Kidd Batmanga§ The National Post of Toronto talks to Chip Kidd about Japanese Batman:

“DC had no record of this. They couldn’t help us in finding any of it but they also said they wouldn’t hinder us.”

“[Back in the 1960s] DC was so inundated with licencing requirements they couldn’t keep up with it. They couldn’t police it. It’s why the sensibility is so different.”


§ The AP looks at an R. Crumb art show running in PHiladelphia:

“It was just a matter of the art world actually catching up to him,” said Todd Hignite, editor of Comic Art Magazine, who curated the show for the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco last year. “He’s been so influential not only to practically every cartoonist following in his wake, but a lot of gallery artists are really influenced by him as well.”


§ At Comic Book Bin, Tom Spurgeon explains how to read classic comics strips:

Luckily, many of these great works know a thing or two about pleasing an audience. The best comic strips from the 20th Century entertained millions of people. They stood on the front lines of visual media as consumed by the average American. If you wanted to see something amazing in the 1920s, if you wanted to step into another world, you couldn’t go to your computer or your TV. The movies and their crude effects might disappoint. Open up the Sunday funnies, though, and you saw page after page of vibrant colors and remarkable stories and beautifully crafted art work accessible to everyone in an average household. Still, there are a few very real differences between reading George Herriman and George McManus and plunging into Grant Morrison and Marjane Satrapi. Here are a few tips for taking a comics trip into the past in a way that can help yield the most satisfying results.


§ Abhay Khosla reads SECRET INVASION so you don’t have to:

So, let me try to be less snotty about it, and just say: look, it’s not what I wanted. We can all be angry people and throw around hurtful words like “mediocre” or “horrible” or “terrible” or “padded” or ‘slow” or “snail-paced” or “perfunctory” or “generic” or “unoriginal” or “vapid” or “empty” or “boring” or “dreary” or “unimaginative” or “shallow”. Where does that get us? SECRET INVASION, it’s just not what I wanted; that’s all. Someone else, it’s what they wanted, and good for them. And sure, we can throw around words like “bad” or “uninspired” or “uninteresting” or “un-good” or “stinky” or “dregs” or “dispiriting” or “illogical” or “malignant” or “poo” or “doo-doo” or “ugh” or “blech” or “yuck” or “nauseating” or “brain-dead” or “witless” or “deficient” or “laughable” or “undercooked” or “half-baked” or “pointless” or “aloha” or “swill” or “pablum” or “crappy” or “shitty” or “shit-for-brains” or “shit-from-an-ass” or “fart-faced” or “rotten” or “decrepit” or “thesaurus.” But– what’s, that’s not, you know– instead, let’s, uh… let’s not.


Etc-Ahorror5-102608 T600§ This article from a Florida paper inexplicably looks at a 2000 comic by Rich Tommaso that even The Beat doesn’t remember:

Efforts to reach Tommaso to ask what inspired his comic series were unsuccessful. Representatives of Dark Horse Comics said they do not give out contact information on their authors.

An online biography, states that Tommaso has been writing and drawing comics and graphic novels for more than 10 years. He was born and raised in what he calls “one of the dullest parts of the New Jersey suburban-lands” and watched too many depressing films by people like Fassbender, Mike Leigh, Ken Loach and the like.


§ The Bowling Green college paper recounts an appearance by Scott McCloud:

“It’s our birthright as humans to create our own world to escape to from time to time,” he said.

In this world, McCloud described the five choices comic book writers have as choice of moment, frame, image, word and flow. McCloud believes these are common elements found in all comics.


§ Matt Madden recalls 9 Dearly Beloved Comics:

I think there are two main reasons to go back and re-read books. One is essentially nostalgic, the act of looking back at a fondly remembered work of art, the way I can always pick up a Tintin adventure and think “Oh, yeah, I remember that,what a great book!” The other reason to re-read books is to find those that get richer and deeper after each reading. These latter are the kind of books I have tried to talk about here, although of course both impulses overlap quite a bit.


§ Flog has some fun with current events.

1 COMMENT

  1. Seriously, it is hard to overstate what a terrible event SECRET INVASION has been. Whatever one might make of the various tie-ins, the plotting in the main miniseries has been so weak that one could argue there is no storyline as such, just contradictory and faulty concepts jammed together within the pages by an editor who doesn’t give a damn about quality.

    SRS

  2. The Horror of Collier County was awesome! I still have the issues. I’m pretty sure they collected it.

    It has great twilight Zone references too.