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.

From Peter Parker Spider-Man Vol. 1: A Day in the Life, which is sadly out of print but available for cheap used, I present the Death of the Chameleon. Words by Paul Jenkins, art by Sean Phillips.

This is a big week for rap. Jay-Z’s The Blueprint 3 drops this week, but the album of the week for me, the big deal, is Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… Pt II.

The first Cuban Linx, the legendary Purple Tape, is one of the best albums to come out of the Wu-Tang Clan, and one of the best rap albums, period. It took crack rap and kicked it over onto its ear, redefining it for a generation. The Clipse, Young Jeezy, and even Jay-Z have been working from Raekwon’s blueprint, which is itself borrowed more from Godfather and Hong Kong action flicks than from Scarface.

Cuban Linx II leaked last week, as usual, and I copped it. For me, it’s album of the year contender. It’s only real competition, I’m thinking, is Mos Def’s The Ecstatic and maybe Heltah Skeltah’s D.I.R.T. (Da Incredible Rap Team), though that last one is purely personal taste. OBC4L2 is exactly what I’d been missing: hardbody New York rap of the grimiest variety. The producers come through with a lot of RZA-style, or maybe post-RZA, production, including J Dilla on the incredible House of Flying Daggers joint with Ghostface, Deck, and Meth. New Wu is a Rae/Ghost/Meth cut that bangs, too. It’s a classic Wu cut, like Ice Cream or 4th Chamber. We even get some Detox-era Dr. Dre on a Busta Rhymes feature, and every single guest star goes in. Ghostface is on seven of the twenty-two tracks, another nod to the classic Purple Tape. RAGU: Rae And Ghost United.

And really, that’s what this record is: it’s a Wu-Tang album. Not a collection of songs, not a gang of singles and a bunch of filler. It’s an album. There was thought put into the sequence. Opening the album with a Poppa Wu introduction and ending it with Kiss the Ring is the sort of thing that means something. Poppa Wu is classic, and Kiss the Ring is kind of like Jay-Z’s Blueprint 3: a victory lap.

The difference between Rae and Jay, though, is that Rae won the race. Jay’s just talking like he did.

From Tom Brevoort’sBlah Blah Blog:

Q: Why do booked with international lead characters seem to struggle in the US market, like Captain Britain & MI:13 and Alpha Flight? yes, i know that Wolverine’s Canadian, but APART from him.

A: I don’t know that it’s any one thing, but if I had to hazard a guess, I would say that it’s all part of the same phenomenon that makes it more difficult to sell series with female leads, or African-American leads, or leads of any other particular cultural bent. Because we’re an American company whose primary distribution is centered around America, the great majority of our existing audience seems to be white American males. So while within that demographic you’ll find people who are interested in a wide assortment of characters of diverse ethnicities and backgrounds, whenever your leads are white American males, you’ve got a better chance of reaching more people overall. That’s something that continues to change as the audience for what we do gets larger and more diverse-but even within that diversity, it’s probably going to be easier to make a success of a book with a female or African-American lead before it is a British or Canadian-centric character.

He’s right.

I mean, I know what I want out of comics, but that’s often diametrically opposed to what Don DC or Maria Marvel wants. What I want? Young Liars, Unknown Soldier, all that stuff that’s great, that’s head and shoulders above the pablum? That doesn’t sell. It’ll move 20k out of the gate, then drop to below 10 and be cancelled within a year and a half. Young Liars is gone now, Unknown Soldier is probably on the way out, unless it’s trades do gangbusters.

In short, we, as in the comics reading community, get the comics industry that we deserve. Our buying habits decide the output of the companies. And if people only want stories starring classic characters, stories that “matter” and pay homage to the knotted and twisted chains of continuity… you’re only gonna get stories starring white dudes, with the occasional green chick or redhead playing the background.

Case in point: Hawkeye vs Luke Cage. One has been put into a leadership role on the team, gained the respect of Captain America, and been in New Avengers from the beginning. The other has returned to life after a controversial death, and enjoyed a new lease on life and the return of his long-dead wife.

The last Luke Cage miniseries, barring the recent release of Luke Cage Noir, was the Azzarello/Corben miniseries at the top of the decade. Hawkeye’s latest was New Avengers: Reunion, telling the story of his reconnection with Mockingbird. That was this year.

I’m not judging here, this is value-neutral. But, if you’re going to go, “Our best-selling comics tend to be about our universe and continuity. We should do more of those so we can stay afloat,” you’re going to get comics starring people with several dozen years of Marvel history. All but two of those people are white, and the two are Black Panther and Falcon, who no one cares about anyway.

So if the audience wants stories that matter, you’re gonna get stories starring white dudes. It’s not even racism. It’s mathematics.

The only problem is that it’s also a self-defeating cycle. You aren’t going to bring in a larger audience by telling the same old stories about the same old people because, wait for it, they’ve been ignoring those stories forever. You’re gonna have to take risks, and telling stories about Barry Allen ain’t it. I applaud Marvel for being willing to stick with Black Panther long enough for it to find an audience for that very reason, and I recognize that companies have to make a profit. At the same time, though, I don’t have to read books starring boring characters.

Good on Brevoort, though. He’s a stand-up guy, and it’s nice to see a dose of realism in comics.

The thing about reviewing, critiquing, and talking about comics, or any media, is that there has to be two components to your text. You have to have facts and you have to have opinions. The facts are what is actually in the book– Superman punches a dude, Wonder Woman does something boring, Spider-Man cries like a baby. The opinion should be defensible and derivable from the facts that are in the book. “Batman punched a lady for no reason, I think that was pretty lame.”

There are wrong opinions, of course– ones that were created from incorrect or incomplete data, ones that don’t reflect reality, or (to be perfectly frank) ones that are just stupid. It’s possible for two intelligent people to come to diametrically opposed conclusions about a work, as in here, where I disagree with some very good friends of mine and one of my favorite writers about comics about certain elements of Darwyn Cooke’s Parker: The Hunter. Different strokes, different experiences, different conclusions. All of that is fair.

I try to keep all this in mind while I write. I want to be sure that I’m not bringing something to a work that isn’t there. I keep this in mind when reading reviews, too. I learned from my time doing games journalism that a lot of reviews are objectively terrible and uninformative, which basically means that they are worthless.

All of this preamble is to say that Jesse Schedeen and IGN’s review of Starr the Slayer #1 is of poor quality, factually inaccurate, and not useful to someone looking for an informed opinion on the book. It’s crap, son.

The biggest problem with it, the most mind-blowing thing, is this:

Unfortunately, different doesn’t automatically equate to good. Writer Daniel Way makes the risky choice of communicating this story almost entirely through rap. Yes, you read that right. Instead of a standard omniscient narration, the tale of Starr and his creator is relayed through hip-hop rhymes. Suffice it to say, I’m not prepared to crown the writer as Mixmaster Way anytime soon.

Here’s the first page of the book:

I’m going to be charitable and assume that Schedeen has never heard rap, or else he’d understand that mixmasters are DJs, not emcees. I’m also going to assume that he’s a bit behind on his history reading, or else he’d recognize that Way is not using the art from the Bronx, but rather something that is centuries old, if not older. Do you know the classic The Tale of Brave Sir Robin from Monty Python’s Holy Grail? Way’s using a bard, or a griot, or a storyteller, a type of person who often used music or song to tell their story while trying to make some money on the side. “Busts mad rhymes on the street corner?” Nah, son.

Schedeen goes on to say that Way’s rap goes on and on (with a breakadawn joke), to the point that he feels the pages are cluttered and hard to read and he just stopped paying attention. And, sure, that’s fair– some pages have a caption box or two with like six words per box, that’s a ton! Other pages, something like ten of them, don’t have a caption box, or have just a single box on the entire page. That’s tough reading!

But Schedeen not paying attention? That shows in the review. He describes Corben’s style as being “significantly exaggerated here,” when, no, it looks just like his Cage work which looks like his Den work which looks like his Edgar Allen Poe work. It looks like a Corben book, and isn’t more exaggerated than any other one.

He says that Len Carson’s world warps and the fictional world intrudes on the real one. That’s a fairly liberal reading of the book, considering that the intrusion isn’t the sort of thing that develops over the book. It takes place over three panels and one page and close out the book. Not very slow, that. It’s far from a Telltale Heart situation, I think.

He goes on to say, “Starr’s world, by comparison, is a little bland and surprisingly devoid of violence and bloodshed at the moment.” Starr’s world is the one where all the action happens. One guy gets his brains busted out (with one punch!), another gets his face pounded into pulp, and three people straight up die. I can see how that would pale against… a playback of an old man’s failed career as a writer and all the fast cars he used to drive.

Schedeen again:

In discussing this book, Corben has revealed that he, Way, and editor Axel Alonso constructed the story in the “Mighty Marvel Manner”, which essentially means that Way constructed a basic outline, Corben drew the issue, and then Way filled in the dialogue afterward. This certainly isn’t a common approach anymore, and for good reason. Perhaps in a misguided attempt to make the writing stand out in this art-centric comic, Way has needlessly burdened the script with unusual narration and pointless homoerotic humor.

The homoerotic humor thing– there’s one gay “joke,” though it’s more of a metaphor (first panel, first page, above), so that’s a stretch. I’ll grant you unusual narration, though, and we’ll chalk the homoeroticism up to taste.

The Marvel Way thing, though, is kinda clearly due to a misunderstanding of how the Marvel method works. When you’re working with a talent like Richard Corben, a guy who has been creating comics that are consistently better than the average since before I was born, working in the Marvel style isn’t that bad of an idea. It gives him a chance to deliver a beautiful book that’s paced according to the art, rather than the story. The thing about the Marvel Way not being common any more is straight up untrue– George Perez reportedly uses it, Kurt Busiek has used it on recent projects, and it’s a pretty viable way to do comics to this day.

Boiled down, Jay-Z already said what I’m trying to say: “Do you fools listen to music or do you just skim through it?” This review feels like Schedeen skimmed through it and guessed to fill in the blanks.

I read Starr the Slayer and thought it was pretty fun. A solid B/B+ right now, with definite room for improvement. It’s a Conan story that takes itself exponentially less seriously than actual Conan stories. A guy drinks “roofinium” before being sacrificed, there’s a strain of dark humor throughout it, and the song is bawdy and funny, kind of like the first scene in Romeo & Juliet.

It’s a comic that works. Way’s script doesn’t trample over Corben’s art, and Corben’s art is Richard Corben: the bomb. It’s immature, but it’s also funny. I read it, I liked it, I’ll cop the inevitable hardcover. It’ll go on my shelf next to Richard Corben’s Edgar Allen Poe books.

Recently, I took a splendid little trip to Orlando to partake in Disney World and the Universal parks. How can I sum up my trip in one image?

Sheesh.

I guess I should go in this day-by-day.

Read the rest of this entry �

I saw some screwy news courtesy of Rich Watson’s Glyphs about another entry in the DC vs Dwayne McDuffie saga. An excerpt:

Plans for a Static monthly were scrapped by DC last spring. Based on their actions, they never really wanted to publish the Milestone stuff, they wasted my time. We could have done a little deal for them to use Static without me having to spend so much money on lawyers.

I checked his message board, and wait, there’s more!

Static Shock currently runs on Disney XD four times a day. I know that’s somehow not as good as appearing in Teen Titans, a comic with over 20 thousand readers, but I’m not sure why.

From another thread:

No. I did not accept the offer. I have completed the script to a Milestone mini-series that is currently being drawn. DC has also given the go ahead to a major project about their black characters and their place in the DCU, but I’m no longer sure I want to do it as I’m increasingly concerned about their posture on racial matters. I hope I’m wrong. I’m sure we’ll talk about it in the next few months.

Basics:
-Static Shock was the #1 or #2 rated show on KidsWB for most of its run. I think it was trading top spots with whichever variation of Pokemon at the time.
-Static Shock’s cartoon, which is around ten years old, runs on a Disney channel four times. It’s reasonable to assume that Static Shock has more fans than, say, all of the Superman comic books put together.
-DC’s shown no interest in solo Milestone books, despite undoubtedly shelling out a lot of money and paperwork on the characters.
-Instead, they’d rather have Teen Titans feature Static, even though Titans is a book that has been of poor quality and a laughing stock for two or more years.

So, what happened here? DC picks up one of the more marketable cartoons in recent memory, and a fondly-remembered and ahead of its time universe, and fumbles the ball. The universe is shuffled off to a brief series of one-shots in Brave & the Bold, Static ends up in a comic no one likes (if you like Teen Titans, you like a bad comic, this is gospel truth), and the guy who is the face of the deal ends up shuffled off a book he was writing with handcuffs, out of the DCU, and off into cartoonland.

What happened?

DC needed new toys to put into the meatgrinder. They’re getting consistently outshined by their biggest competitor, which can’t look good in front of their bosses. They have exactly one respected and profitable movie franchise, but Marvel’s buckshot approach has seen some success. By tapping Milestone, or rather, Static, they get the bonus of a built-in fanbase, a pedigree, and a little check on the Minority Box. That’s a Triple Word Score.

So, like a toy collector buying cases of crap he doesn’t want, they get their action figure, the one they think will make them money, and toss the rest. They think that Static himself won’t sell on his own, because they’ve trained their audience to view new characters with distrust, if not outright malice, and non-event stories as Not Necessary, so they botch any plans of a solo series. Stick him in a team book and you get all the benefits, none of the minuses!

And then, at some point in the future, they’re going to put Static back in their toy chest, ready to spring out again when they need a young black kid (who is drawn like a grown man) to talk about how cool someone else is, take a dive for a new hero/villain, or catch a hot one in the next Crisis.

All of the drama, all of the hoopla, is about money. It’s about being able to make a profit on the short-term, and hoping that that keeps you going enough that you can catch more later on. It’s an extraordinarily near-sighted way to do business. According to McDuffie, a number of comics creators, ones with names, ones who sell books, wanted to do Milestone work. They remembered the universe, they wanted in on what looked like a good thing. But, money talks, and if you aren’t looking at an immediate profit, well, sorry. You aren’t talking loud enough.

But when arts meets commerce, commerce eventually wins out. It doesn’t matter how groundbreaking (original, cool, artistic, awesome, whatever) a character is. For the companies, and this includes Marvel, they are products to be sold, and whatever gets them sold is the right thing to do. DC dicking McDuffie isn’t about a grudge. It’s about having more action figures in the toybox that you can pull out, rather than creating new ones. It’s about being able to point and say “This is a comic for _______ people!” and expecting them to come just because you built some mediocre, at best, story.

DC saw that a character was successful elsewhere, hunted it down, and didn’t care about the consequences of that act. So now there’s a creator, one who has proven that he can do popular work amongst comics fans in at least two mediums, who is pretty much thoroughly alienated, a gang of savvy fans who are pissed, and a character who is going to slowly disappear into the ether.

I don’t get it. It seems like you have a ready-made formula for success. You have characters people like, creators who actually care about doing stories with them, and an audience who just might be receptive. Instead, you instantly shuffle most of the characters off into Nowheresville, put the one you like in a lame duck that no one, not even the writers, enjoys, and shut it down before it even gets started.

Well done. You’ve succeeded in completely playing yourself.

They turned me into a Power Girl fan.

From Power Girl #4, words by Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti, pictures by Amanda Conner, colors by Paul Mounts. Headbutt: heard round the world.

I’ll have something smarter on this later, but I’m wonderfully feverish and sick lately. I just wanted to put this out there, because it’s an amazing book. I’m working on a Thing in the background, something I think would tie into a look at Power Girl very nicely, but for now, I’ll just have to tease.

And sneeze.

This popped up on Twitter this morning via Laura Hudson’s ComicsAlliance, and wow! It’s a huge surprise. In short, MF Grimm was Marketing Director for Tyrese’s Mayhem. The full info is on ComicsAlliance, but here’s an excerpt:

I would like to take this time to inform you all that I have officially stepped down as marketing director of Tyrese Gibson’s MAYHEM!

Although I handled the marketing up until San Diego Comic Con 2009, I did not agree with the direction the owner(s) and the creators were headed. Therefore, I submitted my resignation shortly after our return.

On several occasions over the past few months, the creators decided to forget about their responsibilities (writing a good comic book) and on a whim, turned their focus to the marketing of Tyrese Gibson’s MAYHEM!; it was during these times they found multiple ways to insult well-respected people within the comic book industry.
[snip]
It’s easy for people to take credit for things (like strategic marketing) when they are going well, but no one will step forward when unethical methods are implemented, methods that are clearly not “strategic”. Because I am credited in Tyrese Gibson’s MAYHEM! as Marketing Director, I’m obligated to come forward and absorb the blame for these (unauthorized) snake oil selling marketing tactics which I found to be unnecessary and insensitive to comic book retailers. (I do not want to be associated with the comic book retail problem that has arisen because of this project , especially in this frail economy.

At one point, I put in a personal request to Arch-Enemy Entertainment (the parent company of Tyrese Gibson’s MAYHEM!) To have the members of Team MAYHEM! Who insulted Mr. Brian Hibbs of Comix Experience (and several other comic book retailers, many of whom are close friends of mine) by using snake oil selling marketing tactics to send a apology in the same forum(s) where the insult(s) took place; my request for the apology went ignored by the creators. I must therefore take it upon myself to do what should have been done quite some time ago.

And you know, good on him. Other than writing one of my most favorite stories (Sentences), I appreciate that he saw that the gang he was working with was headed down the wrong road, tried to correct it, and when he was rebuffed, made a tough decision and quit. Genuine apologies seem to be pretty rare, and judging by the text of his letter, he means it.

What’s important, and what Carey touches on here, is that if you’re coming into an area, respect is a rule, not a choice. When you’re trying to put out a floppy, you need to take into account how the market works and play along with the retailers. You aren’t going to be able to create overnight change, no matter how hard you try. It sucks, yeah, but them’s the breaks.

As far as Tyrese Gibson’s Mayhem and whether or not it was a good comic… “I read your book, now I break weed up on it.”

Between Batman & Robin and Batman, I realize that while I do enjoy Dick Grayson as the newly-christened Dark Knight, what really seals the deal for me is his relationship with Damian Wayne. The big selling point is that now the roles of Batman and Robin are reversed. Batman is now the light-hearted one mentoring the brooding, moody badass. Without even mentioning him, Damian is the best use of Jason Todd since his resurrection, as Dick is trying to make sure that, against all odds, Damian doesn’t end up either corrupt and crazy (like Jason) or dead (also like Jason). I feel that the Dick/Damian dynamic is what’s going to define this episode of Bat-history and may ultimately make it one of the more interesting duo dynamics in comics, alongside Cage/Iron Fist, Booster/Beetle and Wolverine/Cyclops.

Then I remembered something. This isn’t the first time the two of them have crossed paths in comics. In fact, they helped lead to one of the few bright points of the Kingdom Come sequel Kingdom. More specifically, Kingdom: Nightstar, written by Mark Waid and drawn by Matt Haley ten years ago. Following up on the plot thread shown only in background shots from Kingdom Come, Nightstar — the daughter of Dick Grayson and Starfire — has a romantic relationship going with Ibn Al Xu’ffasch — son of Bruce Wayne and Talia Al’Ghul. Bruce, being a delightful asshole in this continuity, decides to let Dick know.

There you have it. The next time Robin gets all indignant at Batman, imagine that inside he’s thinking, “I’m so going to nail your daughter in an alternate timeline for this, Grayson…”