Links of note

You see at museums they put up signs/plaques that explain things. As a visitor, you really aren’t ever expected to read every plaque, but you scan them and when you see something interesting you normally stop and read it. So it was extremely frustrating to be standing in a room with strong comic history and not know why anything but a handful of comics were important. I mean “Amazing Fantasy” #15 wasn’t even labeled as the first appearance of Spider-Man book. Underneath the comic was just its name and the year it was published.

The 2007 World Cosplay Summit will be held this summer in Nagoya, Japan. This year’s event will feature teams from Brazil, China, Italy, Thailand, Germany, Singapore, France, Mexico, Spain, and Japan. A Brazilian team won the 2006 title.

The final third is really really simple: be interesting. Write about what interests you in a lively way. There are some blogs out there that do the most boring things imaginable, like page-by-page summaries of the latest superhero pamphlets, followed by long-winded reviews that say nothing new. Don’t be like those guys – give the reader a reason to care or respond. Now, that may sound hypocritical coming from someone who’s fond of posting ads, but the response on those is generally pretty good. I think that’s because, hey, we’re all burned out on Hostess and seeing any kind of comics-related material from before our lifetimes is always worth a moment. Hell, sometimes the much-vaunted Chris Sims just posts seemingly-random panels, but these can be downright fantastic as pieces of lowbrow pop-art. Give your readers something they can’t get every week at their shop and you’ll probably get a response. Maybe not immediately, but keep plugging at it and eventually, there’s going to be a reward.

“We wanted to make the city the central character of the film,” says Arias, an L.A. native who has spent 15 of his 39 years in Tokyo. He sculpted his images from the Tokyo neighborhoods he knows and loves but also borrowed from cityscapes in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Colombo, Sri Lanka, to give his metropolis a pan-Asian feel. He likens the clutter to “a big box of toys you just drop on the carpet.”

“The chaos is very Asian: old stuff, new stuff, these amoeba-like cities that are constantly consuming themselves,” Arias says of the setting to his directorial debut. “It’s a parallel universe that is kind of like Japan. But it’s not Japan.” A bit like Arias himself, who speaks fluent Japanese and knows the culture well but has become a bit of a novelty here as the first non-Japanese director green-lighted for a major anime feature.

Using Bogaert’s words as originally written, O’Connor recreates this true and exciting story in a way that both children and adults can appreciate. His bright and often humorous illustrations paint a realistic picture of life in the 1600s wilderness of New York, a time before colonial settlement and the French and Indian Wars depicted in James Fenimore Cooper’s “The Leatherstocking Tales.”

O’Connor adds a few of his own little details to the story that make it more intriguing than if it were just a translation of the journal. This also makes it even more enlightening. Overall, O’Connor makes Bogaert’s journal fun to read with clear text and his awesome illustrations.