The News Blog of Comics Culture
Tweet Via Midtown Comics, A recent letter from Steve Ditko. A recent letter from Steve Ditko to one of our customers. He asked Steve what he remembered about designing Spidey’s costume. #ditko #spiderman (at Midtown Comics) 50 years is a long time…and Stan Lee doesn’t remember anything either. The intensely private Ditko has long refused [...]
TweetQuite a few remembrances of underground pioneer Spain Rodriguez, including this round-up of reactions from his peers at TCJ. Here’s Gary Panter’s imagined history: SPAIN looked to be exploring edgy scenes and choosing to do bad things and hang out with violent sociopathic folk in his comics and past at least–people that did BAAAAADD things!!! [...]
Tweet I am very sad to report that an email has been sent by Ron Turner: It is with great sadness that I inform you of the passing this morning of Spain Rodriguez. He passed at home with his daughter and wife at his bedside at about 7 this morning. He had been fighting cancer [...]
Via Millarworld — in case you have been sleeping and missed Grant Morrison’s thoughts on Alan Moore. We don’t know the credits for this, but it’s pretty awesome.
Johanna Draper Carlson finds a SF book from 24 years ago that predicted the kind of soul-stealing succubus that many fear wit a narrative involving a SF convention:
by Laura Sneddon–Over the last few weeks, my good friend Pádraig Ó Méalóid has been writing a series of articles about Alan Moore and Superfolks, which became an edgeways look at the long running friction between Moore and fellow writer, Grant Morrison. While Moore has previously spoken out about his thoughts on Morrison in various interviews, Morrison has generally kept quiet on the issue. There have been occasional barbs of course, and plenty of praise, but very little on the actual facts of the matter.
If you’re a digital hoarder like The Beat you may wake up one day and realize you have some bookmark files that go back 10 years or more. And then you may poke around and you may find something like. Bradley’s Almanac – comic book links which was last updated more than nine years ago.
TweetYou may remember Joe Caramagna dropping numerous hints over the past few weeks that he had a secret project in the works, a comic he would be writing at some point in future. Well! The project has been revealed as being The Further Travels of Wyatt Earp, a digital comic series about the life and times of the gunslinger. Written [...]
So, just to recap where we left off last time: it looks like Alan Moore has based all the big hits of his career on ideas he stole from Robert Mayer’s 1977 novel Superfolks. Various people, including Grant Morrison, Kurt Busiek, Lance Parkin, Joseph Gualtieri, and even Robert Mayer himself, have claimed at one point or another that Moore based a lot of his superhero work on various aspects of the book, specifically Marvelman, Watchmen, Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, and his proposal to DC Comics for the unpublished cross-company ‘event,’ Twilight of the Superheroes. But is any of this true, or might there be another explanation? To answer that, I’m going to go through the individual allegations or suggestions, and deal them one by one, to see how they hold up.
Tweet One of the events we missed last week was Steve DIitko’s 85th birthday, so a belated birthday greeting, and a link to Michel Fiffe’s appreciation and account of his long correspondence with Ditko. As thoughtful observers know, Ditko is not so much a recluse as he doesn’t like interviews….reading his comments excerpted by Fiffe, [...]
In 1977 Dial Press of New York published Robert Mayer’s first novel, Superfolks. It was, amongst other things, a story of a middle-aged man coming to terms with his life, an enormous collection of 1970s pop-culture references, some now lost to the mists of time, and a satire on certain aspects of the comic superhero, but would probably be largely unheard of these days if it wasn’t for the fact that it is regularly mentioned for its supposed influence on a young Alan Moore and his work, particularly on Watchmen, Marvelman, and his Superman story, Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? There’s also a suggestion that it had an influence on his proposal to DC Comics for the unpublished cross-company ‘event,’ Twilight of the Superheroes. But who’s saying these things, what are they saying, and is any of it actually true?
If the juicy, fact filled excerpts aren’t getting you to run down to the bookstore to pick up a copy of Sean Howe’s MARVEL: THE UNTOLD STORY, you must be dead to comics. io9 has a lengthy excerpt that goes right to the heart of the glory days of Lee and Kirby. I cut and pasted five different revelatory paragraphs before to settled on this one, regarding Carl Burgos, the original artist on the Human Torch, and his thoughts back in the 60s of trying to get the rights back.
Tweet Lost Art Books’ Joe Procopio has a gallery of The Lost Art of Heinrich Kley which explains that the German illustrator (1863-1945) had a great influence on the look of early Disney animated films: In fact, Disney himself held up a book of Kley’s drawings during a television appearance and said that they were [...]
TweetMarc Tyler Nobleman wrote Bill the Boy Wonder: The Secret Co-Creator of Batman, which came out a couple months back. The book is about Bill Finger, who was responsible for an awful lot of the Batman mythology, even though Batman (co-)creator Bob Kane was the only officially recognized creator. This is why they named the Bill Finger [...]
Tweet Via the Comics Journal’s excerpt of the book everyone is talking about, Sean Howe’s MARVEL: THE UNTOLD STORY. On February 17, 1992, the day the article [about the departure of the Image founders from Marvel] ran, Marvel’s stock dropped more than eleven dollars a share. The Los Angeles Times, CNN, and USA Today all [...]
Tweet Former Marvel assistant editor Scott Edelman riffles through the memory bag for this 1976 plane jumping exploit with then Marvel E-i-C Jim Shooter. What’s really amazing about this photo is that I didn’t know they had Instagram then!
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