Kibbles ‘n’ Bits 12//17: Nobel Prize winner is turning to comics

§ Nice Art: Tove Jansson, the Finnish creator of the Moomins, is really one of the all time greats. D&Q has a new edition of Jansson’s Moomin and the Brigands out this week:

As winter starts to creep up on us and we find the sunlight slowly slipping from our grasp…
Forget about it! Because you can grab yourself a hot-hot-hot off the press Moomin comic out TODAY! In this very first Moomin comic strip by Tove Jansson, you’ll find some of the most epic cartooning from the series. Ghosts! Monsters! Brigands! 

And some more Jansson to provide much needed beauty in these dark times.

§ Kazuo Ishiguro is this wear Nobel Laureate. Raise your hand if you knew that. Ishiguro-sensei (he wrote Remains of the Day) is 62 but far from done with trying new things. According to this report, he wants to get in on this very hot comics things everyone is talking about:

Kazuo Ishiguro told reporters in Sweden on Wednesday that he is thinking of writing a comic series because he is fascinated by this way of telling stories. He said he has loved the popular Japanese manga comic tradition since his childhood, and that storytelling technique it uses is close to the way he writes fiction. He adds he is also inspired by the superhero comics that came out of the United States in the 1930s. He says the eastern and western forms have “now married” in an exciting way. “I think all storytelling forms need to be explored,” he said.

According to the NY Times,arrowverse his work deals with “the fallibility of memory, mortality and the porous nature of time.” So these will be some heavy duty comics. Bring it on!

§ Best ofs: Paste Magazine offers The 25 Best Comic Books of 2017 and they are all very good. It was a good year after all.

§ Black Girl Nerds looks at the Arrowverse Crossover and had some issues.

All of our faves are problematic. All of them. From Game of Thrones with its brown folks can only be slaves narrative to the Arrow/Supergirl/Flash/Legends crossover event in which Nazis were utilized as a narrative plot point; there’s no denying that many of the series that we enjoy are incredibly tone deaf and obtuse at times.

 

§ Rosie Knight presents 12 LGBTQ comics and its a great list of webcomics, and indies. The occasion was the publication of Snagglepuss, so that happened.

§ Vanity Fair has run a long interview with Kevin Feige, which makes him sound like a fellow who puts his pants on two legs at a time. But the guy paidhis dues, as his account of his time as Lauren Shuler Donner shows:

I interned there a long time, from ’94 to being hired officially the beginning of ’96. In the fall of ’95, I had one more semester of school to get enough credits to graduate and they hired me as a P.A. So I would go to school, and then go in there and work and got paid. I very much liked the notion of having a job before I graduated. That job was walking dogs and getting lunches and washing cars, but it was a job in the film business. I ended up not walking in my graduation ceremony because I was working, which I thought was a good excuse not to go.

Every interview with Feige leads to headlines, but my big one from this is that both he and Scarlet Johansson are members of Club 33, the exclusive spot in Disneyland where you can drink alcohol.

Scarlett Johansson: Kevin and I are both huge Disney buffs. We’re both Club 33 members. When I found that out about him, and seeing the familiar excitement and inner light that comes from a huge Disney fan speaking about how much they love the whole magical world of Disney, that really speaks a lot to who he is: he’s a kid at heart, in a way. When this studio was sold to Disney, I was like “YES!”

 

§ It was Fred van Lente Day at CBR, always a joyous occasion, and it’s heartening to see the NüLook CBR has not abandoned all of its traditions. Here’s a preview of the upcoming Action Presidents #1. Unrelated, but the reach of Van Lente Day even reached France, where he was interviewed en Francais.. Truly, something to bring the world together in peace and harmony.

§ A site offered a list of the top ten comic book movies OF 2017. There were so many comic book movies in 2017. The top three were actually very very good.

§ And Comicbook.com listed the 10 Worst Comic Book Movie Villains but left out the worst of all: Oscar Isaac’s Apocapylse. YOU MADE OSCAR ISAAC UGLY, HOW COULD YOU??!!??

§ The San Diego Convention Center sent out its annual report for the fiscal year ending June 30, and for some the big news is that events at the center had a $1.1 billion economic impact on the region, including 844,382 hotel nights, a record, and $673.9 million in direct spending by attendees.

For others the most notable faction is that the President and CEO of the SDCC is named Clifford “Rip” Rippetoe.

If you’re wondering, while Comic-Con is the biggest single event, the kidney doctors still spend more:

The 21 medical-related events at the center accounted for 22 percent of attendance and nearly half of the economic impact, according to the report.
Center officials said the average convention delegate spent $377 on lodging, $126 on meals, $68 shopping and $39 on admission to area attractions.

§ Ryan Reynolds is going to play Pikachu. Specifically, Detective Pikachu. They are making a Detective Pikachu motion capture movie. The story involves a sassy reporter, so that’s exciting.

I repeat: Ryan Reynolds is Pikachu.

§ If you likes charts and graphs, this look at The Gender Balance of The New York Times Best Seller List is utterly chart-tastic. As you may guess, female authors were a very distinct minority until the 90s, when the kind of genre fiction women wrote got bigger, and women authors domination of literary fiction took hold. But:

The data seems to say that, today, books by women are as valuable to the book-buying public as books by men. So why doesn’t the publishing industry seem to recognize this? Like many institutions, the publishing industry has long been accused of gender bias. Every year, the VIDA Count organization goes through literary journalism outlets and tallies the genders of the writers whose works are featured and reviewed in those outlets. According to their most recent study, in 2015 books by women made up less than 20% of books reviewed in the New York Review of Books, 30% in Harper’s, 29% in the Atlantic, and 22% in the London Review of Books. A lot of the bias in reviews reflects a bias in publishing.

A woman’s work is never equal, even when people love it.