Kibbles ‘n’ Bits — 5/21/10

§ Fleen reports that T-shirt mogul Todd Goldman may have ripped off Jess Fink again. Several of the offending images have been taken offline, so it’s hard to judge.

§ Stirrings of life at the much delayed Spider-Man musical! Director Julie Taymor spoke out about the insane costs of the show — it will take four years of sellouts just to break even — but she at least acknowledged some of the setbacks:

Asked if “Spider-Man” needed to have the kind of box office popularity as “The Lion King” to succeed commercially on Broadway, Ms. Taymor said: “Yes, financially, of course it does, but I’m aware of that, that’s my responsibility as an artist. I’m not doing this for a small audience; I’m doing it for a world audience.”

Taymor was honored with a lifetime achievement award by the New Dramatists organization. And as a super-bonus, future Spider-Man Reeve Carney SANG one of the Bono-Edge penned songs from the show, and it contained the lyrics “You can fly too high and get too close to the sun/See how a boy falls from the sky.” Of course it did!

§ For his part, Carney was similarly sanguine on the odds that he’ll some day spin a web big enough to go all the way to the stage door, even though fellow cast mates Evan Rachel Woods and Alan Cumming have both had to drop out due to endless delays:

“No joke — right after this, I’m going to get fitted for my Spider-Man suit,” he told MTV News. “As soon as I put this microphone down… This is actually not a joke.”

§ Jesse Hamm has another post on the art of the late Frank Frazetta

Foster favored the complex, balanced compositions and accurate drawing of 19th century masters, and unlike most of his fellow cartoonists, he used shadows to define forms, rather than “wire-framing” their structures with lines. This gave his work a solidity and a sun-baked glow that Frazetta, raised on similar methods, could emulate more easily than others his age.

§ Brian Heater interviews Jonathan Rosenberg who recently shocked the online webcomics world by announcing he was putting his Goats webcomic on hiatus due to the ongoing struggle to make money:

You mentioned bringing Goats to an end in the post. You almost mentioned, abstractly, a new plan that you were working on. Is the plan essentially the creation of the new strip?

Yeah, that’s part of it. There are other things I’m doing at the moment—I’m looking into some other creative projects that I’ve had some opportunities to possibly do. but nothing solid that I can talk about. For the most part, I’m going to try to launch a new Webcomic. It’s not going to rely on continuity, the way Goats did. It’s hopefully going to be a standalone every day. But it will still have some of the same sensibility that Goats had.

§ Is there anyone breathing who will not want to read an article that features Tucker Stone and Benjamin Marra talking about a DC comic called THE RISE OF ARSENAL # 1-2 in which lots of arms get ripped off?

§ The Huffington Post reviews the To Teach comic by William Ayers and Ryan Alexander-Tanner:

William Ayers’s new book To Teach: The Journey, In Comics is part autobiography, part education reform tract, and entirely enjoyable to read. I don’t know another edu-book that blends these three elements so well. To Teach updates Ayers’s 1993 book of the same title– except this time around he’s featured in comic panels whose only facial features are dark hair, opaque glasses, and a mustache. It’s profoundly charming.