Julian Lytle’s Ants has been going on for six months as of today. Click the picture above to read that strip, go to his site and read the latest strip, and subscribe. He’s a good dude with a good strip.
Here’s the brief on Mark Waid and Neil Edwards’s new series from BOOM! Studios:
INCORRUPTIBLE showcases super villain Max Damage, who had an epiphany the day The Plutonian destroyed Sky City. That day, when The Plutonian turned his back on humanity, Max Damage decided to step up. Now Max Damage has changed his name to Max Daring and turned from his formerly selfish ways to become… INCORRUPTIBLE. The flip side to this year’s break-out smash hit IRREDEEMABLE, examining the hard, difficult road to changing your ways and making a difference in the world…
Irredemable turned out pretty good, after kind of a rocky start, and this has a hook I can get down with. Villains turned good is usually pretty fun. Full press release after the jump.
Singer-actor Tyrese invents comic book superhero – CNN.com
“There was an experience that I felt was pretty limiting as far as the comic book experience itself on paper” says Gibson, who stresses that he did not grow up reading comic books and is not a comic book veteran. “[So] I set up this technology with my team and this is the first-ever digital comic book [on iTunes] in the history of comic books.”
“We don’t believe you, you need more people.”
Hey, it’s cool that you didn’t read comics growing up. My mom didn’t, either, and I’m about to ship her a big box full of books that she reads or has expressed an interest in. It’s nice you like comics now! It’s not nice that you are making things up to make Mayhem, your completely and thoroughly awful comic book, seem like something record-breaking and cool!
I don’t remember the first digital comic I got for my iPod Touch. Maybe it was some weird Japanese thing I couldn’t get to play. I do know, however, that I bought Bone: Out from Boneville, just about a year ago. Shoot, Comixology and IDW have been pumping out digital comics over the past year, Comixology in particular.
So- first ever digital comic book on iTunes: untrue. There are no amount of semantic acrobatics you can go through to make it true. It’s not the first comic book designed specifically for the iPhone/iPod Touch format. It’s not the first digital comic on iTunes. It’s not the first comic to add page turns and voiceovers. We call those “motion comics” now and both Marvel and DC have been doing them for months. It’s not even the first print comic to be transplanted to iTunes. That makes Gibson either a liar or ignorant, and if he’s ignorant, he definitely shouldn’t be making bold proclamations.
Gibson: Me and my partner Mike Lee and Will Wilson all got together, we started brainstorming about different concepts and different directions we could send this character in and we came up with something pretty unique. It’s an ongoing series and so as soon as you think you’ve got it figured out, there’s a cliffhanger that makes you want to read the second issue and the third issue.
Mayhem is a three issue series, and it’s not unique. It’s a gritty guy with a gun shooting people and grimacing. People who don’t even read comics are tired of that.
Gibson: In everything you do, there’s gonna be cynics and those folks questioning what your motivation is behind getting into anything. I dealt with it when I went from one career move to the next: “Man, stick to singing; stick to acting.”
I dealt with a lot of that from certain folks in the comic book world. … They wrote these long e-mails and [started] on a smear campaign.
That’s what we call “dry snitching,” talking about someone or something in an indirect manner so that you can seem like you didn’t talk about anyone specific at all. It’s also passive-aggressive and something children do. Gibson is talking about San Francisco comic retailer Brian Hibbs, owner of Comix Experience, one of the more respected comic book shops in the country. Hibbs wrote a post expressing reasonable skepticism about the marketing and probable value of the comic itself. And, hey, he’s a retailer, and he’s got twenty years experience in the game. I figure he knows what he’s talking about. However, his thoughts got him branded a “hater” by Gibson and his youtube sockpuppet.
It was hardly a smear campaign, by the way. It was a retailer expressing doubt, and considering that his livelihood depends on being able to sell comics, he has every right to do so.
Gibson proclaims his newfound love for comics throughout the piece, but it’s always tilted toward “I want people to buy my comic.” He never mentions comics that he enjoys. He only mentions other creators when they are related, tangentially or no, to his book. He speaks of Mayhem going to other media, like movies, after building a comic book fanbase. He positions himself as an innovator, rather than someone who helped create a retrograde and ugly comic book of the sort we’d left back in 1996.
Gibson’s own marketing director, Percy “MF Grimm” Carey, quit the project while citing their “snake oil selling marketing tactics.” Carey’s dissent is important, as his book Sentences, featuring art by Ron Wimberly, was released from a very well-regarded imprint from one of the two biggest comic publishers around. It was critically and commercially well-received, and gained Carey a measure of respect in the comic book world, mainly because he gets it. You have to show and prove before people buy into your hype. You can’t do it in reverse. You can’t hype and expect people to let you spoon feed them baby food.
When you factor in Carey’s reasons for quitting, the Mayhem situation suddenly becomes very clear. It’s a cash-in, a quick attempt to trade Tyrese’s fame for sales of an amateurish comic book about a walking, talking cliche in a cliche of a story fighting cliche villains. You’ve read Mayhem several times before, and it was undoubtedly better every other time.
Mayhem is the dictionary definition of a soft batch: undercooked, underplanned, and falls to pieces if you look at it hard. But hey, don’t take my word for it. Here’s five pages from the first issue and the solicit for issue #1.
Los Angeles, the City of Fallen Angels, is a city swept up by a brutal crime wave led by a kingpin known only as Big X. The body count builds as only one man can stop the flow of drugs and violence, only one man can stop Big X. He is the embodiment of vengeance and raw justice, the faceless arm of those who cannot defend themselves. He is known as Mayhem, and along with his sexy but deadly partner Malice, their goal is to dismantle the kingpin’s organization, unravel the dark secret that mysteriously links them to Big X, and save the city they grew up in.
BOOM! Studios kindly sent over a couple previews of books that are debuting tomorrow. Die Hard: Year One is a Howard Chaykin/Stephen Thompson joint, while The Unknown: The Devil Made Flesh is by Mark Waid and Minck Oosterveer.
Die Hard first:
Devil Made Flesh:
Seems kinda light as a preview, since it more or less requires knowledge of the previous series. I dug the last book, though, and it’s interesting that Doyle doesn’t seem to remember what happened. What do you think?
Sometimes you don’t realize how much you miss something until it comes back.
One of the best parts of Spider-Man’s supporting cast are the female characters he meets, befriends, and sometimes dates. Glory Grant, Gwen Stacy, Mary Jane, Betty Brant, Liz Allan, and probably a dozen others. They ran the gamut from weepy and hot-for-teenager Lee/Ditko-era Betty Brant to determined Gwen Stacy to party girl with a heart of gold MJ.
While Aunt May and MJ’s Aunt Anna were both pretty much cut from the same cloth, with Aunt May being a little more frail on occasion, the rest of the women came from all walks of life, and the series benefitted from it. One woman who is absolutely in my top three, though, is Felicia Hardy, the Black Cat.
Felicia brought a more realistic version of the Clark/Lois/Superman love triangle to comics. In a world where you honestly have a choice between the heroic hot dude and the shlub who just kinda stutters a little, who in the world would choose the shlub? Felicia is an attractive cat burglar and lives the high life. When Spider-Man reveals his identity, all she can say is, “Put your mask back on!” It’s Spider-Man she loves, fabulous man of mystery and amazing hero, not Peter Parker, Dude Who Worries About His Rent.
Felicia brings something to the Spider-books that MJ or Gwen never could. She’s got abilities that raise her above the level of “normal comic book girl.” Her bad luck powers are only icing on the cake for her agility, general physical fitness, and ability to plan a crime. She knows the risks and enters into them of her own free will. Her fun-loving nature, too, provides a wonderful contrast to Peter Parker’s constant gnashing of teeth.
She was actually in my first comic, though she jobbed to Venom there. Amazing Spider-Man #316, the beginning of Venom’s big comeback tour. She comes looking for Spider-Man, not knowing that 1) he’s married and 2) moved out. Venom catches her while she’s in Spider’s old apartment, beats the snot out of her, and leaves her in tears. Great going, guys.
Amazing Spidey #606 brought the Black Cat back into the Spider-Man family proper, with her first appearance in the flagship book since Maximum Carnage. Do the math: that’s 16 years. She showed up in various miniseries and probably Spectacular or Web Of, but Amazing is the Spidey book. Seems like a long time, doesn’t it? Luckily, her return to Amazing Spider-Man is also a return to form, as she reminds me of the character that I loved back in the day.
From Amazing Spidey 606, words by Joe Kelly, pictures by Mike McKone, with Chris Chuckry on colors:
After 6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental, we break down eight books that are worth reading. Esther’s got Dan Jurgen’s Booster Gold, Gail Simone and Nicola Scott’s Secret Six, Franco and Baltazar’s Tiny Titans, Batman Confidential, and Superman/Batman. I’ve got Amazing Spider-Man, Criminal, Yotsuba&!, and Pluto. We share some jokes, a couple anecdotes, and realize that though we approach comics in different ways, we generally want the same thing: good stories.
Visual aides:
David
And a bonus shot, since Esther got a whole extra book!
Yotsuba&! 6 is very, very funny. Easily the best book in the series thus far, if only due to the way the stories end up snowballing into a larger tale. Yotsuba’s trek to Fuuka’s school did an amazing job of capturing just how awesome real life is, which is something Yotsuba&! already does very well.
You already know how much I like Yotsuba&! Rather than doing a recap and review of volume 6, I want to discuss something that makes me love it a little less.
My problem is with the translation. It’s not to my liking, to be honest, and pales in comparison to the ADV Translation. It’s not that it’s bad, exactly, but it is a little too faithful to the source material.
Part of the beauty of Yotsuba&! is that the source material is very, very strong. The relatively few cultural jokes have easy analogues, as in Miura visits the Ayase household dressed as a cardboard robot. In the ADV translation, she says that her name is Cardbo. That’s pretty easy, right? Cardbo->Cardbord->Cardboard robot. It makes sense.
In the Yen Press translation, Miura calls herself Danbo, a reference to the Japanese word for cardboard. And, okay, that’s cool, but it isn’t a joke, exactly. It’s a reference with a footnote. It’s like when someone tells you a joke, and you don’t laugh because you don’t get it, and then they explain why it was funny. The problem is that after all of that… it still isn’t funny. You get it, but you don’t laugh.
Similar to the Danbo translation is the use of honorifics– chan, san, and so on. While an integral part of Japanese, they don’t really have any place in English. It’s another joke that doesn’t work. There are ways around it, of course– Fuuka-neesan can just be “big sis,” for example. Oftentimes, however, nothing is truly lost by leaving them out. An adult referring to Yotsuba in Japan may say “Yotsuba-chan,” while an American would say “Yotsuba.” Both are equally valid and both read the same. The chan is just a clue for us to go “Oh! She’s talking to a child!”
The sound effects are also left untranslated, for the same reason that I assume the honorifics were left in. Untranslated isn’t exactly right, though. There are little notes next to the first iteration of each sound effect in a group that explains what the sound is. Otherwise, the sfx are untouched.
It’s a little lame and distracting, if I’m being perfectly honest. It’s another case of being too faithful. I’ve been reading manga for a long time. I know that “doki doki” is the sound of a heartbeat, “ora ora ora!” is what people say when they’re punching someone over and over, and that chicks go “piyo piyo!”
The thing is, that sort of thing doesn’t really translate. It tends to just look silly, and yep, in Yotsuba&!’s new translation, it looks silly. When the Japanese sound effects are left in the text, the book ends up looking more like a fan translation rather than a professional work.
Fans are notable for being extremely reluctant to be anything but absolutely faithful to the source material in an attempt to be truly authentic. This often leads to awkward, or nonsensical translations. Yotsuba&! being strong enough to shine through an awkward translation doesn’t make the translation any less awkward. The honorifics don’t add anything to the book, beyond it seeming more “Japanese.” It’s like the book has been translated, but not localized.
Part of the draw of Yotsuba is how it’s fairly minimalist, to borrow an idea from Jeff Lester. His specific example was toward the end of Yotsuba & Delivering, when Koiwai bonks Yotsuba on the head for bicycling so far away from home. It’s a completely white panel with Koiwai, his fist bonking Yotsuba on her gigantic head, the sound effect in kana, the romanization of the sound effect (“go”), and “bonk” in parentheses.
In the original Japanese, it’s a very simple and to the point panel. However, in Yen Press’s translation, it’s got the romanization and the actual translation on top of the kana, which just clutters things up. It takes away from the minimalist style of the panel. The problem is that editing out the kana and simply inserting a “bonk” sound effect in an appropriate style would’ve been much more straightforward and, well, funny. The panel has two bits: Koiwai bonking Yotsuba and the “bonk” sound. Instead, it has the bonking action, a symbol that’s essentially meaningless to me, the translation of that symbol, and then the actual sound effect. It’s too much. It weakens the joke by layering on too much information.
My favorite translation, bar none, is the Geneon Lupin the Third dub. It took an old series that would not have benefitted very much from a direct translation (judging by the original Monkey Punch manga I used to own), looked at the characters and their personalities, and crafted new lines and jokes based on that. The characters never felt out of character or inappropriate, and the jokes were actually funny, rather than just being references to Japanese pop culture. This is an extreme example, of course, but it shows how this kind of thing can work.
It’s similar to how ADV approached their Yotsuba&! translation. Certain things won’t translate seamlessly, but rather than compromise a very funny book by making it less funny, they bent the rules a little and kept the book’s spirit, if not its letter.
I totally understand why Yen Press’s translation is the way it is. JuYoun Lee, Senior Editor at Yen Press, gave an illuminating interview with Deb Aoki over the translation. I don’t agree with the way they chose to go, but it makes sense from a certain angle. It’s more accurate and exact, but I don’t think that that is a universally good thing. It leads to too many jokes ending up explained, rather than allowed to breathe, distracting gremlins ending up on the page, and having to qualify my love for the series when recommending it to people.
At one point during Yotsuba&! 6, Koiwai says, “I love the way she reacts to stuff like this.” That sums up the entire series. It’s got a strong dose of humor, wonder, and love. The source material is some of the best out. Yotsuba&! is a very, very good series, but certain aspects of the translation are disappointing. That isn’t a dealbreaker, but I wish it were a little better. It deserves it.
Superhero comics encourage obsessiveness. I know you know it. Don’t pretend that it doesn’t. Paying attention to continuity, untangling the quagmire of a character’s past, and following all of the news and trivia of a company is something we’ve gotten pretty good mileage of here on 4l!, even.
And I mean, I make fun of it all the time, but it’s also pretty interesting. It’s kind of like solving a puzzle. A puzzle with several dozen pieces that all have the same shape, so putting it together is an event. The companies even encourage this with their crossovers and events.
Rizzoli USA, the folks who published Louise Simonson’s DC Comics Covergirls (a book I’ve wanted to read forever but haven’t gotten my hands on) sent over something pretty interesting last week. Marvel: The Expanding Universe Wall Chart is pretty much the perfect thing for a new reader or an old reader looking to pick up some new tricks. First, check out the size of the thing:
Now, that’s all well and good, but images only go so far, right? On the flipside of the chart is a continuity wonk’s dream: pages and pages of info on your favorite characters. They’re sorted by theme, rather than character, so you can see things about teams, kid heroes, origins, names, and so on. There’s even a bit on marriages. I uploaded a flickr set with a few G1 shots of them so that you can see what I mean.
It’s all pretty neat, to be honest. It’s a little tongue in cheek (Hellcat and Hellstorm’s marriage contains the blurb “presumably this ceremony was not held in a church”), and Patsy Walker gets a lot of love, surprisingly. I like it.
Now, here’s the thing that should interest you. I’ve got an extra one of these, new in box/mint condition/still in the wrapper, which means that it’s contest slash giveaway time. Here’s the details:
1. Share your favorite bit of Marvel or DC trivia or continuity porn down in the comments
2. Leave a valid email address in the email box
3. In the name box, put your real name. First name, last name, both names, whichever you prefer. Just no pseudonyms.
4. You have until midnight, this Friday, to enter. I’ll put a reminder post up on Thursday in case you forget to enter.
5. Also, this is open only to US residents. If you want to share trivia, and you’re from Uzbekistan or somewhere, you can, but please mark that down in your comment.
5. Wait until Monday, when I announce the winner and ship them a big fat chunk of Marvel history.
Sound good? Let’s get it in. Show me what you got.
I’ve yakked about Ann Nocenti’s run on Daredevil before, but honestly, it was really great and underrated comics. The message that violence is not the answer, that heroes cannot use violence as the end-all/be-all problem solving tool, all of that stuff? It’s what Daredevil could use a little more of these days, instead of increasingly tortured melodrama and depression. I like my Daredevil to be a little more like Nocenti’s and a little less like Blankets, you know?
Anyway, context: Matt Murdock has forsaken the love of his life for Mary, the good half of Typhoid Mary. At the same time, Daredevil has fallen under the spell of Typhoid Mary, who betrays him, has him beaten, and then finishes him off by dropping him off a bridge. When DD wakes up, New York City has gone to Hell, literally. It’s infested with demons, the skies have gone red, and monsters roam the streets.
Daredevil, ashamed of himself and his actions, has gone quiet. He’s moving on auto-pilot, never speaking, just brutalizing demons. It isn’t even properly protecting people. The demons provide a convenient excuse for Daredevil to work out his frustrations. Not much of a hero, is he?
Best part’s the smile at the end.
Words by Ann Nocenti, art by John Romita, Jr.
What time is it? Time for another Bat-cast? You know it!
We open on me eating a rice krispie treat (thanks Esther!), move to the Disney/Marvel lawsuits, hop over to Batgirl, and then talk over Batman & Robin! Who’s trying to block the Disney and Marvel merger? What’s up with the possible love interest in Batgirl? Why did David drop Batman & Robin?
We ran a little over time (by half an hour, dang) so look for a Continuity Off-specific episode in a couple weeks!
