200810210247§ io9 looks at Superman’s habit of litigating against superheroes he thought were too much like him. There are more than you thought!

Superman’s powers include super-strength, super-breath… and super-lawyers? The iconic DC Comics character has been known to go after plenty of other strongmen in court, crushing any characters with more than a passing similarity. The most famous super-litigation was the 1951 case where the Man Of Steel killed Captain Marvel, the Superman-esque character who gets his powers from saying “Shazam!” But the world’s most litigious hero has gone after plenty of other peers, and here’s our history of super-lawsuits.

§ Tom Spurgeon reports that an interview with Lucy Knisley has been taken down due to complaints from her publisher:

Simon and Schuster representatives wrote CR Monday evening claiming that the number of images used in the publication of this interview (eight, including cover) Sunday morning surpassed the number of images they allow anyone to use for free. CR’s stance is that both the number of images and the way they were utilized as distinct, individual, non-consecutive illustrations in the body of text making up a lengthy interview constitute fair and reasonable use.

It was my choice to take it down in the meantime; it was not requested that I do so. If the folks at Simon and Schuster and I can work something out, we’ll restore the interview. I’m sorry for any inconvenience. Please don’t let this keep you from buying Lucy Knisley’s fine book, French Milk.


§ Hervé St-Louis suggests that Twitter is a new platform for webcomics promotion:

It’s not longer sufficient, even to have a blog. The latest chic in the comic book, and new media-creating field, is having a Web comics published on your own blog and commenting about it on Twitter, exchanging data feeds that other subscribers can add to their favourite Web 2.0 communities. If most of the action you get is still on Facebook, then, you’re already out with the crowd! Seriously, combining Twitter with your Web comic is the best way of letting the world know about it. When I look at both process, they just complement each other! Web comics are not perennial. The creator has to update pages frequently, otherwise his audience will quickly lose interest. Ditto Twitter.


Sounds about right for the average person’s attention span these days.

§ Chip Zdarsky presents My Marvel Comics Comic Ideas Journal! — NSFW!

§ Brian Heater wraps up a presents part three of a multi-part interview with Art Spiegelman:

[A]ter it was finished, all the world wanted from me was a fucking Maus movie or Maus 3. I had to tell people that the war ended and my father died, and that’s that. On the other hand, I didn’t feel that my next move should be anywhere in that terrain. First of all, I certainly didn’t want to be the Elie Wiesel of comic books. And I like to be a moving target. I think you’d be hard-pressed—though I can explain it perfectly—to find out what Jack and the Box and Breakdowns have in common. They don’t look the same, they feel rather different, and I’m maybe one step too close to it to know if you could, without my name on it, recognize that they were both from me. But I don’t necessarily try to find that one thing. If anything, I’m more likely to do something other. For example, when I finished Maus, the next book I did was The Wild Party [grabs the book].

1 COMMENT

  1. Be careful with the Twitter advice, though: most Twitter users HATE people who only get on to promote new blog posts. (Especially when you factor in the Twitter users who send/receive those messages via SMS-enabled cell phones. Yes, you can do that.) If you ONLY use Twitter to promote new content elsewhere, you’re going to find many people don’t want to follow you.

    However, there are ways to work Twitter and your webcomic in a sort of symbiotic relationship; for instance, the folks behind the webcomic nemu-nemu have Twitter accounts for Nemu and Anpan, two of the characters in their webcomic. The “tweets” don’t even seem to be all that related to the recent happenings in the webcomic, but when done well it works to get readers more personally invested in the characters, and thus the stories.

  2. Heidi, I’ve been playing around with the idea of going 24/7 every 20 minutes with limited art starting in 2009. I wanted to get a tiny sense of what that was like.

  3. “If you ONLY use Twitter to promote new content elsewhere, you’re going to find many people don’t want to follow you.”

    Indeed, twitter is indeed for punchy short content not as a billboard just to say “hey go here instead”.

  4. Oh. Well, that’s nice of you to help me out with it. Basically, I would dick around with the design a lot before I settled on anything. The linkamids haven’t even been around for half the blog’s life.

    I just wanted to know how long it would take to do a day where it’s spread out like that as opposed to concentrated, and it seemed like a dead enough day to try it.

  5. If Art were to do a Maus 3 – he could maybe touch briefly on the Cold War era – by maybe utilizing carnival dancing bears to substitute for the KGB.

    ~

    Coat

  6. S&S needs to figure out how to publish comics. Their subrights department — the same people who, I am sure, hassled Tom — wouldn’t let Vulture run an excerpt of FRENCH MILK, because we wanted to run it a few weeks before pub, and we don’t pay. They’re the only publisher who’s ever turned us down for an excerpt — and this was with the book’s editor pushing to make it happen.