I am terrified of flying, hate any mention of planes in danger, and yet I found the strip of Streaky The Supercat taking the tail off an airplane because it had the picture of a mouse on it to be the most adorable thing I’ve seen this week.
I’m pretty sure that Amanda Conner needs to be classified as a deadly weapon.
Feel free to comment with your favorite part of Wednesday Comics below.
I’m generally of the opinion that the world would be much better if I ran it. (What? Like you’re not?) This principle applies to panels, and all of the things said by all of the people on them.
It applied especially to the Sunday Conversation With Dan Didio panel at Comic-Con. I generally like these panels very much because they leave aside the usual slideshow of covers that we will be seeing in eight months to two years and the painfully awkward questions. Instead, they’re a bunch of people talking about comics. Dan Didio generally does a great job of moderating the responses from the audience, and a panel of comics professionals cuts in with funny commentary. It’s a really enjoyable panel.
One of the questions this year was, “What was a big ‘wow’ moment you’ve read in comics?” That was where the panel spiralled down from something fun into the realms of what I can only describe as extreme unacceptability. Every single reply was “When ____ got killed.” Every one.
People! Stop encouraging them! We just barely got them to stop playing darts with the members of Young Justice! Maybe it’s a question of when you started reading comics, but to me, standard character death that comes with every single big event is the most predictable and un-‘wow’ thing in the world. You can practically set your watch by it. How were any of those people shocked?
But what’s more, one of the other questions was, “What do you like to read in comics?” My answer? Fun. A lot of it. I want to have a blast when I’m reading. I want the characters to have a blast. I want the comic I’m reading to be so much fun that if you gave the reader the option of falling through the paper and joining the characters, they would do it in a heartbeat.
I don’t know if the panel was Bizarro World or if I’m truly that alone in preferring comics in which a hero’s death isn’t the most memorable event. Aren’t there so many better things to remember? And if there aren’t, shouldn’t there be?
Back in the early 90’s, the comic company Valiant struck a deal with Nintendo. Over the next two years or so, Valiant would release a multitude of series based on Nintendo franchises. There were a couple that felt natural. Super Mario Brothers and Legend of Zelda each had their own cartoons at the time, so they would get picked up. Captain N: The Game Master would also get his own comic, though transformed due to the inability to use videogame characters outside of Nintendo. There was even a series called Nintendo Comics System that acted like an anthology of stories featuring those I mentioned and miscellaneous games like Dr. Mario and Punch Out.
Around that time, Nintendo’s Game Boy was still fresh on the scene and they wanted to do whatever they could to get the word out. Sure, advertising was easy for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Captain N was one big commercial for the console and all its games. Well, all the games that weren’t on that crappy knockoff cartoon Power Team (anyone else remember that? It had the monster truck Bigfoot, a basketball player and a talking tomato). Anyway, outside of commercials and magazine ads, how do you advertise what is essentially a lesser NES that you can carry around with you?
With the Captain N cartoon, they eventually introduced a Slimer-like character named Game Boy who was one, big, annoying Game Boy levitating around. With Valiant, they went in another direction. They gave it its own comic book.
I’m sure by now you’re already asking the million dollar question: “How exactly does a Game Boy comic work?” That’s a very good question and having found out the answer, I just had to get my hands on this 4-issue series.
Last weekend was my third Comic-Con and the first one in which I couldn’t get into the panels I wanted to. David, on the last fourcast, disagreed with my belief that the Con has grown too crowded to be effective, but I met a few people who agreed with me and we all had different theories on why the Con seemed to have reached critical mass and exploded into something unwieldy.
I had heard that Comic-Con had reduced the number of tickets sold, and when I went online to buy my own tickets, I found that the four day passes were almost sold out much earlier than last year. I thought that would make it easy to get into panels. Sadly, on Thursday I saw that the Con had gotten so crowded that any tv or movie panels had a two to four hour line and that many of the comics panels had a one hour line. Even if you were willing to wait, it was often a toss-up as to whether you got to see the panels you wanted to.
My theory is that the early sell-out of tickets meant that the Con had started attracting hardcore fans. People, like me, who had been there several times before. Not only would they target panels more specifically, they’d know to get in line early, and when that failed, get in line even earlier. Not to mention the recent recession might have driven people away from the vendors and up to the panels.
A friend of mine, Graeme McMillan from io9, thought that there were the same amount of tickets sold, but that everyone showed up this time around, instead of the regular percentage of no-shows that any event gets.
And then, of course, there were the outright cynics who thought that the Con would sell tickets to the entire population of the world if it could, and it did, and there was no use acting surprised that things were overcrowded.
Although everyone I met at this Con was wonderful, and I did enjoy seeing writers and editors close up, I feel like maybe I should hold off on San Diego next year. Granted, I won’t get a chance to get an over-sized Dr. Who bag at another Con, and I won’t see the life-sized lego replicas of Boba Fett, but I’d sacrifice that to get into the panels I want to see without waiting for hours in a line that snakes around the entire building first.
I’m back from the con, barely, and I’ve got some reminders.
–The Wolverine Contest is still on. Go, enter, and win a free book or two. It ends tomorrow, so go ahead and get your entries in.
-I interviewed Adam Warren after discussing his Dirty Pair and Gen 13/Livewires work. It’s a good read. He went above and beyond in answering all those questions.
-Podcast is due to return in the middle of this week. We’ve got a couple of special guest stars this time around, and it required a little more time than usual.
-Lone Wolf & Cub has been on unannounced hiatus for the past couple weeks. I hope to get back to it this coming Sunday, but at worst, it’ll begin again on August 9th. San Diego Con and a few other things bearing down on me meant that something had to give, and LW&C ended up being the victim.
-I totally screwed up my back at the con. Yow.
Adam Warren was kind of enough to consent to an email interview, so of course I immediately bombarded him with way too many questions. As a result, we’ve got a long, and wide-ranging, interview that I think is pretty interesting. We cover a lot of ground, and Warren does it with good humor. And I do mean a lot of ground– this thing weighs in at over 5800 words. I went through and added in links for context or reference, in case you’re curious about a few of the topics that come up.
Thanks to Ken Kneisel for supplying me with the majority of Warren’s run on Dirty Pair, Jacq Cohen at Dark Horse for turning an offhanded Facebook comment into a fun interview, and finally, Adam Warren for answering a million questions.
After you finish reading, you should buy some Empowered (One
(and yes, adam warren week is just three days long. shut your face.)
At the time that I’m writing this, Empowered has been out for a couple of weeks. What’s your workday like now that it’s on shelves? Do you take a vacation between books or get right into working on the next volume? What do you do to relax?
Right now, I’m working on an Empowered one-shot (in conventional comics format, for once!) and frantically trying to wrap up a few other miscellaneous art jobs before I head off to the San Diego Comic-Con this week (ouch). This is more or less par for the course, as I usually try to work up other pitches or grind away at brief stints of better-paying work before I go back to full-time work on the next Empowered volume; in a way, though, this almost is a vacation, compared to the crazily long hours I often have to work as a volume’s deadline looms ever nearer.
As for relaxing, well, once the workday’s over, I might read some books, watch a DVD (starting over with The Wire season 1, at present), or crack a Sam Adams or two and catch some Craig Ferguson in the wee hours… (Though the latter’s not an option, of late. Since the spectacular onset of the digital TV revolution, my remote neck of the woods went from receiving about eight different TV stations’ signals to receiving a grand total of none whatsoever; yay, DTV! So, no Craig Ferguson for me, nowadays.) Ah, the manifold joys of the rural-dwelling freelancer’s off-work lifestyle…
How fast are you, art-wise? Do you do any digital work, or are you strictly lo-tech? What do you listen to while you draw?
I certainly wouldn’t claim that I’m an especially speedy artist in general… but, when working in the straight-to-pencil format used for Empowered, I can usually turn around at least two pages per full workday, which isn’t too shabby a production rate.
That’s the whole point of the format, really: to move on to the finished page as quickly as possible, leaving out all the intervening stages that used to slow me down as an artist. As in, my technique used to progress from scrawled roughs to very tight but undersized layouts to even more tightly penciled, full-size pages to final inks that were even tighter still; on Empowered, I jump from the thumbnail/rough stage straight to final, penciled pages (at the wee 8.5” X 11” size, BTW), a considerably more streamlined process.
While the technique I use on Empowered is indeed extremely “lo-tech”—nothing but graphite on letter-size copy paper, without resorting to such high-tech, cutting-edge, space-age innovations such as bristol board or inks or a separate lettering stage—I can’t say that it’s strictly lo-tech, as the pages still wind up getting scanned into Photoshop, then tweaked and cleaned up (and lettering-corrected, as necessary) at Dark Horse. Contradictorily enough, only modern scanning and printing technologies make Empowered’s primitive process viable in the first place…
Nowadays, I listen to a helluva lot of talk radio when I’m working, mostly of the sports-related variety (I am a New England native, so Pats/ Sox/ Celts interest comes naturally to me), occasionally mixing in some books on CD for variety… I do, however, switch over to music from the ol’ iPod when working on scripts, due to the sad fact that talk radio’s babble frequently derails my train of dialog-related thought. (Unless I actually want to mix references to KG and Jonathan Papelbon and Randy Moss into my scripting, which is rarely the case.)
While doing research for this interview, I realized that you don’t sell your original art. I don’t think that you travel to many cons, either, so genuine Adam Warren Sketches(TM) are pretty rare. Do you prefer to keep your art within the confines of published books, rather than sketches and such?
It’s not that I’m particularly opposed to selling my artwork; it’s just that I’ve never clawed out enough free time to set up some means of actually selling the stuff. (Plus, I am a tad paranoid that some Empowered material might need to be rescanned at some point; such are the problems inherent to working in the ever-tricky medium of grayscale.)
I should say that, back when I used to attend considerably more conventions than I do now (the invites dried up a long time ago, for better or for worse), I did crank out a goodly number of commissioned sketches every year… Empowered is descended from the last major clump of such commissions (mainly of the “damsel-in-distress” variety) I took on, after all. Now, though, I no longer have the time to deal with many (or any) more such requests along those lines.
Side note: Come to think of it, my attendance at San Diego this year will mark my first convention appearance during the entire time that Empowered has been coming out… Alert the media! Well, perhaps not.
In general, I suppose that I do prefer to keep my artwork within the confines of a published book, or at least within the confines of a story… Drawing as such doesn’t interest me all that much, save for as a means of conveying a narrative. I’ve never filled a sketchbook, I don’t draw people in the subway (er, that is, assuming I moved to a location that had a subway), I don’t hang around sketching with fellow artists after conventions (though the first part of the social “Drink & Draw” experience does appeal); in short, I don’t do the things that a real artist, someone who’s Crazy In Love With Drawing, should do. Luckily, this isn’t a major, psyche-twisting source of angst for me, as I pretty much see myself as a writer who happens to be able to draw.
Read the rest of this entry �
I am off to San Diego.
In the last Fourcast, I related past incredibly embarrassing meetings with creators.
I’d like some stories about your own meetings with creator, or con experiences, good and bad.
I think Gen13 may have been my introduction to Adam Warren. I kinda sorta remember picking up it up when I was super high off Wildcats 3.0. Later, I picked up Livewires, a Marvel miniseries that Warren wrote and Rick Mays drew in 2005. I can’t help but associate one series with the other, even beyond the Adam Warren connection, because they both take the idea of a “comic book universe” head-on and treat it with a certain measure of, if not respect, realism.
Most comics tend toward real life in terms of technology and style. Reed Richards is a crazy supergenius, Superman’s an alien, and lasers exist, but real life is more or less the same as it is in our world. Gen13 and Livewires, though, take the opposite tack. Superheroes run rampant in Gen13, by way of a not-so-underground youth sub-culture based around being posthuman. There are gimmick groups, really professional teams, people who just abuse their mental powers to get themselves off, and others who are ironic superteams. Livewires exists in the black ops area of the Marvel Universe, performing cleanup jobs on rogue technology and getting into high tech gun battles.
In a similar vein, Livewires is about identity. The main character, Stem Cell, doesn’t believe she’s a robot (pardon the r-word, my mecha, i’ll do better) until she’s forced to face reality. The disbelief is designed to make it easier to activate her and get her used to real life, but it also brought a few questions to mind as I read over the book.
It’s the fact that the books focus on younger people that makes them work for me. Teen Titans, X-Men, and pretty much everything but Runaways have devolved into generic superhero tales, all full of sound and fury and continuity. They’re no longer about teenagers doing teenaged things, like Warren’s Gen13 run was. When’s the last time Robin and the gang went out to a party of teen heroes? Gen13 did it, and they found a bunch of friends in the form of the Mongolian Barbecue Horde (amongst other names). They’d hang around the house, play DDR, talk about girls or boys, and do teenaged things. It wasn’t just wham, bam, another friend is dead, time for a funeral.
This is a big part of what I like about Adam Warren. He manages to latch onto something that you either hadn’t thought of, or wished would happen, and spins it into something fresh. Writing teenagers isn’t as simple as mentioning Xbox or iPods or PlayStation. That kind of Mad Libs writing always comes off lame. Actually knowing what you’re talking about, taking into account how teenagers act, and being willing to experiment makes for a good time.
I’m just young enough that I can’t really remember a time without anime or manga. I had an early introduction to Akira via my uncle and discovered both Saturday Anime on the SciFi Channel and the burgeoning anime section at my local video store. By that point, it was over for me. 8-Man After All, Dominion Tank Police, Bubblegum Crisis, Robot Carnival, Demon City Shinjuku, A-Ko, Vampire Hunter D (the first one), Galaxy Express, and Fist of the North Star were huge to me. I mean, I used to watch (and own) Tenchi Muyo. You could say that I was spoiled. I got the best of Japan (well…), the best of America (well…), and it was all normal to me. I managed to catch that wave just in time. (Do you guys remember Burn Up?)
Before that, though, Japanese animation and manga weren’t quite the powerhouses they are now. There were a few early adopters, of course. Frank Miller was a Lone Wolf & Cub fan, and Ronin is chock full of Japanese influence. Another was Adam Warren, who, if not the first guy to do “original english language” manga, was definitely one of the first.
What’s really interesting about these books is that Kei and Yuri, the titular Dirty Pair (though they prefer Lovely Angels) could easily be written as The Assertive One and The Doormat, respectively. Rather than fall into that trap, Warren twists their dynamic a little. Kei is a hard-drinkin’, hard-fightin’, hard-shootin’, loud tomboy with a foul mouth. Yuri’s more reserved, sure, but she’s far from a wilting flower. Both of them are capable, funny, hate each other’s guts in that way that only best friends for life can.
The action in DP tends toward the huge and explosive. Suns go supernova, characters are infected with wardrugs that make them into violent beasts, bio-organic monsters run rampant, and sometimes people get shot right in the face with lasers. It’s a very action movie kind of violence, the kind of thing where the heroines can come across dead bodies and go “Yuck!” rather than vomiting.
And, you know what? It works. Adam Warren’s Dirty Pair feels like the kind of story you’d see in a Die Hard or Lethal Weapon. The action keeps you riveted, but the relationship bits in between keep you going. Kei and Yuri have a great dynamic, and they get into funny and exciting situations. It’s definitely a product of its time, a period where high heels and laser beams go hand in hand, but that was a fun time. I hesitate to call it dated, if only because the science fiction still feels fresh in its approach. The hair styles can be a little ’80s anime-style, but I never really felt like I was reading a specifically ’80s comic, like you tend to with so much of Marvel and DC’s output from the same time period.
Dirty Pair still feels fresh, or is interesting enough to eliminate any of those feelings of the awful ’80s. Kei and Yuri are great heroines, almost like a sci-fi version of Riggs and Murtagh. It’s funny, exciting, and a blazingly fast read. Good stuff.
(all images yapped from ComicArtCommunity)
I’m not usually a fan of deep continuity stuff. “Who cares,” I think to myself. “Get to the story.” For me to get into continuity porn, I need some kind of hook. It has to be lovingly mocking, as in our Continuity Clashes on the Fourcast!, or kinda funny, like NotBlogX’s X-Men recaps. Another way to win my heart is to come up with a new approach. With The Wolverine Files, Simon & Schuster have come up with a great hook. Colonel Fury, Director of SHIELD, wants to know everything about Wolverine’s past and orders his intelligence teams to gather up all of the info and come up with a definitive history. Thus was born The Wolverine Files.
I like this. Mike W Barr wrote it, and he kept up an informative, but slightly tongue-in-cheek, tone. That tone is what makes this book, rather than breaks it. If this was just another generic Encyclopedia of Comic Information Portrayed as Boringly As Possible, it would be no good, However, Barr keeps things moving with short bios, delivering only necessary info, and having some fun with the format of the book. There’s a few blacked out sections, others that take a more whimsical approach to explaining Wolverine’s relationships.
Here’s what we’re gonna do. You need to tell me a) your favorite Wolverine artist, b) your favorite Wolverine story, and c) why it’s your favorite. Be as specific or as general as you like, just tell me why you like it. You’ve got seven days, and I’ll post a couple reminders between now and next week. After that time is up, I’m going to go through and pick the most convincing comments and they get free books.
Sound good? Hit me.
