Неужели уже четверг?
Я... думаю, мне нужен редактор. Злой.
Интервью: Скотт Снайдер, "Мстители", вебкомиксыИнтервью:
Scott Snyder: Man of the Year! - Скотт Снайдер говорит со всеми подряд, и от него я уже устала так же, как пару недель назад устала от Бехдель, но это интервью вроде получше остальных.
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But the only way to write Batman, really, if you want to write Batman; is you have to pretend like you made him up. Because you have to do it in such a way where you understand that you love the character enough to feel ownership, despite all the other versions of the character you’ve read before. Meaning your version will honor and be a dignified version, be your own take, but will also build on a history of all the Batmans that came before. So my Batman isn’t Frank Miller’s Batman, but that Frank Miller Batman is in the DNA of my Batman, do you know what I’m saying? The only way you can do it is to be not worried too much about whether your Batman is the right one from before.
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What I love is when I see someone that has a message or something that they’re interested in, whether they’re telling a Batman story or they’re telling a comedic story or whatever, and that’s there on the page and they’re interested in expressing it. What I try and help them do is to figure out ways of doing that, and find the best way to articulate their idea. So maybe that means starting with a flashback, maybe that means starting with a flash-forward, maybe it means starting in the action -- but it’s really what your comic is about. Meaning, all those choices are dictated by what the thing means to you and what it’s about; it always has to come from that. What is your comic? What is it about? What are you exploring? What does it mean to you? Why does it matter to you? And then letting that become a series of decisions which dictate everything you decide artistically. Everything is in service of getting that across.
Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray Talk AME-COMI Digital First - внимание: эксперимент! DC Comics решило выпустить линейку комиксов по мотивам созданных AME COMI статуэток. Начали с Чудо-Женщины. На бумаге серия не выходит, распространяясь исключительно в онлайн-форме. Выглядит... любопытно. Костюм смехотворен настолько, что он делает поворот на триста шестьдесят градусов и из ужасного становится прекрасным, героиня совсем не похожа на то. что мы о ней знаем, а особо пластиковой покраске почти удаётся убить рисунок Аманды Коннер, но, думаю, как минимум детям должно понравится.
Неделю назад Грег Рака и Брайан Бендис говорили друг с другом, а теперь они тут по отдельности:
CBR Sunday Conversation: Greg Rucka - интервью про парки развлечений. Нет, правда.
Brian Bendis Blowout:
Part 1: All Things AVENGERS
Part 2: SPIDER-MEN
Part 3: POWERS and the Post-AvX Future
Wide World of Webcomics: Jungle Fun of HOMINIDS - интервью с авторами вебкомикса Hominids.
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The webcomic world is an interesting community where people really seem to support each other and give great feedback. You can really grow a dedicated fan base where the gap between creator and audience shrinks considerably.
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I think its immediate impact is that independent creators have more opportunity than ever to have their original ideas to get noticed and be potentially successful. And it’s an opportunity for bigger companies to take notice of something they might have overlooked in the past.
Ну и для тех, кто хочет посмотреть на художников в движении: Дэйв Гиббонс, Фрэнк Куайтли и Эми Ридер. Последнее поверхностно, но интереснее всего, поскольку посвящено не конкретному проекту, а... просто болтовне.
Статьи с идеями и размышлениямиСтатьи с идеями и размышлениями:
On Second Thought, I Really Don’t Like Wonder Woman, Part 1, On Second Thought, I Really Don’t Like Wonder Woman, Part 2 - Чарльз Риз про то, что оригинальная "Чудо-Женщина" Марстона воспевала авторитаризм и была вовсе не так феминистична, как принято считать. С автором статьи в комментариях спорят помимо прочих Ной Берлатски и во второй части немного я. Дискуссия, впрочем, быстро уходит в дебри. Тем, кого пугает слово "феминизм" по ссылкам лучше не ходить.
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If there’s a danger to Marston’s feminism, it’s in his tranquil submission to a “loving” authority. Don’t ultra-nationalists love their country? He circumvents this problem by making his heroes as anodyne as possible. We should trust the Amazonians, because we know they are pure and virtuous. Granted, this hardly sets Wonder Woman apart from all the other classic DC heroes, but isn’t that a problem? Even a feminist heroine can be as indicative of the fascistic aesthetic as any of her male counterparts. Marston’s creation helped with equality in representation, but it did so by presenting some ideas that any libertarian-minded type should find fairly repellant (and by ‘libertarian’ I mean the philosophical belief in free will, not necessarily the political variety).
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If Marston’s argument for being bound doesn’t sound like fascism’s bundle of sticks, it’s because his fantasy of Wonder Woman always has her using Amazonian power in the most decent way possible. Well, that, and because fascism is assumed to be the prime example of knuckle-dragging masculinity.
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Although Wonder Woman regularly uses dominating tactics (the lasso, fisticuffs) they’re always reactive (the villain strikes first). Like Billy Jack, she wants to love, not fight, but she’ll kick your ass if you force her. There’s no question why the Saturnic girls hate Paradise Island so much; it’s clearly better than their home. We have nothing to fear from the Amazonian matriarchy, because it’s as submissive as we’re supposed to be. They only use psychic domination on caricatural villains. This is your basic superhero moral gobbledygook, only encoded as feminist. Azzarello got something right in his interpretation: if this were a rape/revenge movie, the Amazonians wouldn’t be the avenging party. My sympathies lie with Eviless.
Marketing Through Piracy - Марк Уэйд о том, что он не боится интернет-пиратства.
Batman can't come out as gay – his character relies on him being in denial - Бэтмен не может совершить каминг-аут, и гомофобия тут не причём.
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Bruce would be a little happier, a little less uptight, a little less tortured. He wouldn't have so much to prove, so much to hide. He wouldn't have to act like such a badass all the time. He might not growl so much.
And that's why Batman can't come out: because his whole character relies on him being in denial.
Batman is a dynamic figure, wrestling with different sides of his own personality, constantly shifting between different forms and resisting any single definition. If he came out as gay, he wouldn't be the moody, difficult figure we've grown to love; and ironically, by declaring himself as happily gay, Batman – as a cultural icon – would actually be less fascinating, less complex, less queer.
The Middle Ground #105 | How long has this been going on? - о разном отношении к пропуску сроков комиксами корпоративными и авторскими и о том, что возможно дело в разном отношении к самим комиксам.
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In theory, I’m all in favor of the creators having full control of their stories and I’m definitely in favor of creators being able to tell the whole story from start to finish. But … there’s this part of my brain that also goes, “Well, it’s a Superman comic, I feel like that that should be able to be cranked out monthly” for reasons that I can’t quite understand. There’s something about the already-extant production line mentality about superhero books that makes me not only perfectly okay with creative ownership being shared on them, but also almost prefers it: Instead of artistic expressions, they feel like “product,” if that makes sense, and the timeliness of product takes priority for me in a way I can’t quite explain.
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Nonetheless, I have drawn this strange and unusual line that it’s one thing for ongoing franchise books to be compromised in order to hit their release dates, but not other books, which… surprises me, I guess.
In Defence Of Race, Gender And Orientation Bending - почему стоит менять персонажам расу, пол и ориентацию.
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New characters are rarely embraced, heritage characters where the mantle is passed down from character to character, the name remaining the same, eventually find the originals returned from the grave to seize it back again. Which means the vast majority of the main characters were created in the thirties and sixties, but now in a world that looks and acts very different - and expects different things. The only way to present a company’s characters in a way that looks vaguely representative of its audience and cultural context is to change those very characters.
Fandom Is Jointly Owned - почему фанаты, которых возмущает появление слэшеров неправы. Для тех, кто всё это читает, бонус: в комментариях ссылка на интересное обоснование нелюбви киношных Тони Страка и Стива Роджерса друг к другу.
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Which is, of course, 99% correct. (It’d be 100%, except that I’ve always felt like Cap and Iron Man’s arguing doesn’t mask a simmering romantic tension between the two men that could erupt at any moment. Cap and Iron Man’s arguing actually masks a much deeper and more fundamental dislike that the two have for each other based on the fact that Iron Man really is a dangerous control freak whose actions, while well-meaning, betray the fact that he actually is so elitist that he thinks that he should be allowed to run other people’s lives, and Cap finds that morally abhorrent. A much better slash pairing would be Cap and Hawkeye, whose macho banter practically screams, “We’re boning each other in the locker room after missions.” But I digress.) The point is, arguing that “this isn’t canon!” or “these characters wouldn’t do that!” is a disingenuous mask that this particular breed of fanboys use to attack fiction that makes them uncomfortable.
On "Grifter" #9 & "Cradlegrave": What's The Point Of An Establishing Shot? What's The Point Of A Story? - на примере двух комиксов нам интересно рассказывают, как надо и как не надо показывать место действия.
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In short, Clark first tells us that we're looking at "snow" and "mountains" in the most general of senses, before giving us a super-bloke speeding across them while being followed by super-baddies, and that's all he tells us beyond implying what an awesomely cool dude Grifter is. What the scene might actually look like in any detail and specificity, what it might feel like to be there, what thoughts and emotions might be inspired from a smart-minded manipulation of the material on the page; these simply aren't things which Clark and Liefeld are concerned with.
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It's not just that Clark seems to have no interest in the backdrops he's presenting, with their embarrassingly thin details apparently constructed from vague memories of Christmas wrapping paper and a postcard image generated in less than 0.33 seconds by Google. No, his fascination appears to lie solely with the secondary-art-market-friendly, full-figure posing money-shot which dominates his design to the degree to which we're not even shown Grifter's snow-board in the third panel, which is actually intended to show, yes, Grifter snowboarding. The heroic frown, the obsessive attention to the folds of the hero's trousers, his beautifully wind-tussled hair; these are the apparently vital issues which Clark frets over.
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By contrast, Edmund Bagwell's establishing shots of the sink estate in Cradlegrave are so rich in information that the purposeful despair expressed in John Smith's sсript fairly radiates off of the page. Has there ever been a panel which could make a reader shudder at the inescapable, soul-corroding reek of a scene as that of the frame above?
Статьи, из которых можно узнать что-то новое не про супергероевСтатьи, из которых можно узнать что-то новое не про супергероев:
Comics College | Charles Burns - кто такой Чарльз Бёрнс, и почему вы хотите про него знать. "Чёрная дыра" этого автора у нас издавалась.
My Five Most Influential Croatian Comic Book Artists - пять самых важных хорватских художников комиксов.
Tomb of Dracula #2 - самая по мнению автора странная и пугающая из проиллюстрированных Стивом Дитко историй. Сценарист - Марв Вольфман!
One-Artist Anthology Comics - история "антологий одного автора" в комиксах. Крамб, Честер Браун, Дитко, Клоувз, Братья Эрнандез и прочие.
Pop Art’s Pop: Illustrator Winsor McCay, a neglected American master - статья про автора "Маленького Немо".
Adapting Lovecraft - история адаптаций Лавкрафта и отсылок к нему в комиксах, от Heavy Metal до Алана Мура и далее. Сверхъестественный ужас, щупальца и секс.
The Comic Book Scare and the New Criticism - история первоначальной маргинализации медиума.
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As opposed to responses to the rise of the novel in 1809 or cinema in 1909, in 1949 the anxiety about comic books was definitely not that they produced a dangerously illusory alternative reality. The danger was never that comics were too immersive, but that they were not immersive enough. No one can read a comic book, no matter how well executed (as only a select few were in those early days of the comic book industry, which relied heavily on a sweatshop system of production), and forget that these are made things: someone drew the comic, someone lettered it, and so on.
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New Criticism in many ways was brought into contact with the tension between its ideals and reality by the rise of the comic book. On the one hand, the New Criticism was motivated by a democratizing impulse, seeking to bring discrimination through critical discipline to a new generation of readers. On the other hand, its methods dramatically widened the gulf between how people actually read and how the critics were now telling them they should read. It was not just “good” reading material versus “bad”: at the heart of the New Criticism and the postwar humanities in general was the teaching of right ways to read versus proscribed and even pathologized reading methods. Bad readers read for emotions, for feelings, for chills and tears and other bodily responses (“skin-bristling”): their reading methods, like the reading materials themselves, were fundamentally pornographic, even masturbatory as suggested in the illustration accompanying an article about the comics scare in Kiplinger’s Personal Finance. Good readers, on the other hand, read for ideas, liberated of individuated emotions and individual bodies: their reading methods, even more than their materials, are cultivated, as Trask puts it, “against a mass culture that is understood, on the one hand, to wallow in its own emotional excess and, on the other hand, to feign its sincerest values.”
Комиксы и эксперименты с формойКомиксы и эксперименты с формой:
How Batman Got You Interested in Architecture. Batman: Death By Design - комикс про архитектуру. То есть про Бэтмена. То есть про архитектуру.
The Remarkable Comic That Is Sioux Warrior - трансформирующийся комикс.
No Man’s Land by Blexbolex - повествование, составленное из фрагментов завихрений сознания самоубийцы.
The Return of the Cosmic Techno-Gods from Space - три фантастических комикса.
Mark Beyer: More Disturbing Evenings - комиксы Марка Бейера, альтернативщика-ветерана.
Рецензии и местами рекомендации
Рецензии и местами рекомендации:
Небольшое предисловие: да, я редко ссылаюсь на рецензии. Все дело в том, что хотя рецензий на комиксы пишется огромное количество, интересных среди них очень мало. Большинство рецензирующих работают в жанре "изложение", предпочитая не говорить о комиксах, а рассказывать про них, изредка приправляя сказанное оценкой, а я не знаю как вам, а мне читать, кто, что и как сделал просто не интересно. Такой отзыв может убить даже интересный материал: я, например, подозреваю, что MIND MGMT - любопытная вещь, но из множества написанных про этот комикс слов вдохновляет разве что короткая ругалка от The Savage Critics. Кстати, злые отзывы обычно интереснее: их авторы во-первых в среднем больше сосредоточены на самовыражении, а во-вторых (и это связано с "во-первых") заметно больше нацелены на развлечение читателей. К сожалению, большинство ориентированных на мейнстрим сайтов по очевидным причинам категорически беззубо-позитивны (я не уверена, например, что на Comic Vine знают, что можно ставить оценку ниже трёх из пяти), мейнстримно-ориентированные блоги исполнены категорического фанатства, которое при знаке "плюс" та же беззубо, а при знаке "минус" плевательно-злобно, но без развлекательности того же Такера Стоуна, а про альтернативу мало кто хочет читать, да и ссылаться каждый раз на одни и те же места неудобно.
К чему это я? К тому, что на этой неделе было много неплохих рецензий, и вот вам список, организованный по нарастанию "высоколобости":
Thor: The Mighty Avenger - Thor the Mighty Avenger #1-4, Journey Into Mystery #83-84
'The Influencing Machine' Shows the Medium Isn't the (Entire) Message
On Batman Incorporated #1: Reader's Roulette Round 2:1 - отзыв отрицательный.
Louis Riel - биграфический комикс Честера Брауна о канадском ревлюционере.
Spandexless Reads | 05-24-2012 - большой отзыв на Deadenders Эда Брубакера и Уоррена Плиса в конце.
The End of the Fucking World #1-5 | Charles Forsman
Six Observations about Alison Bechdel’s Graphic Archive Are You My Mother? - да, предсказуемо TCJ. Да, не столько рецензия, сколько статья.
Ну а теперь слегка расслабимся - наконец-то снова супергерои и суперзлодеи: Бэтмен, Люди Икс, Танос и прочиеНу а теперь слегка расслабимся - наконец-то снова супергерои:
Kurt Busiek on Why Batman Is Not Green Lantern - почему Бэтмен не получил кольцо, зачем нужна общая вселенная и это страшное слово континьюити: "Shared universes are fun as long as they make reading comics more fun, and not fun when they start to tangle things up and mess with the individual series concepts. When that happens, you can either go with it even though it messes things up, in the name of logic and continuity maintenance, or you can sweep it under the rug and look the other way".
Shazam!: Why Grant Morrison Should Write Captain Marvel - почему Грант Мориисон смог бы "понять" настолько сложно дающегося прочим авторам Капитана Марвел.
Why Batman Incorporated is a Good Idea - в защиту идеи, вызывающей много, много, много вопросов. Дополнительно: комментарии к первому номеру Batman Incorporated и набор отзывов на него же.
Do Batman and Flash Remember the Pre-New 52 World? - фанатская гипотеза: а что если Супермен и Флэш помнят мир до Ребута?
DC Histories: Mr. Freeze - история Мистера Фриза.
Hero Worship: Why I Love Catwoman - пост любви к Селине Кайл.
Reclaiming History: In Defense of Hank Pym - Хэнк Пим бьет женщин. Но что было до того, как это стало мемом?
Inside The Mind of Thanos, Marvel's Mad Titan - кто такой Танос, которого мы все увидим в следующих "Мстителях".
Top Ten Northstar Moments - лучшие моменты самого важного иксмена июня.
Чистые развлечения
Чистые развлечения:
DC Entertainment's Burbank Office Tour - тур по офису DC!
The Symbol - подборка изменений символа Супермена в исполнении фанатов.
The Bizarre History of Superhero Porn - история порно про супергероев.
Bizarro Back Issues: Spider-Man Beats Venom With Beach Nudity (1989) - я процитирую: "Spider-Man cold strips down on the beach and offers his body to what is essentially a tentacle monster from outer space. Yyyyyyyyyup... The plan here is to lure the symbiote off of Eddie Brock through the irresistible temptation of his body." О да.
Comic books are not just a joke - Статья про КомМиссию на Russia Beyond the Headlines. Что там развлекательного? То, как они не смогли найти человека, который написал бы что-то, что было бы интересно читать! Серьёзно, эта статья - как пустая переваренная овсянка на воде.
Ну и напоследок видео, которое все наверняка уже видели:
Я готова ставить деньги на то, что целиком это не прочитает никто.