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§ Ed Piskor notes The Art Of Cause and Effect In A Solitary Comic Panel:

One of the things I like most about this panel is that, if you look at it a certain way, you are witnessing time move from the bottom of the panel (with the character throwing) to the top of the panel (the broken window). This idea of witnessing time pass through action in a single image might be what excites me most. Clowes could have easily drawn one panel with the character throwing, and another panel with the projectile breaking the window, but the approach he took is much stronger. Below is another example from that issue of Eightball.


§ Michael Sieply at the NY Times, points out that Comic-Con success really has nothing to do with box office success:

In Hall H, a crowd of perhaps 6,000 roared welcome, then listened with rapt attention, as Hayao Miyazaki, the Japanese animation king, bantered onstage with John Lasseter, the Walt Disney animation chief. Weeks later, Disney released Mr. Miyazaki’s film “Ponyo” in the United States, only to see it founder with just $15.1 million in domestic ticket sales.

On the flip side, “Avatar” got off to an uncertain start at Comic-Con. Despite a seemingly good response in the room, snarky texts and Twitter messages from Hall H seemed to bode ill for the 3-D epic. In January, it became the biggest box-office hit in history.


He also suggests that films that open right after Comic-Con may get the biggest boost from the publicity. Isn’t it all really about getting buzz going among people who write for internet movie sites, anyway?

§ Tom Spurgeon interviews Ian Boothby, best known for his Bongo Comics work.

Well, the Simpsons audience is so huge that you only get a miniscule portion of them. The books don’t sell particularly well in the Direct Market. But they sell really well on the newsstand. It’s very similar to Archie in that way. If you saw the sales of Archie in comics stores, Archie’s not doing that well. But all these people know Archie, all these people read Archie. That’s the same boat we’re in. If you look at us over here, oh, not doing so well; if you look at us over here, we’re doing very well. Whenever they have a free comic book day the Bongo stuff flies off the shelves. The people bring such a love for The Simpsons to the book, when they know about it, it’s like “Oh — yoink!”

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• Is AsiaOne the Examiner.com of Asia? Because this story from Singapore about a dude who didn’t have enough room for his comics goes into wayyyyyy too much detail — like, he has visited his comics only twice since he put them into storage and that was because he “went there to put more things in.”

WHEN Mr Nazri Aris moved from a five-room flat to a four-roomer, he had to make a difficult decision: find a new home for his huge comics collections or junk them.

“It’s either I find a new home for my collections or throw them out,” said the 36-year-old sales and marketing manager of medical company Lifeline Corporation.


And how many comics were squeezing out the children? 300, according to the article! Come on now, look at that picture. That could go right under the bed, no problem.

§ Sign o’ the times: Nerdlebrities must now team up to get their comic books made.

§ Breaking: Does DC Comics Hate Cats?

§ Apparently all the young men who wold be Spidey are being viewed in a lineup and made to run laps.

I’m told that nobody has won the job yet. It is possible that more candidates will be added. But there is a strong list of actors who screen tested, and most likely the new Peter Parker is among them. I’m told that the candidates whose screen tests were viewed Friday are: Jamie Bell (the Billy Elliot star who wrapped the Kevin Macdonald-directed The Eagle of the Ninth) , Star Trek’s Anton Yelchin, Kick-Ass’s Aaron Johnson, Andrew Garfield (The Social Network), Logan Lerman (Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief) and Alden Ehrenreich (Tetro). Frank Dillane (Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince) and Michael Angerano (Lords of Dogtown) are also in the final list that the studio is working from. I’m not sure if Angarano tested. I’ve heard Dillane decided not to because he is likely headed to attend drama school at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

§ Jog transcribes his 2008 SPX panel with Bryan Lee OMalley:

I think a lot of it came in little bits here and there. I had been thinking of Scott Pilgrim since early 2002, but I didn’t start writing it properly until early 2004. So, little things came here and there, so it’s really hard for me to have a timeline of when ideas showed up, because – originally it was supposed to be one book, and it just grew and grew. The seven evil ex-boyfriends thing came a little later, like – but what was the story going to be before that? I have no idea. As to the whole “it grows into something else,” I feel like there was an element of me just kind of wanting to trick people. I always have had that. And I would deny it. I probably still would deny it if somebody asked me in an interview – but I don’t want to say that, it’s not true.

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§ Canadian cartoonist Connor Willumson talks to Vice Magazine:

“The ligne claire guys are those who ran with the aesthetic that Hergé developed on Tin Tin. It’s a primarily European trend that eventually branched off and mutated with a million other adventure cartoonists like Taiyō Matsumoto or Geof Darrow. It’s a popular look with the contemporary big-name alt cartoonists, but I don’t think the influence is directly European for them. Open up any Heavy Metal magazine and you’ll find a dozen ligne claire guys, but only a handful have the touch. The ones I was absorbing were Moebius and Daniel Torres, and Hergé to a smaller degree. Torres made a great picture book for children called TOM. Tom is a gigantic dinosaur that drives a floating island. He befriends a little boy and makes it big in a superficial manhattan art scene, blah blah. Torres has this great trick for making buildings look enormous by disregarding the standard rules of perspective drawing, which is a tricky feat with clean lines. Eisner did this too.

§ WOLVERINE POOS ON A ROCK.

1 COMMENT

  1. 300 comics? That’s one long comic box. Or two short boxes. You’re right, why can’t they fit under the bed? Perhaps a higher-up at AsiaOne decided they needed comic book news, and this was all they could find.