Линкспам

[comicsandus]

Четверг!

Снова группами, потому что снова (очень) много. Каждому что-нибудь по вкусу, так?

Интервью

Интервью:

Нет, я не пощу сюда автоматом ссылки на все обнаруженные мной свежие интервью подряд. Многое из того, что попадается на глаза, довольно скучное, многое чётко привязано к конкретным проектам, которые хоть и выглядят любопытными, но не вызывают желания читать о них, не прочитав сами комиксы. А некоторые люди просто очень много говорят: нет, я при всём уважении не хочу читать и разбирать все пять тысяч интервью, которые Элисон Бехдель (да-да, та самая) дала в связи с выходом своей новой книги. Итак:

Scott Lobdell: Some People Are Going to Like You and Some People Aren't - начнём с самого... хм, у меня нет подходящего слова. Скотт Лобделл, сценарист Red Hood and the Outlaws говорит о своей работе. И отвечает на понятные вопросы. Ну то есть, по лично моему мнению, не отвечает и/или демонстрирует редкостное... непонимание произошедшего.

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I don't know what to do, because I know what reality is and I see what people say about it. If I had enough hours in the day, I could go on message boards and refute everything. It's like Superman in Bizarro World; you'd have Metropolis and then you have the Internet where "Me Unhappy." It's interesting.
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You can't write for individuals, and yet we live in a time and a place where the individual has become the center of their own movie. You sit in the audience and you see yourself projected onto the screen and the whole world is you. I guess that's the time we live in.
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In my head, Kory in the first issue is an outsider. The guys don't know much about her. Consequently, I felt we shouldn't know much about her. So on the page or two that she spoke or thought about life on earth and how she liked it and how she wasn't quite welcome, in my head I was like, "Okay, I want her to be the outsider, so I'm not going to discuss her much."


An Interview with Trina Robbins, Part 1, http://www.comicsbulletin.com/main/columns/interview-trina-robbins-part-2 - в качестве мета-тематического антипода предыдущему интервью Трины Роббинс, художницы, вместе с Форрестом Дж. Акерманом создавшей Вампиреллу, и в течение жизни как работавшей на "Большую Двойку", так и сотрудничавшей с андерграундными авторами.

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I didn't have quite the awareness that I have now. If I had, I would've looked at these comics and I would've gone, "Wow, Sue Storm of the Fantastic Four is such a wimp. She's such a wimp, everybody else has all these powers, and she does nothing except like, faint and...and weep." But I didn't have quite that awareness yet. You know, I can look back on it and see that, but I didn't then.
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It's really sad that Wonder Woman is, she's really a slave. She belongs to DC. She's not a living person. And so she's at their mercy, and she's at the mercy of whoever writes her and whoever draws her. You know, what is really weird to me, is that they don't have a bible for their characters. You know what a bible is, I don't mean like, "In the beginning, God created earth," I mean, showing how the characters are supposed to look, and you can't depart from that.
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Well, I object to the hypersexualization of all the superheroines.
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There's a difference between sexy and hyper-sexy. The way I have drawn Vampirella, she's definitely sexy, I designed the costume. But her costume, through the years, has gotten briefer and briefer. She has been hypersexualized, but not by me. I mean, I see drawings in which she's got the 'brokeback pose'. I would never do that.
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Well, the comics creators of course, just have to keep doing what they're doing. There are more women drawing comics now than ever before, and I'm not saying that only good comics can be done by women, because as I just said there's some really great stuff out there by guys, but it really helps that there are so many women doing comics now and doing graphic novels now, because they really do have, women and non-superhero men, have a different viewpoint; their stories are not always - in fact they usually are not - hyper-muscular guys beating each other up, they have real content, real story. And what you can do, as a blogger, is to write about them. I wrote to you about how I know what it's like to have an audience that hates you; you read my email, you know, I went through that, but I feel - you may not feel this way because you like to dress up as Batgirl, so you are a superhero fan - but my feeling is they're not going to change. The mainstream is not going to change. They have a constantly rotating supply of young male readers. They don't care. You heard Dan DiDio, did he care? Did he care if women read their books? They don't care, so go elsewhere. There are some wonderful graphic novels out there.


The Big Joe Casey Interview, Part Three - помните две ссылки неделю назад? Это - окончание. И это очень интересно.

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But beyond that, the more conscious aspect of it -- and I think the superhero in particular -- tends to be symbolic of all kinds of repression. And I want to break that, because, to me, the idea of the superhero should be the exact opposite; it should be the liberation of the self, the liberation of the individual, and I think you can have that without it descending into a Caligula-like existence where you have no morality.
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That's why I think that the superhero is that symbol of oppression. It's such a cliché to say this, but no one should be ashamed of it. It's part of our culture. The stereotype of the family exists for a reason. And I think everyone who has a real connection to comic books, and superhero comics specifically, can at least identify that fanboy mentality.
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The problem is that the culture has not gone that way. The culture has extended adolescent entertainment, if you want to call it that, really quite a long way into adulthood. So the culture doesn't demand for us to get rid of those things and just leave those things behind. I'm still dying to read really cool superhero comics that are totally inspirational and fulfill me.
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That's probably the best scene of any superhero movie that I've seen, because it would still be a great scene if it was in another movie.


CR Sunday Interview: Joseph Remnant - интервью Джозефа Ремнаннта, работавшего с Харви Пикаром над вышедшим уже после смерти Пикара комиксом Cleveland об одноимённом городе.

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The sсript was complete, so overall, I just had to illustrate what was there. However, I do feel like his passing created a pressure to really create something special and I probably worked a bit harder than I otherwise would have to make something that I thought was my absolute best. And there were a few things that I altered that I don't think I would've done if he were alive, mainly because I think was too intimidated by him to ask if I should or not.
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It just seems like such a half-baked argument to say that comics only work if they're drawn with simple and iconic imagery. There's definitely something to the idea that certain ways of drawing can interfere with the flow of a story, but I think it's much more complex than the usual arguments that you here. There are certain people who draw very simple and direct imagery, like Charles Schultz, or Seth, and it's great, but there's plenty of people who draw in a simple style and their comics are awful. Whenever I hear people make this argument, I always think to myself, "so do you think that Robert Crumb and Joe Sacco are terrible cartoonists?"
...
Yeah, I never intended to illustrate other people's stories. I wanted to go the Daniel Clowes route from the beginning. Somebody else sent my work to Harvey and I got a call from him one day and I couldn't say no. He was a hero of mine, so of course I was gonna work with him. The whole thing was kind of a two-year detour from where I wanted to go, but it's a detour that I'm glad I took.

"Мстители"

"Мстители":

Nineteen Thoughts About The Avengers - Мысли не то чтобы про "Мстителей" но вокруг них, про комиксы, историю и будущее. И эмоциональную бурю, переживаемую, когда объект твоей любви становится объектом любви всеобщей.

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I am becoming more and more convinced that history is going to judge us poorly for devoting so much of our society's dwindling resources to making these monolithic "entertainments." Sure, $220 million dollars might not seem like a lot compared to the national debt, but let's be serious: in a hundred years these things are going to look an awful lot like the pyramids of Giza. Gaze upon our works, ye mighty.
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Is it too cynical to think that we've passed the point where creators' rights issues could ever gain any kind of traction in mass culture? Millions of people love The Avengers and a few thousands nerds and a handful of commendable pundits didn't do a whit to add to the general public's awareness of Jack Kirby or Don Heck.
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You want to know what I find really depressing these days? The Marvel superheroes used to be figures of the counterculture. I don't want to press on this point to hard, because it's easy to lose sight of the fact that Stan Lee pushed the characters as being part of the sixties counterculture when he saw that he could leverage a small but enthusiastic readership of college-aged kids into cultural cache.
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So while the center dynamic for the franchise has always been the dynamic between Captain America, Thor, and Iron Man, the heart of the book lies with the numerous secondary and tertiary characters who compose the team's mainstays... When the Avengers is simply a conglomeration of the company's most popular heroes, you lose the crux of what made the book so popular for so many years. But, it must be said, you sell a lot more comics with Wolverine, Captain America, Iron Man, and Spider-Man than with Deathcry, Mantis, US Agent, and Wonder Man.
...
One of my favorite things about the Avengers, historically speaking, is how the book always managed to find a way to balance the corny bombast of "Earth's Mightiest Heroes!" with an appropriate and quite endearing level of banality.... These plot lines aren't likely to appear in future Marvel Studios films.
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All these wonderful stories and situations and characters with whom we grew up, whom we all loved and with whom we all identified, they become something entirely different and entirely alien when projected twenty-feet-tall on the surface of the movie screen. They're not "ours" anymore, no - but we shouldn't feel too bad because they aren't even the same thing that we once had. Onscreen it has become something ugly, shiny, perfectly sculpted, and undoubtedly sturdy down to its bones, but nonetheless alien... But the Avengers was always - always a book predicated on the fact that superheroes were an everyday fact of life and that their adventures - while thrilling and strange and dangerous - were still just another Tuesday at the office for the men and women who did them. That's not a feeling that Marvel seems keen on replicating onscreen anytime soon. It's easier - far easier - to make their superheroes into stentorian gods than average Joes.
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What has become increasingly difficult to recall through the haze of hindsight, obscured by the obfuscating power of billions of dollars of worldwide gross, is that The Ultimates, for all its singular problems, was also satire.


Вокруг примерно того же кружат:

Avengers: Beware the Boom

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But we comics fans have to wonder if all that attention, all that slow build-up and buzz, was only just a precursor for the giant onslaught. We have to wonder if this means that the bigwigs in Hollywood will come a-calling again, and what that will mean for the comics industry and its fans.
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One of the great, amazing things about comics is that there are absolutely no limits to the work that can be included on a comic page. You can do anything in comics, but will this rush for Hollywood bucks result in comics that don't really expand or embrace readers' imaginations? Could this result in a dearth of incredibly imaginative comics like Prophet or Savage Dragon or King City?


The Fifth Color | Comic books can never die

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With as much success as Marvel Studios has seen this year and others, the doors are wide open for all sorts of properties to find fresh new life in a whole new medium. But none of this brave new frontier of pop culture seems to really involve the actual comics medium.
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The more comics hit big among the mainstream and attract more and more of a casual audience, how we view comics as a whole changes.


These Comics-Makers Created The Avengers - люди, создавшие "Мстителей такими, какие они есть. От Кирби до Миллара и немного дальше.


Gag Filled Marvel Cartoon - мультик "Disassembled.", который все уже видели.


Things I Love About Comics: Hawkeye - комиксный Хоукай: за что можно любить этого клоуна.

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Why do I love Hawkeye? Because he’s absurd. It is fundamentally a crazy idea that a glorified carny would one day wake up and decide to show off his archery skills by becoming a full-time superhero. It’s something that shows off just how wildly implausible a superhero universe is; men in powered armor and Norse gods are actually easier to suspend one’s disbelief for, because there’s no way of knowing how the real world would react to a figure of myth showing up in the modern world. But we all know how it works in the real world if you decide to practice archery until you can hit the bullseye every time, and then proceed to decide to glue bombs to your arrows and fight criminals (while wearing what looks, let’s face it, like a purple dress), and the answer is, “YOU FUCKING DON’T.” The very existence of Hawkeye is a sign that you have left real-world logic behind, which absolutely infuriates some people but evokes in others a sense of giddy delight.
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And it comes out in the text. Hawkeye is perpetually dismissed by villain after villain. “An ordinary man with a bow can’t be a threat” is a common refrain over the decades, despite the fact that for the majority of human history, ordinary men with bows were difference-makers on the battlefield. And time and time again, Hawkeye makes bad guys pay for overlooking his talents, because he’s not ordinary at all, even though he has no powers or abilities.


Possible Identity For Loki's Staff In Marvel's The Avengers - вы тоже любите фанатские гипотезы, так?

Создатели и история

Создатели и история:

The Inquisition of Mr. Marvel - Стэн Ли... спорная фигура. Нет, правда, без шуток.

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The difference between Stan and Jack was that Stan, in addition to being a writer, was management. He was Marvel's editor-in-chief and de facto art director; later, he was Marvel's publisher.
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"I don't know," Stan says. "I haven't had reason to think about it that much." Five-second pause. "I think, if somebody creates something, and it becomes highly successful, whoever is reaping the rewards should let the person [who] created it share in it, certainly. But so much of it is — it goes beyond creating. A lot of people put something together, and nobody really knows who created it, they're just working on it, y'know? But little by little, the artists and the writers now are a different breed than they were, and most of them, if they create anything new, they insist that they be part owners of it. Because they know what happened to Siegel and Shuster, and to me, and to people like that. I don't think it's a problem anymore. They make much more money than they used to make, when I was there. Proportionately.


Tezuka Osamu & The Rectification of Mickey - Осаму Тэдзука и влияние Диснея. И не только.

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It was a milieu he knew intimately, being on the receiving end of its lax attitudes toward originality, copyright, and production values on repeated occasions. He saw his books circulate in pirate editions, for which he received not a sen. He also saw single figures, single panels, full pages, and multi-page spreads of his reappearing in books by artists whose names were half not-real and whose publishers lasted but a few seasons. His also saw his characters, a little wonky and bulbous at first but soon smoothed and tightened, turned soggy and scratchy after being put through the wash. There was not much Tezuka could do about this. He might have at least taken comfort in the fact that the proliferation of pseudo-Tezukas was a sign that the real one – himself – was giantly popular.
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There are a couple of basic lessons to be learned from this. In some cases, kakihan might have killed an artist’s touch, but being a manual process it could also add the plate-maker’s own. Ostensibly the ideal of plate processing should be the invisibility of the plate-maker. The problem with kakihan was that the plate-maker’s handiwork was too visible.
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Considering how often Tezuka’s own manga were subject to manual plate-making, it is more than likely that he was thinking of his own work in the hands of these chagrined children. But considering the panel sequence, the reader of Manga Classroom is led to identify with the children’s disappointment through an image of an ugly Mickey. Why the confusion? Why the substitutions?
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How might degraded Mickeys and degraded Tezukas go together? Tezuka had loved Mickey Mouse since childhood. As an artist who respected Disney, it would be easy to argue that he sympathized with Mickey’s fate in akahon simply as a fan. But the connection can also be made otherwise, and without projecting into Tezuka’s mind. Evidence exists in print.


Grumpy Old Fan | The man who made the Darknight Detective - о создателях Бэтмена и том, получили ли они достойную награду.

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The side of corporately-owned superhero comics we like to see — the one that helps mitigate the “exploitation” end — depends on the goodwill generated by that vision of a great chain of professionals, working in vast collaboration on characters who have transcended their origins and become undying pop-culture archetypes.
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I believe that Batman as we know him today exists only through Bill Finger’s involvement, and I think Finger deserves to be recognized officially as his co-creator. I don’t think it’s sufficient to assert that the creation of Batman ended with Bob Kane’s original sketches, especially since that wasn’t the version which National/DC ended up buying.


Для людей, даже более... особенных, чем я: Дэйв Сим о комиксах Стива Дитко (раз и два). Если вам ничего не говорят оба этих имени, вам туда ходить незачем.

Любопытные (и красивые) комиксы

Любопытные (и красивые) комиксы:

Bird Boy, Salsa Invertebraxa и старые абстрактные комиксы.

ЛГБТ и женщины в ваших комиксах!

ЛГБТ и женщины в ваших комиксах:

Why It Is Important to Have Queer Comics - статья от автора Jesus Loves Lesbians, Too.

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The stereotype that adult comic readers are single, socially inept males has also been thrown out the window when considering the mainstream success of graphic novels and the surge of female writers and readers alike. And yet, despite the overthrown censorship and the expanding readership and success of popular comic driven movies, there is still a severe lack of LGBT comics on the shelves.
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I distinctly remembered what it was like being a Christian, falling in love with a woman, and not feeling like anyone could possibly relate to what I was going through. The Christian friends didn't get the "gay part," and the gay friends couldn't fathom the "Christian part." My mom purchased a few books recommended by her church friends, but unfortunately (and this may or may not be surprising to you), they were not very affirming or encouraging. Part of the inspiration for my comic stemmed from the experience of just wanting to know that someone, somewhere, knew what I was feeling.
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You can get your action fix, your humor fix, and your queer fix all in one sweet, fun-filled comic series. This is a series you can give your nephew, your cousin, your sister, or your partner, gay or straight, and they will enjoy it, because who doesn't love to laugh? Better yet, they may even relate to the endearing story of a superhero trying to break into a group while struggling with his own attractions and effeminate tendencies.


Top Ten Gay Couples in Comics


The Spandex Closet: 10 Superheroes Who Need To Come Out


Roll out the roles - Пол Тобин, комикс-сценарист, писавший, помимо прочего, о приключениях многих героинь о гендерных ролях в комиксах.

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Much of my writing to date has been done in comics, in a field where gender roles are very established, and they’re frankly not established very well.
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Women in comics, and in genre fiction, films, etc, are far too often just caricatures of female body parts. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m entirely in favor of beautiful women, it’s just that I don’t need to have a constant reminder that a particular beautiful woman has a really nice rump or a particularly fine chest. Really. Honestly. I got that. I wrote that down in my notebook, right after my notation on mammoth-punching. I keep hoping all this will change… that comics and other entertainment media won’t need the constant titillation factor anymore, now that the average person can amaze themselves by finding their weight in porn with a few clicks of a button. With the internet at our command, do we really still need a leg shot from Supergirl in order to make our day?
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And we might have different ways of achieving our goals, but that doesn’t mean that each and every step on the journey needs to be feminine or masculine. It can just be about a person. Pure and simple. A person. That’s perhaps the most important aspect of a gender role in fiction, the fact that we, as authors, are very rarely writing about a gender; we are writing about an individual person.

DC

DC:

Five Years Later: The Oral History of Countdown to Final Crisis - история Каунтдауна устами его создателей.

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Indeed, what can be said about Countdown that has not already been said about the Vietnam War? It was a quagmire, an unwinnable war of attrition that even the planners could not find a graceful way to end. It left a psychic scar on the nation, and destroyed the best years of countless young men’s lives.
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Countdown may have been a lightning-in-a-bottle, textbook demonstration of what you get when the entire publishing line of a company is hashed out by people who have never been hired to be creators on a dry erase board, then handed down piecemeal to people actually hired to be creators.


Joe Simon, The F.B.I. and the Strange Case of the Missing Artwork - история пропажи оригинальных рисунков Джо Саймона из офисов DC. Это детектив, да. С отсканированными документами!

Вещи, которые вы (почему-то) можете купить

Вещи, которые вы (почему-то) можете купить:

Тостеры с "Хранителями" - люди уже глумятся.

"Конверсы" с DC-символикой!

Духи "Мстителей"!

Банку газировки с прилагающимся Самым грустным Бэтменом в мире!

Ну и разное

Ну и разное:

Comic Book Glossary: Polyptych - использование полиптиха в комиксах. С примерами.

Clan In The Front, Let Your Feet Stomp - не знаю почему, но эта колонка Такера Стоуна меня особо зацепила. Наверное, дело в начале.

Comicscape No.3 out now - and it's free! - новость о выходе бесплатного фэнзина о комиксах и ссылка, по которой его можно скачать.

FFF Results Post #293 -- At The Water Cooler - читатели The Comics Reporter вспоминают самые, по их мнению, смешные сцены в комиксах. И да, многие из них нам показывают.


Okay, I'm done.