§ A white, straight man named Grant Morrison said something that wasn’t stupid. I think.

Q: I love that the first issue of “The Multiversity” is full of people of color, from black superheroes and politicians to aboriginal gods and gay geeks. Why did you do this, and does it have anything to do with the super-white superheroes who have made the jump from comics to film and TV?

A: To be honest, it happened quite naturally and wasn’t something I did consciously. A couple of characters were ones I’d created for “Final Crisis” and others were new, but all of them were introduced to play specific roles in the story and it wasn’t until I’d finished writing the first issue that I realized my team of superpowerful, multiversal justice champions didn’t include a single straight white man.

I live in a world defined by a diversity of skin color, sexual orientation and opinion. I think it’s important to reflect the influence of that world in my “art.” An accident of birth has made me what I am — a middle-aged and obviously decaying white dude from the west of Scotland — so I’d never presume to elect myself a spokesperson for any minority or group. I’m not trying to make political points here but I do feel it’s important to reflect a world in the comic books that more closely approximates the world in which I find myself living. And basically, I identify with everyone who ever felt like an outsider.

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§ Steve Ditko is alive and still making comics…and Kickstarting them. Long time Ditko collaborator Robin Snyder is the enabler here. hey have two 22 page books in the works, #22 and Tales of the Mysterious Traveler. The latter is making his first appearance in 30 years.  

§ Speaking of long waits, the second issue of Nate Simpson’s Nonplayer has been finished! It’s been three and a half years since the first issue appeared from Image Comics. Back in 2011, Nonplayer was a beautifully illustrated comic that fit in squarely with the neo-Mobius movement that was taking place. Now Image is awash with gorgeous books, and it doesn’t stand out quite as much. Simpson spent the last three years on his day job in video games recovering from a bike accident and staying up every night until 4 am drawing one precious line a night.

§ The Comics Reporter offers many picks for books that people enjoyed in 2014.

§ Johanna Draper Carlson only blogs once a week now, but she plays catch up looking at some misdirections in comics marketing:

The problem is that so many readers are looking at exactly the same ordering material as the retailers are. Retailers like it when their customers preorder, since that reduces their uncertainty. But to have them do that, they give them the Previews catalog (or an equivalent). There isn’t a retailer-only information channel, so retailers are often left unaware of why a publisher thinks a particular comic will be a big seller if that turns on a plot event (like a death) that the publisher doesn’t want to reveal early. The publisher can’t tell their actual customer because there’s no way to keep the information from going wide to the public. That’s been an issue so long as the direct market has been around. But that’s not what I want to talk about here. (Long digression, huh?) What I want to point out is three examples of material where the publisher can and should have given retailers information that would definitely affect their ordering patterns, but chose not to.

§ Rob Kirby rounds up the rop 10 mini comics of 2014 but throws in many other picks.


§ And going back to the past, Retailer Joe Field passed along this video from 1988 of an interview with the late Marvel editor Mark Gruenwald from WonderCon of that year.

§ SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS. In a recent Marvel comic it was revealed that the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver are no longer related to a character from another studio. Brett White points out that all this synergy is beginning to break down the things we love most about Marvel.

3 COMMENTS

  1. For what it’s worth, the Quicksilver/Scarlet Witch thing is probably just an ongoing storyline cooked up for the characters during a Marvel writers summit.

    The comics changing the characters’ parentage, or changing them from mutant to Inhuman for that matter, would have no effect on contracts and licensing signed years ago that lets Fox use them in X-men films.

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