Comics Media

Recorded at Publishers Weekly, it's  More To Come, the weekly podcast of comics news, interviews and discussion with Calvin Reid, Kate Fitzsimons and The Beat’s own Heidi MacDonald. In this week's podcast  Heidi interviews comics...

Randy Queen is a skilled comics artist who often draws attractive women. He's best known for Darkchyde but he's worked on many other books over the years like Red Sonja and Witchblade. Escher Girls is a tumblr that posts pictures of ridiculously drawn comics women. As you do. Some of Queen's art was featured on the site, and he didn't like it. So he used the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) to sport these posts to Tumblr and get them removed.

If you are like The Beat, you've noticed that the informed writing styling of Steve Morris have been greatly lessened on this site of late. While that makes us sad, we're happy to report...

This will almost certainly be the ultimate Con Disaster story for our times, as least for a year or so. DashCon held over the weekend in Schaumberg, IL, was a first year show aimed at Tumblr culture, planned as a meet-up for Tumblr users and such favorites as Welcome to Night Vale, a transmedia podcast that is sort of a Lake Woebegone for Tumblr-ites, Baker Street Babes, cartoonists such as Noelle Stevenson and…Doug Jones? You know the guy who was in Hellboy and Pan's Labyrinth.

In last week's issue of Captain America, #22, two characters were shown having a few glasses of wine and tumbling into bed only to wake up the next morning wondering what happened. The characters in question were Sam Wilson, aka The Falcon, one of the few prominent African-American characters in both the Marvel comics and film universes. The woman was Jet Black, aka Jet Zola, the daughter of Arnim Zola. Although she runs around in a skimpy costume reminiscent of Leeloo from The Fifth Element, this is perhaps explained by her having been raised in an alien dimension. Although she was born only a few years ago in real world time, she has aged more in comics time.

As long as we're harkening back to the internet of 10 years ago, as we are in this AMAZING THRILLING BEAT 10TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL, one of the great hallowed traditions of the internet came under fire yesterday, with TCJ.com co-editor Tim Hodler wonderedif TCJ.com should turn off comments and encourage a "letter's page" instead. Oddly, this inspired a flurry of comments. The "letters page" idea goes back to Blood & Thunder the letters page on the old print Comics Journal where industry titans would throw rocks at each other. Seriously these are a goldmine of Bronze Age defensiveness and invective. Would the same spirit be upheld in a world with instantaneous communication in every medium known to humankind? Not sure.

Tumblr users who have been reveling in its ability to share content—and block trolls via the plug-in Disqus—got a rude shock today when due to code problems, users found their custom themes disabled and their comment boards wiped out. Among the missing—DC Women Kicking Ass's lively comments section. DCWKA's Sue took to Twitter to mourn the loss, and just as I write this it looks like she may have found the missing posts, but others were still searching.

While I don't know what was the book of MoCCA at ECCC it was DEFINITELY Lumberjanes, which launched in a convention exclusive edition. With superstar Noelle Stevenson, and new talents Grace Ellis and Brooke...

David Brothers is one of the most accomplished writers-about-comics around, a blogger who recently moved into the industry himself as a member of the Image Comics staff. Having made a name for himself on...

Via. More if you poke around.

Talya Modlin is a Chicago based cartoonist/art type.

A few months ago there was a Kerfuffle over a comics which some indie comics enthusiasts thought was artistically exciting, while others couldn't see that for all the racism in these comics. I wrote about it at the time, and wondered if indie comics—so lively and vibrant—were actually being given a larger social context.