Writing

Moore is 57 years old today, and it gives us a great excuse to post this illo by Dylan Horrocks of Moore as...

Based on what she came up with for one of her Twitter followers, probably. These are pretty good character designs!

Literary icon, comics admirer, and Bay Area resident Dave Eggers was hired to go to the World Series and draw what he found. The results are no threat to Ben Katchor, but pleasing enough.

Matt Fraction has become the first comics writer to win a prestigious PEN Center literary award for his "Outstanding Body of Work." The awards are presented annually to writers living west of the Mississippi. A panel of judges choose finalists in ten categories: fiction, creative nonfiction, research nonfiction, poetry, children’s literature, translation, journalism, drama, teleplay, and screenplay.

A couple of quotes from Warren Ellis were making the Twitter rounds this weekend. This one, from 2000 (!), is from Ellis' column for CBR, and concerns the fine art of writing a comic book pitch:

When Harvey Pekar died on July 12th, he was revealed in death to be a figure more influential and revered than he would ever...

Two summers later, I am still quite taken with The Dark Knight. I have not encountered an American movie — much less an American movie, designed to be a gigantic blockbuster and based on a hugely popular comic book — that is structured as ingeniously and compellingly as this one. I’ve simply never seen anything like it, and after several viewings it still continues to flabbergast.

I’ve worked on a handful of these types of movies as a screenwriter, and let me tell you: they’re hard. They’re really hard. There are so many issues for the writer to address: the protagonist must be active, the villain’s plot must make sense, there must be a romantic interest, there must be due attention paid to the history of the character and the rules of the genre, they must be both fantastic and grounded at the same time. All these balls must be kept in the air and these concerns must mesh in a straightforward, compelling, swift, action-packed cinematic narrative, consistent in tone and true to its source material. I haven’t seen one — not one — that has managed to get everything in and do everything right. None of the Superman movies do it, none of the previous WB Batman movies do it, none of the Spider-Man movies do it, neither of the Fantastic Four movies do it, and, even after 22 tries, none of the Bond movies do it either. (The Iron Man movies come close — really close.) But The Dark Knight not only does a better job than any other movie based on its source material — and by that I mean "superhero comics" — it does it with a radically ambitious screenplay that challenges any number of conventions and brings a new, added weight to its subject.

With the release of UNEARTHING, a spoken word/music/photograph multimedia project, Northampton legend Alan Moore has done a few interviews which are just as entertaining as the man's work. At the Irish Times, he waxes lyrical about many things, and reaffirms his distaste for the current comics scene:

While folks like Mark Millar, Mike Mignola, and Robert Kirkman have been deservedly marked by the success of their creations in Hollywood, one hard-working...

While the ever-fashionable, erudite, and hobnobbing Beatrix navigates the nerd herd of Comic-Con, I continue Watchtower duty her at stately Beat Manor, munching on...

It would have pleased Harvey Pekar, I think, that his passing yesterday was noted in every media outlet from the New Yorker to EW, and not just because they made a movie about him, but as a literary figure of worth and stature. Harvey's life's work was in showing that the ordinary was important, and a working class existence was not a prison but a journey through the profound and beautiful that anyone could experience if they took the time. He found that beauty in simple, quotidian things and experiences that others might have found trivial or mundane, but in the end his message was that what else is there? Life as it is lived is the most precious gift of all.

The Cleveland Plains Dealer is reporting that underground comics legend Harvey Pekar died last night. Pekar's wife, Joyce Brabner found him dead at about 1 am. Pekar had battled lymphoma previously, as chronicled in Our Cancer Year, but the cause of death is awaiting an autopsy. Pekar was best known as author of American Splendor, an autobiographical comic that adapted Pekar's lowly life as a filing clerk at the Cleveland VA into a journey of humor, drama and insight as memorable as any fictional hero, hiring artist friends such as R. Crumb, Gary Dumm, Frank Stack and others to illustrate his stories. American Splendor was an early self-publishing success story of sorts -- while its acclaim gained Pekar enough notoriety for him to become a semi-regular on the David Letterman Show (until erratic on-air behavior got him banned) he still had to work at the VA to rely on getting a pension and continuing to make a living -- indie comics was not a cash cow.