, which is going back and reshooting 66 pages in 12 days and that being… Listen, I understand it’s financiers. You’re trying to save their money, and it becomes a financial thing. … I remember when I was talking to Warner Bros. about doing that movie, ‘High Plains Drifter’ is what I put on the TV, I said, ‘That’s what I wanna do.’ I would do that movie still. If I ever had the balls to spend $5 million, which I don’t, I would do that movie, ’cause that’s the version of that movie that would have been successful, for sure. And it didn’t need to cost anything more than $8-$10 million.
§ People can’t get enough of Julia Wertz and her tiny museum dwelling! Here’s a local Brooklyn TV visit to her apartment, but I can’t embed it. Boo!
§ Comics and Cola begins a series called Comics&Cola: Need to know with Manjit Thapp
‘Need to know’ is a new feature that aims to get you quickly acquainted with cartoonists and illustrators of talent and interest, via a few questions and some examples of their work. Up first, an artist whose work I came came across towards the end of last year and became instantly enamoured with: Manjit Thapp.
To be accurate, it’s my co-author, Dr. Ben Woo, who wrote the blog piece about Liefeld. But I agree with everything he had to say!
FIXED Ben and Bart.
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