The News Blog of Comics Culture
Tweet The disintegration of the newspaper business continued this week when the Syracuse Post-Standard announced it was going to a three-times-a-week schedule and laying off 115 employees, including staff cartoonist Frank Cammuso. The Daily Cartoonist caught up with Cammuso and shows he wasn’t caught entirely unawares: A: You’ve done a lot of cartooning outside of [...]
Tweet In advice to an aspiring cartoonist, ABA finalist Gene Luen Yang lays out the dichotomy of career paths: You have to decide whether self-expression is more important to you or making money from your art is more important to you. Whaaa-at? Is there no middle ground? They’re not mutually exclusive in the long run, [...]
One of the topics we’ve all had our eyes on here at Creator Watch 2012 is the Jim Starlin Situation. In brief, as you all know, Thanos was teased as a villain at the end of THE AVENGERS, and the announced Guardians of the Galaxy seems to be setting up some kind of cosmic menace for Marvel’s movie universe. And it just so happens that Thanos — and Gamora, who is a member of the GotG — were both created by Starlin as part of his run on Warlock.
In the case of Thanos, Starlin has posted evidence showing that he created the character prior to working at Marvel. And when asked about the character’s appearance in the third highest grossing movie of all time, it turned out that he had been in the dark about it. As if that wasn’t ominous enough, a Thanos miniseries to be written by Joe Keatinge was announced with great fanfare and then very hastily canceled, with no reason given, leaving room for all kinds of speculation that the character might be in some kind of ownership tussle.
After reading Bon Alimagno’s excellent interview/evaluation with colorist Erick Arciniega on iFanboy, I decided that it was time for more of us to start jumping on the coloring bandwagon. Getting the right colorist on a comic can be crucial to the success of the book, and yet there’s really very little coverage of this side of the industry available. With that in mind I contacted colorist-whizz (and nicest man alive) Val Staples, whose recent credits include books like Swamp Thing, New Mutants, Deadpool and Hulk, to get a basic insight into his life as a colorist.
Brooklyn is, despite the gentrification covering a huge swath of the entire borough, still home to a few people who don’t shop at Kitsuné; and most of these urban poor seem to be cartoonists, which Brooklyn also has a huge population. The local website Brokelyn catches up with a few of them for survival tips. Brendan Leach, Leslie Stein and Lisa Hanawalt, (whose book on farts for children is excerpted above) give their recipes for ketchup soup and other practical hints:
Revisiting the debate over whether the Image model is as viable as the company model for creators to make a living.
CBR has a nice roundtable on creator-owned comics that rounds up Robert Kirkman, Mark Millar, and Steve Niles. Since they are all “strongly for” the piece doesn’t really ignite any banter, but it does allow many long, entertaining manifestos. For instance, how Millar terrorized Alan Moore when he was a teen.
Marvel is going all cosmic in the movie world, and Thanos, a character created by Jim Starlin, is at the heart of it.
The evidence is unavoidable. First it was the Thanos cameo at the end of the Avengers—supposedly thrown in because director Joss Whedon was a fan of the character and a cosmic storyline is integral to keeping him on board for Avengers 2.
Creators, talent, architects, makers…maybe we should just call them the Bullpen.
I’ll make it short and sweet: creators have to create. Marvel and DC no longer allow them to do that, except within rigidly proscribed guidelines. And the Paolo Riveras of the world are going to have to move on. It might not be too long before the Big Two are just steppingstones to get your name out there for even bigger things.
Just before his death a few days ago, former comics writer Robert L. Washington III gave an interview to CBR that makes for very sobering reading.
Nat Gertler has made a chart, and even though his name is not Clarissa, it might just explain it all for you.
Continuing the thread of inquiry that has been going on here at The Beat of late, Dean Haspiel has a nifty little slideshow for you.
Ruben Bolling, aka Ken Fisher, is much loved in most quarters for Tom the Dancing Bug, his long running, surgical strike weekly political comic. Of course, the field for weekly political comics is not exactly busting at the seams with dough. So recently Bolling came up with a new idea, called The Inner Hive which would offer a subscription model for goodies to readers:
Like any good cartoonist and comics evangelist, a road trip cannot just be days of blasting Mates of State and stopping at roadside attractions like Corn Palace. No, no, on my trip from The Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, VT to Fantagraphics in Seattle, WA will be punctuated by a few stops to conduct portfolio reviews and drop off some Schulz Library tote bags at great comic book stores across America.
Creator/publisher Zak Sally weighs in on the Kirby Matter, and the actions he suggests are more proactive:
actually, over the course of writing this, i think i DO have an answer– not THE answer, but an idea anyway: it’s somewhat presumptive on my part, and it is NOT what “should” happen, but it falls under the category of “the least you could do”.
Recent Comments