The News Blog of Comics Culture
Tweet The winners of the Bill Finger Award for 2013 have been announced and they are Steve Gerber and Don Rosa. The award was created in 2005 to recognize writers—one living, one deceased—who have yet to receive adequate notice for their work. Gerber and Rosa are certainly exemplary choices. Gerber’s work on Howard the [...]
Tweet Sitting down to describe Larry Hama’s career it a pretty overwhelming task. Do you talk about his start in comics at the age of 16, his service in Vietnam, his work as a penciller in comics, or his tremendous writing output, spanning decades? Add to that the fact that this all creates a composite [...]
Tweet Part of yesterday’s “March Surprise” for DC Comics—confirmation that two popular writers were walking off their books due to editorial interference—was another odd fragment found lying around‚ the issue of Supergirl with one team listed on the cover (Mike Johnson and Mamud Asrar) while the actual contents were by the famous team of Frank [...]
The “titles” of Batman Begins showed the symbol of a bat formed in a swarm of bats, the titles of The Dark Knightshowed it in fire, now The Dark Knight Rises shows it in ice. The bats in Begins were a symbol of fear, the titles a metaphor for an identity forming out of shadows. The fire of The Dark Knight was like a wall of fire for that bat, that symbol, pushing through the chaos inflicted by the Joker. Now, the bat is, literally, the cracks in the ice formed by the isolation of Gotham City at the hands of Bane.
Good news from Peter David, the popular writer who had a stroke while vacationing at Disneyland. Because of the incredibly unfortunate timing (not that there is ever a good time to have a stroke) he has been rehabbing in a Florida treatment center, far from his New York home. Wife Kathleen has been updating everyone on his progress and David has been using Dragon Dictation to post to his blog and keep up with work. He’s been making good progress, and now some very good news.:
The Oscar nominations were announced the other day. To no one’s surprise, the screenplay for The Avengers was not among them. That’s a shame, because the screenplay for The Avengers is a startling model of precision, density and propulsion. It manages to juggle no fewer than ten wildly disparate main characters in its ensemble cast and give each of them weight, clarity and purpose. Dear readers, I’ve worked on many a comic-book movie, none of which ever got near production. To get one superhero narrative to work is damn near impossible; The Avengers soars with seven.
TweetWhen I first began writing this column, my intent was to help creators and comics publishers understand the methods to the madness of landing a book on the bestseller lists. After the November 8th Beat posting of the NYT list showing several GN titles on the list, it’s really not a question of whether a [...]
In response to a reader, Warren Ellis passed along the following notes for writing dialog which strike us as very useful. With apologies, here’s the whole thing:
Tweet Remember that Harvey Pekar Memorial Statue that was Kickstarted and planned to be installed in the Cleveland Public Library? Well, i’s going to be dedicated in just a few weeks, on October 14th. In the meantime, here’s a short film on the making of the statue, starring Pekar’s widow and collaborator Joyce Brabner.
Frank Doyle—a prolific writer for Archie—and Steve Skeates, a busy comics writers of the ’70s, have won the Finger Award, which honors two writers, one living, one deceased, whose contributions to the comics medium have been underappreciated. Two great choices. The awards will be presented during this year’s Eisner Awards.
While laid up with medical issues that preclude him doing serious writing, Kurt Busiek has set up a Formspring account, and, as you could extrapolate from reading his calm, well-reasoned* answers here at The Beat, there’s lots of info:
Chris Claremont reveals what might have been in X-Factor #1. Read on to discover Alan Moore’s involvement!
Bestselling fantasy author Diana Gabaldon, creator of the Outlander series, had a comics bestseller last year with her book THE EXILE, and in an interview at EW, she explains her earlier career writing Disney Comics:
Although battered and bruised by a wave of opprobrium over his work on the New 52, writer Scott Lobdell hasn’t given up, and he’s facing the music — or questions from the internet, as the case may be. After a lengthy layoff from high-profile comics assignments, Lobdell’s work on RED HOOD AND THE OUTLAWS and TEEN TITANS has met with a….mixed reaction. Or as he reportedly asked Gail Simone, “Why didn’t you TELL me?” In an interview with Comicvine he does cover some of the more controversial aspects of his recent work like…Starfire, the amnesiac sex addict.
This afternoon, Bill Willingham tweeted some typically frank thoughts about working on superhero comics — in recent years, he wrote JSA for DC, and before that Shadowpact, a group book featuring several of DC’s more supernatural characters…and Detective Chimp. And as many have said before him, working with recent brands of editorial direction tended to mitigate against spontaneity:
What writer has made the biggest contribution to the many universes of DC? Now that question can be answered, at least in terms of volume. Jason Kirk has been playing with the Grand Comic Database and come up with a list of the top 100 DC Comics by page count. You’ll need to go to the full link, but here’s the top 20 for arguments sake and some of Kirk’s talking points:
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