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§ Nice Art: Sam Wolfe Connelly’s cover for Rogue #2, via Big Bang

§ Hoo boy where to begin. Despite my hopeful thought that Netflix might still need recognizable IP, as reported last week, they already gutted their animation development slate, as reported in a “bloodbath” type story from The Wrap:

Phil Rynda, whose official title is Netflix’s Director of Creative Leadership and Development for Original Animation, was let go this week, along with several of his staff, TheWrap can exclusively report and Netflix has confirmed.

According to several creators who spoke to TheWrap, the Kids & Family space at Netflix Animation has changed. Series that benefited from great word-of-mouth and critical praise aren’t being renewed and several high-profile projects have been unceremoniously canceled, including the long-delayed adaptation of Jeff Smith’s beloved comic book series “Bone” (first announced back in 2019).

The cancellation of the long simmering Bone adaptation was of course met with the most outcry – including a brilliant cartoon from creator Jeff Smith himself:

SlashFilm has an excellent summary of the long and tangled history at attempts to adapt Bone, which includes an appearance by Britney Spears in the Nickelodeon era.

Later, after the film rights had lapsed and reverted back to Smith, Warner Bros. picked up the ball in 2008 to run with it. Like the George Lucas and Peter Jackson sagas that inspired Smith for the big screen version of his story, WB planned to make a trilogy of epic computer-animated “Bone” movies. After a few scripts were rejected, Patrick Sean Smith, the creator of ABC Family (now Freeform) series “Greek,” boarded the project as a writer in 2012, along with “My Best Friend’s Wedding” filmmaker P.J. Hogan as the director. The team went back to the drawing board in 2016 when screenwriter Adam Kline teamed with “Kung Fu Panda” director Mark Osborne to give the project one more good college try for Warner Animation Group before it faded into the ether once again.

If you scroll through some of the quote tweets of Smith’s tweet you’ll get a lot of expert analysis including this from Ruben Bolling:

Seems to me Bone is by far the most demonstrably and enduringly popular IP that hasn’t yet been adapted for film/tv (except maybe Calvin & Hobbes, which isn’t for sale).

I’ll put on my hopeful hat once more and state that the Big Cow IP Race isn’t over yet, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see someone offer up another football to Smith. There are occasional happy outcomes with these types of cancellations – look at Nimona – although that got picked up by (shudder) Netflix, so hope it’s still a happy ending.

While The Fall of Netflix has sent Hollywood and media itself into a total tizzy, when the dust clears I’ll stand by the belief that content will still be king.

§ But fear not, Smith is still busy with his “real job” of making comics, with a second Tuki volume at the printer and the first book in its third printing. 

R. Kikuo Johnson's No One Else - BOMB Magazine

§ R. Kikuo Johnson’s No One Else won the LA Times Book Prize for best graphic novel. The other finalists were

  • Heaven No Hell by Michael DeForge
  • The Waiting by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim Translated by Janet Hong
  • Shadow Life by Hiromi Goto & Ann Xu (Illustrator)
  • Stone Fruit by Lee Lai

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§ Speaking of awards, this is super late, but Lisa Hanawalt won a Writer’s Guild Award for an episode of Tuca and Bertie and that is super cool!

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§ Former Vertigo and Black Crown editor Shelly Bond is teaching a course on editing comics, and I can’t imagine that you won’t learn an incredible amount from it. Sign up here.

§ Brooklyn’s 440 Gallery is holding a juried show of sequential art, with judges Dean Haspiel and Whitney Matheson. Apply here.

440 Gallery announces a Call for Artists for the 2022 Annual Theme Show Sequential Synergy: The Art of Comics. Artwork selected for exhibition for the show will be on display at our Brooklyn gallery space July 9 – July 29, 2022. Artists at all levels of professionalism and experience are invited to submit work in all mediums.

Sequential Synergy: The Art of Comics celebrates the diverse ways comics artists, aka cartoonists, utilize the real estate of the blank page. For over a century, artists have been creating comics to tell stories about caped crusaders, historical figures, themselves or something else entirely. Sequential Synergy will explore the forms that comics can be and how they affect us; we will discover that cartoonists are not merely visual artists, but are writers, designers, directors, and most of all, acute observers of human behavior.

Acceptable submissions include, but are not limited to the following types of images: cover art, splash pages, full pages of sequential art. The submitted images may be excerpted from a larger work.

 

§ Forbes has released its survey of the world’s billionaires, and Marvel’s Ike Perlmiutter is only the 576th richest person in America, with a net worth of $4.8 billions. That’s down a bit from 2021 – maybe he spent it on lawyers.

§ Julie Doucet released her first graphic novel in decades last week, and got a New York Times profile out of it. And here’s The Beat’s review of Time Zone J.

The Montreal-based comics artist Julie Doucet began self-publishing her zine, Dirty Plotte, in 1987. Three years later, it became the foundation stone of the influential Canadian comics publisher Drawn & Quarterly. With its lack of inhibition and disregard for pat categorization, Plotte — the title is Québécois slang for vagina — became a source of inspiration for other comics makers. “She has this sort of freedom in her work, writing about her experiences and things that seemed taboo,” said the artist and cartoonist Jessica Campbell. “Rave,” Campbell’s queer coming-of-age comic, was partly made possible by the permission she found in Doucet’s illustrations.

§ Also in the Times, Liana Finck discussed her new take on Genesis, Let There be Light, on their book podcast.

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§ David Roach wrote a marvelous obituary for artist Garry Leach for TCJ:

It is one of the vagaries of an artistic calling that a person’s entire career can come to be defined by a few key works, often created in their 20s or 30s, which for whatever reason somehow resonated with their audience. This has certainly been true of Garry Leach, who passed away in March this year. His early work on Marvelman with Alan Moore in 1982 remains the strip he is best remembered for, particularly outside the UK. This is perhaps not entirely surprising however, because few artists can have had such a varied, obscure and at times frustrating career as Garry.

The piece includes many breathtaking pieces of Leach’s art such as the above.

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§ One of the little noted aspects of the Zestworld exercise is that we are now getting the memoirs of the maestro, Jimmy Palmiotti. And this could be a a bigger blockbuster than Grant Morrison. Such as this memory of his very early work for something called Eternity Comics.

Anyway, I pull up to this residential house in a nice Italian neighborhood and in the window of the house are what looks like a row of severed heads- which I later found out were all rubber masks filled with newspaper. The neighborhood grandma’s must have shit themselves when walking by that place. A ring of the bell and I am greeted by Brian and shown around the place. From the outside, you would never expect that inside were desks, drawing tables, empty L&B garden pizza boxes, a lot of soda and beer and tons of very used comics. You guessed it, the place was housing a ton of comic artists and they were working all over the house. I was instantly smitten.

§ Wonder Harbour, a much loved comics shop in Edmonton was recently destroyed by arson, and a fundraiser is under way. The arsonist has yet to be apprehended. 

Dear friends, Our beloved WonderHarbour has been destroyed by an arson. They spread gasoline throughout the store, and lit a fire that consumed every thing. There is nothing left. Thankfully, no one was hurt and Rufus is in the good hands of the people at the Edmonton Reptile Rescue. Thank you for looking after our little guy. The fire was contained in the building and it looks like the building will survive, but all the hard work you’ve seen the WonderHarbor team put into building Canada’s largest comic store has been lost. We are devastated. This will be a long road and any help is appreciated. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you for your outpouring of support and love.

§ Bill Kartalopoulos wrote a lengthy recap of hie trip of Angoulême 2022 with lots of pictures and memories.

When I arrived in Angoulême on Thursday the 17th, the Festival was already well underway. The biggest news already circulating was that Julie Doucet had won the Festival’s Grand Prix award, announced Wednesday night at the Hôtel de Ville. This year’s finalists were already notable as a group of three women, including Catherine Meurisse and Penelope Bagieu, and Doucet was only the third woman to have ever won the Grand Prix. Doucet’s win was, to me, a happy surprise, since the other finalists were–until now–more widely known within French culture. The prize came on the heels of L’Association’s publication of the Dirty Plotte collection Maxiplotte, an elegant single volume edited and designed by L’Asso co-founder Jean-Christophe Menu. Doucet was present at the Festival and seemed, every time I crossed her path, both overwhelmed and delighted. I’m already looking forward to next year’s retrospective exhibit.

§ A statue of an athlete looked more like Robert Patrick as the Terminator, and hilary ensued.  Because by God. we need more hilarity. 

 

 

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