Thanks to Luis Medina for filming me, and to Jorge Vega for introducing us!

Also, thanks to Cheryl Lynn for linking my ugly mug earlier.

Good on you, Newsarama.

Blog@Newsarama -> Just Past the Horizon: Late Edition

LISA: What exactly happened with the Paul Cornell interview and the last couple of questions that were removed from the site?
MB: Glad to fill you in, Lisa. A question was asked that was poorly phrased and perhaps not thought out as well as it could have been beforehand, and the exchange was then regrettably missed in the editing process. We apologize to anyone who was offended.
There is really no excuse — it was a bad judgment call on Ben’s part and we certainly should have caught it before it was posted. We obviously always try to be thorough when proof reading an interview, but this one unfortunately slipped through the cracks.
That said, as soon as it was pointed out to me, the passage was removed.

Found via LitG today.

“So, yeah, you’ve got this Arab chick… she gonna blow any dudes up?”
“I heard that there’s a black guy in the comic. Which white girl is he trying to get with? Does he play basketball at all?”
“This Asian girl you have on the team… I’m just gonna put this out here, see if I can get a response. Two words. Happy. Ending. Hey? Yeah?”

Faiza is one of the most interesting new characters to come out of Marvel. Cornell gave an awesome interview about her a while back that sold me in basically one paragraph.

Thanks, Newsarama interviewer Benjamin Ong Pang Kean, for reducing her to being the “British Muslim” who is probably gonna kill some dudes while screaming about infidels and building mosques.

Is an apology forthcoming? I doubt it.

Funnybook Babylon let their mad dog off the chain. Jon disassembles it here.

Nasir “Nas” Jones is one of the best rappers alive.

It’s as plain as the chipped tooth in his mouth. Illmatic is one of the top five best albums ever. It’s that good. New York State of Mind, to pick one song, is infinitely quotable (“I never sleep, ’cause sleep is the cousin of death” “Rappers I monkey flip ’em with the funky rhythm I be kickin'” “I got so many rhymes I don’t think I’m too sane/ Life is parallel to Hell but I must maintain” “Never put me in your box if the shit eats tapes”). If I tried, I could probably kick half the rhymes on the album with an instrumental.

The problem with coming out swinging on your first try is that your second looks lame by comparison. So it was with Nas– basically every album has been seen as lesser than Illmatic, to the point where Nas released Stillmatic. I’d say that Hip-Hop is Dead is his closest to Illmatic and a thoroughly awesome album.

The thing about Nas is that he’s scary clever and intelligent. It’s like if Tupac had kept up with the tone of his first album (Brenda Had a Baby, for example) with a bit more black power in. He is a sick storyteller. He isn’t the free-association kind of storyteller like Ghostface is. He’s in the Rakim school of telling stories– really straightforward and just in the mix. Ether is still basically the anatomy of how to make a diss song.

(If you’ve ever seen me make reference to spitting ether or ethering someone, just know that I’m not talking about the chemical.)

What I’m saying boils down to Nas is smart. The corollary to that is that he should know better.

Case in point, from King Magazine (vaguely nsfw, bikinis):

Do you remember the first time you were discriminated against because you were black?
The first time I opened up a Superman comic book. The first time I saw Flashdance, with the light-skinned, beautiful bitch who’s chasing after some white cat, which…I don’t have nothing against interracial relationships—love ’em, actually.

This is Nas’s career in a nutshell. He’ll hit you with something profound and then follow it up with something off-kilter. “The first time I opened a Superman comic book.” “The first time I saw Flashdance, with the light-skinned, beautiful bitch.”

He’ll drop The World Is Yours and then hit you with Hate Me Now. He’ll go from Nasty Nas to Nas Escobar. Illmatic to It Was Written. He put One Mic, one of my most favorite songs ever, on an album with Braveheart Party, a song so bad that Mary J Blige asked for it to be removed from the second pressing of the album. Braveheart Party makes me want to fight Nas. One Mic makes me want to hang out with him and chop it up.

Nas’s next album is called Nigger. I trust him and his skill, particularly lately, to be able to pull it off. The first single is harsh, but I’m digging it. It took me a minute to open up to it.

What will it say about the record industry if Def Jam drops you, 10 albums deep, over a single word?
That starts a revolution. It sparks something within the hip-hop community, within the streets, within the people outside the streets. It raises an eyebrow to the situation, you know? Nobody wants to deal with the word “nigger,” because what comes with the word “nigger” is a whole history where you show so much injustice, and you show so much that has not been fixed yet. So it’s a scary thing. But it’s also uncomfortable when I’m dealing with it. Like, no one can tell me what to do. None of the black leaders, none of these motherfuckers, record companies, none of them can tell me what to do. Because you can’t stop what I want to do, you understand?

Nas is smart. Nas is stupid.

I say that this is Nas’s career in a nutshell, but it’s also bigger than that. It’s emblematic of a bunch of black men all over the country. Actually, let me dial that back– I am right there with Nas.

I’m not perfect. Sometimes I slip. Sometimes I roll my eyes at certain things like “*smh*, white people.” Sometimes I look at something and the only comment I’ve got is “That’s mad niggerish, man.” Sometimes I want to just box the entire internet’s ears and and scream on someone.

I’m smart. I should know better.

It’s a constant struggle. This is why I don’t like snarky things– it’s too easy. Anyone can toss off six sentences of ill will without really looking at something. I try to keep from doing it if only because I hate it. I force myself to think things over. I force myself to adjust to new information. I force myself to produce real content, for good or for ill.

I love Nas. I don’t want to be Nas.

From Nas’s verse on Kanye West’s “We Major”:

I heard the beat and I ain’t know what to write
First line, should it be about the hoes or the ice?
Fo-fo’s or Black Christ? Both flows’d be nice
Rap about big paper or the black man plight?

Nas knows what I’m talking about. (Kanyayo does, too, but that’s another conversation.) You can go low brow or you can go high brow. I can talk about ice or black man’s plight, which one do I pick?

I like Luke Cage and Storm. At the same time, I hate Luke Cage and Storm and everything they represent. They’re two sides of the same coin– the dangerous thug and the whitewashed safe one. The problem is that that coin represents a false dichotomy.

It isn’t that simple. Very, very few things are black and white. Racism and sexism definitely aren’t as simple as racist/not racist or sexist/not sexist, no matter how hard people on both sides of the argument try to make it seem that way. 99% of people are Nas– stuck in the middle. Smart and stupid. Gifted and wasted talent.

Pedro of FBB and I talk pretty much daily, and one thing we often talk about is how the level of discourse online and off embraces dichotomies way too easily. People want to be able to point and say “That’s wrong” and be absolutely right. It’s the “Manichean murder machine” that The Invisibles talks about. Nine times out of ten, it isn’t as simple as with me/against me. Real life is not in black and white. Real life is in shades of gray. I feel like it’s important to take that into account when writing.

On the one hand, Lil Wayne is the dude who coined “Bling bling.” On the other, he’s dropped incredible verses on “Georgia… Bush” and Rich Boy’s “Ghetto Rich” remix. (“Fuck being like Mike, I wanna be like pop/ Then I picked up a mic, I wanna be like ‘Pac/ Please put down the pipe, you don’t need that rock/ Please put up a fight for the kids that watch/ Us in the spotlight, and then they mock/ But caskets get closed and then they drop.”) David Banner can drop “Like A Pimp” or “Play” (NSFW) and then be that dude who basically did a better job raising money for the Hurricane Katrina support effort than the US government?

Is T.I. the idiot who got caught trying to buy illegal guns, or is he the guy who stays working with single parents and Boys & Girls Clubs, trying to make life easier for them?

This is what I think about. I write for a living, so I take this writing thing pretty seriously. I want to be sure that I’m on point, because my words reflect who I am. I’m not afraid to pull back and tell myself “It’s just comics,” but I’m not going to be that guy who is talking out of the side of his neck and end up looking like an idiot.

I hadn’t realized it until I sat down and thought about it, but Nas was probably the first “conscious” rapper I heard. I’m saying, I knew PE and KRS and them, but I know Nas way better than I know them. Maybe that’s why he’s so prominent in my mind. I heard KRS and PE. I paid attention to Nas.

I could talk about the man and his career all day. I’m not entirely sure why I’m writing about Nas on my comics blog and I don’t entirely know where I’m going with this. He wanted to draw comics as a kid, though, which ties into my usual point that black people reading comics isn’t a new or remarkable thing. Don’t call it a comeback new trend, ’cause we’ve always been here. Pay attention.

Art Baltazar at New York con really hooked me up. I got a grip of sketches for me and my friends. I’m having to trickle these out, ’cause I know that my friends read the blog and check my flickr. Here’s a few that I gave out last week:

Grifter for the Eisner Award-nominated Matt Silady, Cloak & Dagger for World Famous Runaways Fan Mindy Owens, both of which are my comrades in Writers Old Fashioned

Matt Murdock for Kirsten, also of WOF, and Doc Strange for James Sime

Adam Strange (heart) Miss Misery, for Kirsten and James both.

It’s been quiet on 4l lately ’cause my day job needed a careful application of “work” applied to “projects.” That’ll change soon! Big things poppin’.

Myspace.com Blogs – EXCLUSIVE: FRANK MILLER blogs about WILL EISNER from the set of THE SPIRIT! – MySpace Comic Books MySpace Blog
I maintain that A CONTRACT WITH GOD will prove Will’s most influential moment in comic-book history. Out of nowhere, the master reappeared on the scene, stabbing his sword in the sand, declaring with format, content, and its self-description as a “graphic novel” (a term I don’t like, but more on our disagreements later), that comic books need not be ephemeral things with a shelf life measured in weeks, but, if worthy of it, capable of literary permanence. It changed the way artists, then publishers, viewed comics. Back then, in the dog years of the early seventies, Will charted a map for the future that may have saved comic books from self-induced extinction.

It’s a good read. If you haven’t read it, check out Eisner/Miller. It’s also a wonderful read.

from son of vulcan issue one

from son of vulcan issue five

Injustice Gangstas.

Will write SoV ongoing for free.

Comics were better back in the day.

You look at that and tell me it isn’t completely awesome. That last panel is a killer.

Jacked this from my IRC buddies. Sup Yung David!

For your perusal– the best Green Lantern scene in ages.

One of the Women in Comics panels at NYCC seemed kind of off to a lot of people. (Shot of Jenna Jameson in that one that may or may not be sfw?)

How do the ladies creating comics do it? They’re constantly blowing us away with the most outrageous and provocative titles. Jenna Jameson (Shadow Hunter), Colleen Doran (Distant Soil, Reign of the Zodiac), Amanda Connor (Birds of Prey, Painkiller Jane, Lois Lane ), Louise Simonson (New Mutants, X-Factor, Superman) and special guests reveal why they know what Fan-Boys want.

Yeah, Jenna Jameson is the odd man out there, so to speak. She’s got one comic under her belt, which she is credited with creating, rather than writing, so I can totally understand the consternation. If anything, I’d pay cash money just to see Louise Simonson talk. I’d pay extra if we could get a “Walt’n’Weezy Hour” where they just tell stories.

But, I kind of feel like the fan-based hostility toward writers or creators from outside the medium has run its course. It’s gotten stupid in its fervor. Case in point– Steve Bunche wrote a panel report on the Women Who Kick-Ass panel, which was subsequently reposted on The Beat.
Here’s a bit of it:

Billed as a sounding board for women in the funny books biz, the panel garnered a bit of controversy for its placement of former adult film star Jenna Jameson among the likes of Colleen Doran, Louise Simonson, and Amanda Conner. Jameson, a funny and intelligent speaker, is quite lively in her own right, but her presence was guaranteed to detract from the other panelists and attract a legion of devotees of “one-handed” cinema, many of whom couldn’t have cared less about the creative process of comics and paid their admission fee in hopes of worshipping at Jameson’s tenderloin flick altar. I have absolutely no problem with Jameson’s porn past, in fact I’m a staunch advocate of such fare, but the inherent sensationalism that comes with her simply doesn’t jibe with a panel aimed at women being taken seriously in the medium. No matter how sincere her intentions may be, the vast majority will most likely not be able to embrace Jameson in any real capacity as a creator and see her as anything other than a “tainted” woman who splayed her naughty bits on camera for the, er, amusement of folks living in a hypocritically anti-sexuality culture. Just ask Traci Lords.

Here is what I learned from the panel report:
-Jenna Jameson used to do porn.
-Colleen Doran and Louise Simonson didn’t show.
-There were more moderators than there were panelists.
-Jenna ain’t that interested in comics, no way, and probably didn’t even come up with the story for her book.

I can’t find any info on the Women Who Kick Ass panel online. All I’ve got is this report to go on, and it’s got no quality information in it. It’s got a lot of unsourced and specious conjecture, to be sure. Most of the crowd were Jenna fans, rather than comics fans? Really? It cost forty-odd dollars to get in the con for a day pass. You mean to tell me that you seriously think “about twenty or so comics enthusiasts” were the only comics fans in the audience? For really real?

Jenna was there to shill the comic “she supposedly created” is a huge claim to make– particularly when you aren’t privy to the inner-workings of Virgin Comics. A lot of their comics follow the format of (Celebrity Name)’s (Two Word Title). That’s their thing and it’s a formula they’ve worked to some success. Why throw in that jab about “supposedly created?” What’s the point? What does that have to do with the panel?

Conner’s efforts were valiant, but, for all intents and purposes, for what may have been the first time in her life, Amanda was the smart, talented, and funny wallflower in the eyes of a room full of wolves sniffing around the dance’s popular “hot” girl in a futile omega mating display.

This is the bit where I realized the post wasn’t a panel report at all. It’s a hit piece. The first paragraph is about how we don’t need a Women In Comics panel ’cause gender has nothing to do with nothing, the second paragraph is dissing Jenna’s fans and saying how she’ll be distracting, third paragraph disses the fans and moderators, fourth is dissing Jameson, fifth disses Jameson again and calls her comics illiterate, sixth mocks her movie, seventh is reproduced above and is basically a White Knight in action, eighth is dissing the audience, and then the ninth is a wrap-up that says the panel sucks.

The only paragraph I remotely agree with is the ninth one. I agree that the panel line-up was a bad idea and unbalanced. I disagree that Jenna Jameson being on the panel deserves an entire hit piece devoted to how she sucks, doesn’t know crap about comics, her fans are slavering fanboys who just want to touch the goddess’s hem (or i guess thong, whatever), and Amanda Conner got done dirty.

Conner did get done dirty, but that isn’t a good reason for the rest of that. I don’t even like Jenna Jameson and her comic is not my thing– so don’t even think that I’m just sitting here defending her. I don’t like the trend of “X person is coming from outside comics” with the subtext of “stealing jobs from worthy comics creators.” It’s crass.

I do agree with Johanna in her comment here, though.

I don’t think it’s her so much as cynicism towards famous names on comics. Remember Tekno’s Neil Gaiman’s whatever and how he had nothing to do with it besides the original concept? If someone licenses a name just to get PR value off of it, then I think readers are justifiably skeptical about that.

I just feel like the reaction is out of proportion. I’m sure that there was something funny or interesting or clever or new said on the panel. Bunche makes a big deal out of Conner’s quick wit and sense of humor (which considering her art, must be pretty awesome), but never actually gives us any anecdotes. It’s like what David Uzumeri said a while back.

What’s starting to disturb me more is the reaction to this that I see on a lot of the more moderated/respectable blogs – this conscious attempt to cut ties with the tastes of the hoi polloi and instead turn the topic to how cleverly you can savage a certain creator or book. Mike Choi is right – the switch is defaulted to “snark” all across the blogging community and everyone’s tripping over themselves to be the funniest guy to say something’s going to suck.

I’m tired of empty snark. You’re clever, you’re mean, you’re smart, you’re witty, you’re awesome, I get it– now tell me what you saw.

edit: Ragnell pointed me to Girl-Wonder’s Four Color Heroines podcast, which discusses the issue at around 12:00 in or so. I may not 100% agree, but they do make good points! Which, really, makes for a great post. Also, they just posted this new post which is all about the panel. I haven’t gotten a chance to check this one out, though, but it may warrant a followup post later!