Culture

Mark Waid has reconstructed his controversial Harvey night speech and made what he was getting at much clearer:

“Yes, Professor Waid, you hippie freak, sharing is all well and good, but how does that pay my bills?”

Daniel Raeburn has made the entire four-issue run of his 1997-2002 fanzine The Imp available for PDF download. Single topic issues on Dan Clowes, Jack Chick, Chris Ware and Mexican historietas generally defined the direction of all future scholarship on such topics and this is one of the finest and most influential bits of comics scholarship/criticism of the last 20 years. So go download for your iPad or whatever.

In his “Emanata” column at Techland, Douglas Wolk looks at the promotional efforts for an upcoming Marvel story by Jonathan Hickman, singling out Fantastic Four as a series that particularly finds itself in the shadow of its creators:

“As Lee and Kirby established the FF, their premises are inflexible: they're a family. They're explorers. They have adventures together. […] If you stick to those axioms, you're not just making a Fantastic Four story, you're making one in the Lee/Kirby tradition […]. If you ignore any of those axioms, then it's not really the Fantastic Four any more, and the question becomes how, and how quickly, it's going to get back to being the ‘real’ Fantastic Four.”

The great fantasist/cartoonist Jim Woodring has only raised 49 percent of the $4500 he needs to construct a Giant Steel Dip Pen and Penholder which he will use to demonstrate art, cure cancer, open a portal to Vhoori, save Social Security and make kittens fly out of rainbows. In this dimension, Woodring's plans for the giant pen are equally noble:

Wow, shit gets very, very personal in this installment.

If you were following our live tweets of the Harveys last night, (and those from ComixMix and JahFurry) you saw portions of Mark Waid's keynote speech transcribed. While claiming it was a "vodka-fueled rant," Waid delivered a heartfelt, if off-the-cuff, talk on the importance of the idea and the supremacy of comics as a medium of ideas. He started off with remarks on the history of copyright, stating it was a means to allow ideas to go into the public domain where they could remain powerful. "No one would say we'd be better off if Shakespeare plays weren't allowed to be read and performed in high schools," he used as an example. While not advocating piracy, his main argument seemed to be that it's already done, the genie is out of the bottle, and struggling to keep ideas protected isn't as important as finding a way to profit from those ideas.

We're at the Harvey Awards banquet with Ramona Fradon, Michael Golden, and many other stars. We're live tweeting the winners at www.twitter.com/comixace. Please follow...

Although the bus sped off before we could get a good picture, this ad for HSBC Bank had a pretty snappy blurb that went something like "Japanese adults buy more comic books than American children do" with a picture of a Sumo wrestler reading a manga. VERY TRUE.

Apparently some politician in Baltimore is using kids reading comic books as the result of a lack of teachers and money for education. Perhaps...

One more Baltimore link before we hit the road -- AdHouse (#1904) will make Paul Pope fans happy by bringing the limited edition THB...

Via Hairy Green Eyeball II:

These memes are strong today