Please RT!
Good guy & good writer @jamescmaddox was in a pretty bad car accident yesterday. He's in the hospital but going to be ok. I'm sure that he and his family could use some $ though. Maybe pick up some of his stuff from @comiXology to help out?https://t.co/wTHuipjnaF
— Matthew Rosenberg (@AshcanPress) August 15, 2018
§ What it says. Help a human out. I don’t know how fast ComiXology money goes to the creator, but the cover above is from Maddox and Brandon Lauhan’s Clown which is described as:
Clown tells of former-journalist Jared Bastian who now makes his living as a clown in a roaming circus. When a group of revolutionaries attempt to spread their agenda during his performance, Jared puts a forceful stop to them and finds himself at the center of the Empire’s attention.
§ Oh but speaking of Comixology, Fantagraphics associate publisher Eric Reynolds has a big bean spiller of an interview with Tim Hodler, talking about his doubts about Amazon’s print on demand program for its comics, which he reveals, Fantagraphics was approached about. He also blames Amazon for Seattle’s housing crisis, which, frankly, all dot coms have contributed to our urban housing crises.
I took the meeting in good faith and said, ‘Sure I’ll listen to you.’ I mean, we’ve been dealing with Amazon from day one, and like I said early on, to a certain extent there’s nothing I can do about it if we want to remain viable. So you have to kind of just [laughs] turn a blind eye or turn the other cheek or whatever, and I’m always gonna entertain any ideas that could potentially help Fantagraphics remain viable as a publishing company. You never want to leave any stone unturned on that front.
So I went into the meeting and I took it in good faith. They’re nice people, I was happy to talk to them and ask questions, and it was only really afterwards and after I heard the comiXology announcement a couple of weeks later, that I started thinking about how those two things related to each other and how they related to this truly omnipresent crisis in this city that is this disparity of wealth. I could talk about this all day long, but we can’t afford to pay people a living wage in this town anymore. Young people who are getting married and starting a family can’t afford to live here, they can’t afford to rent or buy anything. Like I said, I live in this old Scandinavian neighborhood where we were very lucky to buy a house fifteen years ago. And now, everybody on my street that’s buying a house works at either Amazon or Google and they’re paying a million dollars a house. And people like myself, [my wife] Rhea and I, would never be able to live in this neighborhood now.
§ The Pew Center for Arts has announced Black Lives Have Always Mattered: Hidden African American Philadelphia of the Twentieth Century, a graphic novel about little known Philadelphians:
Temple University’s Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection will develop a new graphic novel that depicts underrepresented stories of talent, courage, and achievement from 20th-century African American Philadelphians and encourages conversations about race in America. Combining complex, multi-dimensional narratives with vivid images of black Philadelphians, Black Lives Have Always Mattered will draw source material from the Blockson Collection, one of the nation’s leading research facilities for the study of African and African American history and culture. Award-winning author Dr. Sheena C. Howard will serve as lead writer of the novel, and Eric Battle will serve as the project’s curator and art director.
§ The very busy Rare Book & Manuscript department at Columbia has acquired underground legend S. Clay Wilson’s archives:
The collection includes juvenilia, notably a scrapbook kept by his mother featuring art made from the age of four onward; sketchbooks; extensive and extensively-illustrated correspondence; “jomos,” or small zines done in collaboration with other artists; original art and posters inscribed by fellow underground artists Trina Robbins, Victor Moscoso, Spain Rodriguez, and others; material documenting his work with collaborators from William S. Burroughs and Terry Southern to MTV; Wilson’s own comix collection; over 800 photographs; contracts, and much more.
Professor Jeremy Dauber, who co-teaches Columbia’s “American Graphic Novel” course with former DC Comics president Paul Levitz, notes, “Savage, offensive, uncompromising, Wilson was arguably the most important underground artist of the era, the one who illuminated the influencers … It’s impossible to tell the story of comics without engaging with his work, but for some, this may be insufficient, or faint praise. So let me put it another way. Anyone who wants to study and teach the history of outlaw culture in America, to understand the dark corners that lurk at the underbelly of American free thinking and radical imagination, has to grapple with Wilson’s work. This collection is essential.”
Wilson suffered a traumatic brain injury in 2008. His lively but profane work now speaks for him.
§ Aquaman is having a moment it seems. Even in the comics, as Scott Snyder and James Tynion IV prepare to team him up in Justice League: Drowned Earth. Tynion lays the groundwork for the excitement:
“We’re building off the version of Arthur that’s been existence, […] the character as he’s been in Rebirth but also the Geoff Johns run before that. I think Aquaman is a character for both Scott and I who really surprised us. There’s this richness and the depth because he’s tapped into the fantastic mythology of Atlantis, this he larger than life myth that’s a greater metaphor of this great society. But there’s also this cynicism there, in the fact that in the real world version of the story, the idea is that Atlantis was this great utopia and then it sank to the seas and died.”
Wake up in the morning: vileness on the Internet. Check your social media midday: bile and awfulness about on the TwitterBookSnaps. Scroll the comments section on a news story: a minefield of anger. Have you ever been reading these comments online and wish you could confront whichever “brave” instigator behind a screen and a keyboard is bullying a person or persons?That’s the idea behind Outrage, a new webcomic coming from LINE Webtoon later this year, written by Fabian Nicieza with Reilly Brown on art. In Outrage, an individual who can surf the Internet and physically appear at the source of the venom someone spews on social media decides to take matters into his own hands to clean up the web’s netscape.
§ Also, Dept. of supreme ironies: Disney Takes Stand Against “Overzealous Copyright Holders” – this is in reference to a dispute over a Michael Jackson documentary with Disney suddenly claiming some kind of fair use. Really!
§ A very rare unopened box Of 1999 Pokémon Cards sold for $56,000 at auction. Why the exorbitant price? Apparently one of the potential cards in there is worth that all by itself:
An original, unopened box of 1999 First Edition Pokémon cards has sold at auction in the US for the staggering price of $56,000. Via Kotaku AU, Huggins & Scott Auctions sold the box last week, with bidding opening at $20,000. There’s a reason for the steep price that goes beyond nostalgia: pristine Charizard holo cards can sell for almost as much on their own, as we saw last April when one sold for $55,000, so a box like this gives you a shot at not only one of those beauties, but a load of other valuable cards inside as well.
Rare Holgraphic Charizard! Can any phrase sum up the 90s better than that!
§ It seems that they are looking for a butt-double for Black Widow in Avengers 4. We shall ogle through our tears.
