Kibbles ‘n’ Bits 7/14/16: Wear a butt on your chest

§ Nice art: Katie Skelly has made a t-shirt with her take on everyone’s all time favorite Spider-Woman image ever. So now instead of being awful, it’s cute as the dickens. Thus we evolve.

https://twitter.com/nurse_nurse/status/752558097864941568

§ I’ve long wondered if someone would dare put on a DIFFERENT comic con in July and the Garden State Comic Fest ran last weekend in Morristown, and it looks like every had a swell time, unbothered by other pressing matters. About 6-7,000 attendees were expected.

§ I compared Jillian Holtzmann, Kate McKinnon’s breakout character in Ghostbusters, to Hopey Glass, and this will give you some idea why. When Comic Books Ruled the Earth: Thirty Years of Hopey Glass, Super Punk Badass! (Link via Tom Spurgeon.)

§ A warm account of a comics shop, in this case Legends Comics & Coffee by Chase Magnett:
Y

ou walk into the squat brick building on Farnam Street. Cars rush by other small businesses outside, local staples like the German bakery Gerda’s and chic bistro J. Coco. It is consistently cool inside, especially during a humid Nebraska summer. The floors are wood and the walls are lined with custom crafted steel shelves and ornamentation. It is a minimalist design made to emphasize their products above all else.
The place you’ve come to is Omaha’s Legend Comics & Coffee. It is a proudly presented coffee shop. It is a place that gathers creators of all sorts to help one another with their skills. It is a supporter of the Make-A-Wish Foundation. It is an award-winning storefront. It is a beautiful, historic location in Nebraska’s largest city.
It is all of these things. But most importantly, to many Omahans, it is home.

§ I just linked to Comics Bulletin and I keep meaning to mention how they just hired a bunch of some of our finest young comics journalists to run things there, including Christian Hoffer, J.A. Micheline, Chase Magnett, Daniel Elkin and new editor in chief Mark Stack. So there’s life in that there comics internet after all! I apologize for not having all the titles, but they were announced in a series of tweets that got eaten by a browser crash and then swept away by the winds of time. At any rate, Stack will be on the comics journalism panel at SDCC on Thursday and I’m sure he’ll reveal all there. Good luck, everyone!

§ A. David Lewis wrote to tell me about a short comic he made for the online journal GEEKED that deals with”the Muslim superhero Kismet and thoughts on LGBTQ issues coming out of Orlando.”

§ Vanessa Davis is back! Her smart, touching watercolor comics have been MIA for a while so it’s good to see her back in the pages of nothing less than the Paris Review. Her first comic is a sad one though. dealing with the death of Geneviève Castrée Elverum.

§ Anders Nilsen and Diana Obomsawinalso remember Castree. Nilsen:

Geneviève was extraordinarily productive. The list of small and large books and records (and books-and-records) she made is much longer than her reputation might imply. Not to mention her paintings and the art shows and music festivals she organized. And the jam she made. She should have been better known as an artist. She was mostly a self-publisher and willfully flouted the boundaries between her chosen fields. Her books were records and vice versa – in a way that probably would have confused many retailers in both worlds even if they had come across them. But I think it delighted her more to give her books and records away as gifts than to go out of her way to solicit them for review or track down stores to sell them to. Self-publishing was a political choice at least in part, but it seemed to me that it was simply in her nature, as well. As a giver of gifts. Which is not to say a particularly small royalty check was any less painful for her than any of the rest of us.

 

§ A lot of people were linking to this What Does “Creator Owned” Mean? essay:

What does it mean when a publisher or distributor says that the things they sell are “creator owned”? It’s a great question, but (surprise!) it doesn’t have a simple or straightforward answer.  That’s because “creator owned” isn’t a legal term. There isn’t a legal definition of what the phrase means, and because there isn’t a legal definition, its definition can differ from contract to contract.

 

§ The Walking Dead will be back in a few months and someone will be D-E-A-D. Almost certainly Daryl. And here’s the first promo image of season 7 with Negan flourishing a bat – thank God the bat is not encrusted with brains, because that would be tacky.

§ An excellent interview with artist Sarah Horrocks:

To me, drawing almost became a critical process for learning how to see. It also really increases photo-memory, so it’s worth learning. But yeah. I have no innate talent for drawing. Everything I have done was earned through hours and hours and hours of f*ing up. That’s still true today. I have a gap month between when I’m drawing the next Leopard, and I’m spending the whole month with Jose Munoz and Alberto Breccia comics. Just redrawing my favorite panels and pages, trying to tighten my eye, and figure out how to get my current style to evolve to where it needs to be for the book after The Leopard.