Webcomic Creators and Nerd Rapper UNITE
In as unstable job market as we have today, three men have decided to give their art their full time attention, their all. Writer and artist of Let's Be Friends Again!, Curt Franklin and Chris Haley respectively started their witty webcomic on the print comic world and what it means to really be friends in 2008. Eugene Ahn aka nerd rapper Adam WarRock quit his career as an attorney in 2010 in order to follow his heart and let his mouth fly. Today they announced the joining of their two ventures into LBFA!, Inc.
Preview TwoMorrows' Jeff Smith volume
TwoMorrows has been publishing its series of artists spotlights, Modern Masters, for some time, and they're up to volume #25 and Jeff Smith by...
Congressman John Lewis to pen graphic novel
Even our congressmen are getting bitten by the graphic novel bug, as Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) is signed with Top Shelf to co-write...
Nominations for the Eagle Awards open
Nominations have opened for the 2011 Eagle Awards. You have until March 7th to nominate writers, artists, comics, and the like. Then on March 14th the top 5 nominees in each category will be named, and the real voting begins. The awards will be handed out May 27th at the MCM London convention.
Celebrate Black History month at 4th Letter
David Brothers is blogging Black History Month, spotlighting great cartoonists George Herriman and Jackie Ormes, thus far.
EXCLUSIVE: Preview of Miss Fury from the Library of American Comics
Tarpé Mills is a name well known to comics historians, not only as one of the best of the female cartoonists of the war years, but as the creator and artist of Miss Fury, one of the first successful superheroine characters, which ran for nearly a decade as a sunday newspaper strip. It was a lively blend of outre characters, adventure and naughtiness. This April Dean Mullaney's Library of American Comics is reprinting the best of the strips in a deluxe volume complete with an introduction by comics historian Trina Robbins. Mullaney provided a desception of the volume and this preview for our Anniversary week:
Career Week: The Strange Case of Black Lightning
While we're spotlighting creators issues and outlooks here at Anniversary Week at The Beat, here's an oldie but a goodie: The (Sad) Saga of Black Lightning’s Creation by Daniel Best which presents documents and drawings from writer Tony Isabella and artist Trevor von Eeden, the team known to have created Black Lightning's first appearance. There's some dispute over how the two should be credited -- Isabella claims sole creative credit due to having come up with the character all on his own and described the costume and so on -- but von Eeden has drawings but...we'll we won't get into that here. von Eeden doesn't want the creator's credit--or the royalties that come with it -- but has his own opinions. But that's not what we're here to talk about today. As is well known, Isabella had the foresight to keep a piece of the character he had created independently of DC editorial -- a move he thinks backfired…
Two stories behind the story: JG Jones and J. Michael Straczynski
A couple of interviews out now clarify controversial comics news stories of the past and more recent past; both are a reminder that what you read on CBR or Newsarama is rarely the whole truth -- and that's it's not always our business to know the whole truth.
New York Comic Con goes to four days
ReedPop has just announced that this year's New York Comic-Con is expanding to four days. The show will run from October 13-16, with Thursday a day for academic programming, beginning at noon, and a "Preview Night" running from 4-7. Only 10,000 tickets will be sold for all four days -- nearly 100,000 people attended the 2010 show, according to show runner Lance Fensterman.
Grassroots creators support campaign begins
No wonder that creators are getting a little more vocal about the importance of creator-owned material. Eric Powell's controversial video got things going, but itself was a response to a week-long tweet storm by writer Steve Niles who blogged recently What’s all this Creator-Owned Talk?
Modern children at the modern newsstand
If there's one thing comics bloggers love, it's those old B&W photos from Life Magazine showing kids reading comics--proof of a simpler time when children read things, bananas were a vegetable, and your real father dropped off a bottle of milk at your mom's house every day. Well, recently on the LA Times Southern California Moments feature of reader-submitted photos we came across what looks to be a contemporary example of the genre:
