Fourcast! 29: Talking About Comics Internet
January 18th, 2010 by david brothers | Tags: blogosphere, chad nevett, podcasts, sean witzke, tucker stone, women in comicsOoh, welcome to Name Drop City, where the comics are good and the girls are pretty!
-Noted comics critic David Uzumeri of Funky Babylon gives us an intro
-Theme music: 6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental
-What’re we talking about? Comics internet! Who we read, what we like, what we dislike, and so on.
–Twitter is David‘s favorite comics site, and at recording time, David Uzumeri‘s open letter to DC Comics was the big thing.
-Peter David and Gail Simone: sometimes they get into heated arguments with people on the internet. Here is Jim Halpert from The Office doing an impression of what Esther does when things like that happen:
Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!
-Esther’s favorite site: When Fangirls Attack.
-Some of the WFA custodians are on twitter- Lisa Fortuner, Melissa Krause, and Maddy.
-Esther is not on twitter.
-The last time noted feminist site Jezebel linked to us, David wasn’t in trouble. Rather, they linked to his post about Erika Moen’s DAR, whose extended title David completely flubs.
-David reads manga sites, too. The only ones he manages to mention are Kate Dacey’s Manga Critic and Brigid Alverson’s Manga Blog.
-Brief digression into Esther’s dissatisfaction with Batwoman and Kelly Thompson’s list of female comics characters of the decade
-Sometimes, you just gotta say something mean on the internet and hope and pray that there are no consequences.
-Creators getting involved in arguments online generally ends poorly… for the creator.
-I don’t know if everyone remembers this, but some years ago, Graeme McMillan of io9 used to run a little blog called Fanboy Rampage. He kept up with the worst of creator and reader interactions online, often coming across gems like Mark Millar’s idea for “The Rape of Wonder Woman” or various John Byrne offenses. I blame Graeme for creators being better behaved these days.
–“What the fuck is DC anyway?” Mr. Quesada said, stoking the fires. “They’d be better off calling it AOL Comics. At least people know what AOL is. I mean, they have Batman and Superman, and they don’t know what to do with them. That’s like being a porn star with the biggest dick and you can’t get it up. What the fuck?” (Paul Levitz, DC’s president and publisher, declined to comment for this story through a spokesperson.) —The Observer, 04/28/02
-(still one of my hands-down favorite pieces of comics PR. it’s pure WWF)
–I must admit I have no time for the ’80s style “serious superheroes” books riding the retro wave; never resisting any chance to gratuitously stick the boot in, I thought Watchmen was self-conscious, derivative, and heavy-handed when it first appeared and time hasn’t mellowed my opinion of this vastly overrated series – so the comics I dislike most of all at the moment are filled with unsexy ’80s retro “superheroes-in-the-real-world” type stories. All these soldiers-in-tights comics seem miserly and lacking in wonder, surrealism or novelty. Even Alan Moore himself ran screaming from this kind of story and began an ungainly, 15-year long attempt to reinvent himself as me. So why anyone would look to the awkward pomposity of mid-’80s comics for inspiration is baffling. —Grant Morrison, 2003.
-(that one’s my other favorite.)
-Esther is totally a troll on the internet at some unspecified forum. If you find out where, you’ll have my undying thanks.
-I stopped being cruel when I started using my real name when writing.
-Here’s some context on the Chuck Dixon interview/gay stuff
–BM: Is he a character you’d ever want to return to?
MW: “God, no,” he said, and 40,000 Flash fans exhaled in relief. No. I got conned into coming back for the 2006 relaunch, and it was a disaster from start to finish. I like the stories we told, but I radically misjudged the pulse of the audience when I decided to do a FLASH book totally unlike my last run, when 20/20 hindsight would reveal that that was exactly what the audience wanted.
—Mark Waid, 2009-Esther talks a little about scans_daily, shortly before teasing me with the existence of pro frank miller message boards. (They don’t exist, sadly.)
-Trolls, or people who are really aggressive about their bad opinions, are a gift and a curse. Great punching bags, but you always end up angrier than you were when you started arguing with them.
-I sent a soft jab toward Newsarama’s forums.
-I also send some love to the Joe Casey Fan Club- Tucker Stone and Sean Witzke, plus honorary member Chad Nevett.
-I haven’t embarrassed myself online yet (not that I can tell, suckers), but I did used to hate Garth Ennis and love Chris Claremont.
-Esther also visits Girl Wonder, which has been pretty dark lately, and io9.
-Sometimes reading comics news means hearing what you don’t want to hear. Solution: stop reading.
-Sometimes I send Esther links just to see what’ll happen.
-“When Dan Didio says, ‘It’s a big year for _______'” joke shamelessly stolen from Chris Eckert of FBB.
–Gail Simone x Mark Waid vs Rick Olney
-Out!
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I think Funnybook Babylon would quadruple in readers if they really did change their name to Funky Babylon
also I agree that watching creators fight on the internet is fun as hell. Really had a chuckle as David vs Liefeld
Fun internet stuff: google search me and Fanboy Rampage for a few things Graeme found me doing back in the day on Millarworld. I miss being young and angry like that…
oh god that Morrison quote XD
also interesting Dixon stuff, I now feel a bit bad for the angry stuff I said a few years back
Heyyyy, thanks for the kind words about WFA!
Regarding Batwoman, I’ve been feeling kind of the same way. It’s very good, but I’m not as excited about it as I would’ve expected to be. I think maybe part of it is that she’s so isolated, story-wise, from most of the extended bat-family. One of the things that makes the bat-characters interesting is their relationships with each other, so she’s kind of an odd-ball that way. She’s also got a lot of superficial similarities to Barbara Gordon, which is kind of weird.
Aw, thank you for the namedrop! Ragnell and I haven’t been custodians of WFA for a while though, all the good stuff’s because of Maddy and the others. They’re doing a great job! 🙂
Thanks for the props! I’m glad you like the categories, that was Maddy’s idea and I think it’s pretty great.
We don’t do as much Manga b/c we’re not familiar, but we try and I’m glad you appreciate it. 🙂
I didn’t like Batwoman so much the first three issues, but I liked the origin a lot, so she’s growing on me.
Wooooooooo Birds of Prey! Celebrate good times! GA/BC is terrible, I can’t wait till Dinah leaves.
Now I must go to class, but I’ll listen to the rest later.
Regarding David’s colon rule, I liked a few of the Dark Reign: The List specials, though I’d agree their titles were unnecessarily long. Considering David’s New X-men post, I would have figured he got Dark Reign: The List: Wolverine, which was 22-pages of Jason Aaron saying, “Wasn’t Morrison’s Marvel stuff awesome?”
And I’d like to say I’m someone who’s not just a fan of negative posts. You are more likely to get more comments, since there will be an argument, but I really liked your Pluto and Yotsuba&! posts because they’ve given me a whole new category of sequential art to read.