For some reason, I never got around to writing up a single kibble last week so this is a whole five day’s worth.
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§ Nice art: Kris Mukai, aided by Patrick Crotty, created a comics style guide to making risograph comics.

§ In the NY Times, Nerd of Color founder, and Secret Identities editor Keith Chow asks “Why Won’t Hollywood Cast Asian Actors?” and the answer is pretty dispiriting.

And Hollywood’s argument is circular: If Asian-Americans — and other minority actors more broadly — are not even allowed to be in a movie, how can they build the necessary box office clout in the first place? To make matters worse, instead of trying to use their lofty positions in the industry to push for change, Hollywood players like Mr. Landis and Mr. Sorkin take the easy, cynical path.


§ Adventures in copyediting. When seeing a article entitled “The comic genius of Jack Kirby” you might expect it to be about Kirby’s hilarious work, but no, it’s just about him being a general genius of comics.

Kirby is best known for co-creating Marvel’s most successful heroes and villains in the 1960s, but he was both a groundbreaker and workhorse from the 1930s until his death in 1994. He worked in every conceivable genre, including sci-fi, crime, westerns, and war comics. He even gave creator-owned comics a shot in the arm with Captain Victory in the 1980s. It’s fitting that Kirby (along with Captain America co-creator Joe Simon) is considered the inventor of romance comics, since Kirby and his wife, Roz, were married in 1942 and stayed together till his death in 1994. Even more than a pencil, Roz was Kirby’s constant companion, and they had four children together.

§ When he’s not shaking up the comics world, Abhay Khosla is a real life lawyer, so you might find his comments on the Eddie Berganza scandal very interesting.

2)  It also upsets me because it avoids asking so many questions about why there may not be complaints.  is it okay that there aren’t complaints because you’ve refused to promote women, and women don’t get to work on prestigious superhero titles, just so that they can’t then file complaints about sexual harassment?  Is it okay if you stifle women’s careers so men can run amock?  That’s textbook employment discrimination.  If women have applied for jobs at DC and not gotten hired– well, why’d they get turned down?   Sexual harassment and discrimination isn’t just some creep editor grabbing at you– failure to hire, failure to promote, someone quitting because they realize it’s never getting fixed, etc.  Many things potentially count, depending on the facts, depending on the circumstances, depending on the Judge, depending.  (Nothing’s ever guaranteed).


§ Dear Karl Urban hasn’t given up on Judge Dredd!

§ Tony Isabella recently had strong words for conventions held at facilities that are lacking in the basic amenities. His harshest words are reserved for the 2013 New York Comic Con, and I can’t say too much to refute this, as the Javits Center isn’t made for crowds. But the hotel service was the worst:

Room service should pick up its trays quickly after a hotel guest calls to let them know they are finished and have placed the tray outside the room. During my 2013 stay in New York, a tray was left outside my room for more than two full days, despite multiple calls to room service and the front desk. Finally, I put the tray in the elevator, sent it down and called the front desk to let them know it had been sent down. I often wonder how long it remained in that elevator before they retrieved it.

§ Speaking of hotels, this is an old link, but the San Diego Comic-Con Unofficial Blog has some guesses on how many people were looking for San Diego Comic Con rooms and who walked away happy:

The reason is pretty simple: There are simply more attendees requesting rooms than there are rooms available. According to Simkins, there were “approximately 2.5 requests submitted per room available”. As we discussed last week, the very best case scenario (if every single room at each hotel was included in the hotel block), would have 19,487 rooms up for grabs. That would mean 48,717 attendees were trying for those rooms — though we know the total number of rooms available isn’t actually that high (and thus the total number of attendees trying in the sale isn’t either).


§ And Suzanna Walker has a good piece on Accessibility and Cons:

It’s con season again, and with it comes a bag of mixed emotions for me. On the one hand, I’m excited: I took a year off from attending cons, and it’s nice to be back in the swing of things. This is the first year I’m attending as a creator, not just a fan, and I’m looking forward to talking with people about my work. On the other hand, it’s impossible to avoid the issue of accessibility, particularly when I turn my eye towards networking and navigating a crowded show floor. Conventions are big, loud, crowded places, exhausting for able-bodied people and at times downright inaccessible for people with disabilities. Sometimes, even those cons with the best of intentions can be difficult to navigate. Most well-intended accessibility policies can be difficult to navigate.

§ Sparkplug Books is winding down, and here’s a timeline. You can order books directly from Sparkplug for a few more weeks, then Alternative will be handling it.

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§ Indie publisher Josh Frankel (Z2 Comics) comes clean on what’s it’s like to be an indie comics publisher: along with more art from LEGEND, which looks great.

Personalities – Comic artists are crazy, shop owners are crazy — to be truthful everybody is a little bit crazy. That said, as a publisher, your main job is to navigate peoples’ personalities and in comics there are a lot of them. On a good day dealing with all of these characters feels like being in a carnival; on a bad day it’s like being in a carnival prison.

For some reason, my news feed was full of stories about comics being used around the world for various purposes so let’s just go, ok?

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§ In Nigeria, publisher Oriteme Banigo is using comics to teach local history:

Comic books and graphic novels may play a key role in Nigeria, a country torn by sectarian violence and a commodity-reliant economy damaged by the dropping price of oil. Recent changes in the national curriculum mean many schools no longer offer history class. And while Nigerian authors churn out memoirs and novels that line bookshelves in the country and around the world, Nigeria boasts only a handful of historians who write for the average reader. Oriteme Banigo, the creator of “Okiojo’s Chronicles,” says he fears for the future of the country if its young people don’t learn about Nigeria’s past.

§ In Hawera, NZ the library will be participating in Free Comic Book Day:

Holy Ravioli, Batman!  Comic book enthusiasts from around Taranaki will be racing to the public library in Hawera on May 7 for International Free Comic Book Day. Some 400 free comics will be given away and there are workshops planned with artists and illustrators, a costume competition and various other activities. This is the 15th year the world-wide event has been held, but the first time it had been celebrated in South Taranaki, Library Plus librarian Pamela Jones said. “The big libraries like Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland do it, I don’t know about other small libraries. I know it’s creating a bit of a stir on Twitter amongst the other small libraries,” she said.

§ In Mumbai, a crime comic is being Kickstarted:

From the website- “Black Mumba is a collection of short stories set in the city of Mumbai, India. The stories are all told through the eyes of a weathered police inspector in a familiar 40s crime noir aesthetic. But in Black Mumba, there are no criminals to catch or villains to foil. The city of Mumbai itself is the quarry – the bleak, weird and yet hopeful nature of life on its streets is at the heart of this collection.

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§ Syrian cartoonist Hamid Sulaiman has published “Freedom Hospital”, about an underground hospital in war-torn Syria:

“As a French-Syrian couple every day we pay the price of terrorism, fanaticism, racism, borders, arms etc. Love will always win.” Then Sulaiman was then just an unknown refugee, another bearded face in the human tide which has spilled out over Syria’s borders after five years of unending war. Three months later his graphic novel “Freedom Hospital”, which tells the story of an underground hospital in a besieged Syrian town, is being acclaimed in France and Germany. By turns harrowing, heart-breaking and funny, it follows a group of wounded rebels and the staff of the field hospital who treat them as the revolution’s idealism is drowned in a river of blood.

§ And here’s a project called Safe House, about child brides in Tanzania:

For his second graphic novel, photojournalist Marc Ellison travelled to northern Tanzania to speak to young girls who have escaped child marriage and female genital mutilation. He presents their stories in a “graphic novel 2.0”, a mixture of illustrations, photos and videos. In this podcast, he explains the reasons behind his choice of format as well as the process of creating a report in the style of a graphic novel.

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§ FINALLY, this Australian GN tells the story of The Secret Killer Of WWI, which happens to be diarrhea:

Scientist turned independent publisher Dr. Gregory Crocetti told The Huffington Post Australia this inner battle was taboo. “There’s no honour in pooing yourself to death, so no one wants to talk about the fact that dysentery killed more people than bullets and bombs,” Crocetti told HuffPost Australia.

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§ AND more world comics! Blækhus Comics is a site collecting -non-fiction comics by first year students at The Animation Workshop in Viborg, Denmark.

§ Finally for 90s nostalgics, a look at the comics of Apollo Smile!

Unfortunately, 1998 wasn’t exactly a great time to be making comics. The industry was contracting — even Marvel was just beginning to dig itself out of its infamous bankruptcy — and small press publishers were being killed off left and right. Smile even says as much in the introduction to #2 with the announcement that her publisher, Eagle Wing Press, was getting out of the game. And yes: That happens in the introduction. Rather than saving that news for a letters page or even putting it on the inside front cover, each issue starts with page one as a full text page from Smile, letting you know what’s up. And considering that it’s not even two full paragraphs before we get the announcement that they’re losing a publisher, it sort of kills the mood for the rest of the issue. But I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.

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