Top Cow First Look Volume 1 TP
If you want some incentive to pick it up, here are some keywords:
-Afua Richardson
-Marc Bernardin
-Adam Freeman
–Genius #1
Pick it up or word is bond Cheryl Lynn is gonna come to your house while you sleep and punch you in the stomach.
Check out this preview, courtesy of Top Cow:
I wrote it up for CA a while back.
they believed in machine guns.
–New York Comic Con is this weekend. Gavin and I will be there. Short cipher, then.
-Charlie Huston has a new novel coming out in 2012 from Mulholland Books. Skinner is going to be about poverty, seems like. Here’s a pretty good introduction to the headspace he’s working in.
Speaking of putting a bullet in the head of irony, 1 in 5 U.S. resident children are currently living below that line.
You can’t, as the comedians are wont to say, make this shit up.
Facts, in these situation, kick the shit out of fiction every fucking time.
The present moment is born of the past. The future moment is born also of the past, and the now.
1 in 5 children born from the past into present poverty. How the fuck did that happen?
If you want to get into his work, The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death: A Novel
-Continuing the trend of the extended FBB4l! family being the best people to read when it comes to writing about comics, Tucker Stone has a positively fantastic interview with Darwyn Cooke up at Comics Alliance. Parker: The Outfit
-More Richard Stark: The Hunter
David Grofield: Unknown Soldier 24, Parker: The Outfit
Esther Parker:
Handy Gavin: Incorruptible 10, Metalocalypse Dethklok 1, Secret Six 26, Avengers Academy 5, Chaos War 1, Deadpool Pulp 2, DeadpoolMAX 1, Hawkeye & Mockingbird 5, S.H.I.E.L.D. 4, Taskmaster 2, Ultimate Comics Thor 1, Young Allies 5
I was gonna buy Ultimate Thor off ComiXology, but if you think I’m paying four bucks for a regular old comic book, you’re insane.
Near as I can tell, the Wednesday crowd at the comic shop is driven there by a few things.
1. New comics come out on Wednesdays.
2. People like to sit around and talk about comics.
3. Continuity-focused tales push you to “keep up” with the stories.
Is that fair? I think that covers most of the reasons, right? Generalization, caveat emptor, etc etc. There are other factors–the Direct Market has encouraged a specific kind of culture, the Big Two push continuity over quality fairly often and emphasize reading it now now now, the way you can build a social circle out of your comic shop’s patrons–but those three are the biggest, I think?
New books, movies, and video games come out on Tuesdays, but you don’t really see people hanging out in Borders to discuss the latest Tom Clancy knock-off or in Best Buy to talk about how crap the packaging on most Blu-rays is. The culture is different.
My question is–how will digital comics affect that culture? That Wednesday ritual? Digital comics saps some of the emphasis on buying comics immediately, doesn’t it? You don’t have to rush to your shop to make sure you get your copy of whatever because it will always be available digitally. Trade waiting will change. Filling up a hard drive with comics is easier, cheaper, and more aesthetically pleasing, than having a stack of floppies on your coffee table. Some of the bonuses of waiting for a trade (complete story, cheaper price, easier to store, durability/longevity of format) will be decreased, leaving really just getting a complete story in one shot as the main bonus. I know that I switched to mainly trades because having a lot of “part 3 of 8” floppies stinking up the place is frustrating.
What I like about the oncoming digital future is that everything is on a level playing ground, barring name recognition. There is no real difference between Brightest Day and Comic Book Comics. Comic shops no longer serve as the first line of defense/tastemaking. In comic shops, you might see New Avengers with sixty rack copies and King City with just six. Online, they’re both just covers and titles on a list. That in and of itself is revolutionary, isn’t it? I don’t think Marvel and DC will ever stop being the “Big Two,” but I could see their stranglehold on the comics side of things being lessened once the playing ground evens out.
A lot of series are making money off inertia and nostalgia, too. When you introduce a new factor into that equation, a buyer who is ignorant of the past and has no nostalgia for the series, those series don’t have a chance. Comics companies can barely sell Ms. Marvel or War Machine to comics fans, and they’ve been around for thirty or forty years. When you put Ms. Marvel on a level playing field with Empowered or Battlefields, well, what would make you pick Ms. Marvel over either of those, other than personal interest? If digital comics do what they’re supposed to do, which is bring in new readers, then there will be a whole lot of people who don’t care about “checking up on” all these dusty old characters we’ve invested years in. If we’re being perfectly honest, a lot of current comics readers don’t care about checking in, either, so why would newbies?
This is how the nostalgia trap is defused. Comics would have to live or die according to their own merits, not according to how intricately they’re tied into the past of whatever universe they live in.
The more I think about it, the more I think that digital comics is something that could move comics culture from an inclusive subculture to a general part of culture, like books or movies. The general focus of comics would widen, since there’s suddenly a lot less risk in making your action dramedy about wacky romantic hijinx in a slaughterhouse and a lot less money in bowing down to the past. Or, to put it pithier, we’d have more Scott Pilgrims and less Cry For Justices.
Or am I totally insane here?
-An easy-going review show heading into NYCC this weekend…
-We go over a few of last week’s comics.
-David made Esther read John Layman and Rob Guillory’s Chew Volume 1: Taster’s Choice
-6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental for the theme music.
-See you, space cowboy!
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It’s a sad week for ThWiP. Not because David, Was Taters and I were only able to scrounge up ten panels collectively due to being such a light week. No, it’s because in one fell swoop, we’ve lost both Atlas and the Punisher being a supremely awesome stitched-up zombie thing. David Wolkin wrote up a good look at the finished status quo, but I’ll try and toss in my two cents sometime in the next couple days.
Action Comics #893
Paul Cornell, Sean Chen, Nick Spencer and RB Silva
Amazing Spider-Man #644
Mark Waid, Paul Azaceta, Stan Lee and Marcos Martin
Inio Asano: wiki, Anime News Network
Books: solanin
Why? Asano’s stories are my thing because he pretty much nails mid-20s ennui, but he also draws really, really cute girls. Fashion-wise, they’re kind of hipster girl cute. They have that carefully crafted off-kilter thing going on, a lot of scarves and patterns, sometimes tops and skirts that look a little like grandma clothes, lots of layers, and hair that’s either short or worn so as to appear short. A little quirky, but calculatedly quirky, right? Asano’s girls feel very contemporary.
They have really cute faces, too. They’re kind of doughy. More like, their faces bend under the weight of their emotions. Smiles go from one ear to the other, eyes squeeze shut, certain girls have duck lips, and your commonly accepted proportions for faces don’t matter at all. Expressiveness is what counts, and his brand of particularly cartoony, exaggerated expressiveness is what makes Asano fresh.
The freckles across Meiko’s nose in solanin help a lot, too.
