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§ A lot has been written about Black Panther. Much more will be, as it made history and inspired countless viewers. But not enough has been written about T’Challa’s purple battle shorts. As in when he must battle for his crown he must also don (ceremonial?) purple battle shorts. I must have seen this still a thousand times, and yet no one has ever analyzed the use of the purple battle shorts. So here it is: they appear to be both stylish and practical. Ruth E. Carter FTW yet again!

§ NICE ART: Speaking of Black Panther, Kris Anka tweeted a print he’ll be selling at C2E2. I predict he shall find no dearth of takers.

https://twitter.com/kristaferanka/status/979084293736620032

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§ NICE ART 2: Next week the oversized trade paperback release of X-MEN: GRAND DESIGN goes on sale, to provide closure for those who never got to have a Marvel Treasury Edition of their own. But the cover for the oversized edition of the sequel X-MEN GRAND DESIGN, SECOND GENESIS was just revealed on Screen Rant. It features creator Ed Piskor’s recoloring of GIANT SIZED X-MEN # 1.

Next week’s X-MEN: GRAND DESIGN trade collects the first two issues of X-MEN: GRAND DESIGN as well as X-MEN #1 from 1963, and selected extras including recolored classic pinups. Piskor + X-Men = magic!

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§ Nice Art 3! So much nice art. Collector Cave, a comics shop located in the Bronx, is doing a full FRONTAL face variant cover that reveals the Red Goblin, the villain in next months Amazing Spider Man #799. The art is by Chris Stevens, and it’s definitely the Red Goblin as you’ve never seen him before! Although no one has seen him yet. But it’s cool. The cover is limited to 3000 copies. It’s available on the Collector Cave website.

§ Lilah Sturges wrote a great piece for Teen Vogue based on her viral tweet about lipstick, transitioning, and the power of Twig lipstick.

I’d worn lipstick before, sneaking it from my mother’s vanity as a kid when no one was around, but never as an adult. And now here was Shannon holding out a tube of something called “Twig” and asking me to try it on. It changed my face. I have great lips; it’s just a fact. My cupid’s bow is pronounced, and my lower lip is big and pouty. When I saw the brownish-pink nude of Twig spread out across them, I caught a glimpse of a woman looking back at me in the mirror, maybe for the first time.

§ Comics folk got written up. Tom King and The Vision were reviewed in The New Yorker

A Marvel comic released in 2015, for a twelve-issue run, “The Vision” won an Eisner Award, the comic world’s highest honor, last year, and was recently published in a deluxe hardbound edition. On the back cover, Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has spent the past couple of years writing the latest print version of “Black Panther”—and who, Marvel has just announced, will also take over “Captain America”—declares, “ ‘The Vision’ is the best comic going right now.” It’s high praise, but perhaps still not high enough. Even in an era when our pop-cultural skies are more jammed with Zeitgeist-powered superheroes than ever before, “The Vision” goes down as one of the great comic-book stories—an examination of the limits built into each of us, a superhero tale not about saving the world but about simply fighting to make sure that you, and your family, fit into it.

§ And the NY Times profiled French cartoonist Yvan Alagbé, whose The Yellow Negro is recently out from New York Review Comics.

The French comic book artist Yvan Alagbé consistently gets the same question about his work: “Why do you always draw black people?” His interrogative reply is twofold: “Have you ever once asked a white person why he only draws white people?” and “Is it not possible for me to draw a black person who is representative of humanity in general?” With his twisted goatee and shaved head, Mr. Alagbé cut a shamanistic figure as he calmly surveyed the teeming hordes at the annual Children’s Books Fair in Montreuil, a suburb just east of Paris. As a co-founder of the comic book publisher Fremok he has been attending the event, where we met at the end of November, every year for the last 17 years.

§ Chris Mautner praises Junji Ito, always a rewarding passtime.

This is one of Ito’s primary strengths: an ability to combine comedy and horror in a manner that does not subvert or destroy the dread, but instead enhances it. A growing number of works, comics and otherwise, have attempted to pivot back and forth along the uneasy border between laughter and fear — think of the “Too Many Cooks” video, or the work of the Wham City Comedy troupe — but Ito has been doing it longer and to much greater effect.

§ There will not be a trade collection of The Skeptics by Tini Howard and Devaki Neogi, Howard tweeted, and not in a happy way.

§ Back when they announced that reconstructed Siegel and Shuster Superman story for Action #1000, it was mentioned that the story has been preserved by Marv Wolfman after an office tour he received as a teen. I knew there was a story, and here it is, but trigger warning, the word “incinerator” is mentioned.

In the case of the lost story for Action #1000, that story was among thousands of other pages being wheeled off to the incinerator. They told us if you want any of it, grab it. So we dove into it like Uncle Scrooge into his money bin and we just grabbed whatever we could. We didn’t even have time to look at what we were grabbing.

Later, the four or five of us on the tour went downstairs and started trading amongst ourselves. I noticed I had almost all of a Superman story and the other guys had the few pages that I was missing. So I traded huge amounts of pages to get what I wanted, so I could have that totally unpublished story.

Try not to think about it too much.

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§ These 25 Hilarious Comics About Life As A Flight Attendant by Kelly Kinkaid (an actual flight attendant who taught herself to draw) are actually pretty funny — at least foy someone who flies as much as I do. I was hanging out with a friend who is a flight attendant the other night and she said everyone in her line of work reads these comics.

§ Mark Stack is writing a history of Zack Snyder’s DC movies, heavily annotated with quotes from various junkets and interviews. There’s a goldmine of narratives to be crafted from this stuff, and this is a smart way to present it.

IMHO: No one makes better looking superhero movies than Zack Snyder. As I’ve been doing my MCU Rewatch, I’ve often noticed that the kind of epic action Snyder tosses  off effortlessly is missing. Even if you don’t like his movies, his visual skill is undeniable.

§ This piece urging more folks to go to the movies by themselves got many likes. I nearly always go to the movies by myself. I keep odd hours and since I live right by a great theater I can just blast out when the mood takes me without all that pesky planning. Also most of my friends have kids so planning outings literally takes months. That some people find solo cinema embarassing or shameful, I just don’t get. I know going it alone eliminates the “sitting in the diner debating the movies afterwards” part of the experience, but a) there are no more diners and b) that’s what the internet is for.

§ I see that Karen Gillan has cancelled her Dubai Comic Con appearance. Whenever I talk to a con showrunner, they always mention that Karen Gillan cancels all the time. It’s like the sun coming up, or something.

§ Uh oh: Hulu passed on the ‘Locke and Key’ pilot, another strike out for the IDW staple. However, it isn’t dead yet as the showrunners really believed in it and wrote several more scripts. It’s being shopped around.

Sources say Freer ultimately did not like the show after Hulu paid to keep the writers room open long after the pilot. Seven scripts have already been completed. Hulu declined comment. That’s when WME came in. The agency teamed with IDW and set up screenings of the pilot for multiple outlets. Co-star Samantha Mathis acknowledged the project was being taken out elsewhere in a recent interview at SXSW, noting Locke and Key was being shopped to “Amazon, Netflix and everyone right now” after Hulu’s pass.

§ On the other hand, Netflix has ALREADY OPTIONED that Frank Miller/King Arthur project that we told you about the other day. THAT WAS FAST. Miller had a meteoric rise in Hollywood after the groundbreaking success of Sin City (memba that???) and 300, but got very cold after that stylized look flamed out on The Spirit. But he’s back!

§ On yet one more hand, one person who won’t be back at Marvel or DC because he’s too busy at Netflix is Mr. Mark Millar!

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Photo: Wikipedia

§ Pedro Pascal has been cast in Wonder Woman 2. Pascal is best known as the jaunty but doomed Oberon Martell in Game of Thrones, but he got his comic book battle bona fides in Kingsmen 2. He should be a fine addition to the cast!

2 COMMENTS

  1. Here’s for going to the movies by oneself.

    I always respond to the scene in BvS when Doomsday has slammed the monument/slab on Clark and the shot is of his red boots sticking out of the rubble. Couldn’t be anyone else; it’s so good !!

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