In the 1952 presidential race,
The Crimson decided neither General Dwight D. Eisenhower nor Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson were good enough to endorse, so the paper went for a certain possum from Okefenokee Swamp:
Pogo. Buttons were made, campaign was waged and Pogo's creator, Walt Kelly was invited to give a speech. When he was delayed coming in to Harvard from the airport,
riots broke out.
[more inside]
posted by MartinWisse
on Oct 21, 2012 -
22 comments
It was the last few weeks before I left 2000AD and I was looking forward to starting work on my next creation: Misty. I took the title from the film, Play Misty For Me and my plan was to use my 2000AD approach on a girls’ comic: big visuals and longer, more sophisticated stories with the emphasis on the supernatural and horror. Pat Mills
on the creation of
Misty, a comic full of "pacts with the devil, schoolgirl sacrifice, the ghosts of hanged girls, sinister cults, evil scientists experimenting on the innocent and terrifying parallel worlds where the Nazis won the Second World War." The Guardian's Jacqueline Rayner recalls
Jinty, Tammy, Misty and the golden age of girls' comics.
posted by Artw
on Oct 19, 2012 -
6 comments
Comics critics groupblog
The Hooded Utilitarian ("a pundit in every panopticon") turned five in September and to celebrate ran a month long
festival of hate, "in which contributors will write about what they believe is the worst comic ever — or the most overrated, or the one they personally hate the most, as the case may be."
[more inside]
posted by MartinWisse
on Oct 3, 2012 -
94 comments
Mr. A debuted in 1967, in the third issue of Witzend, a collection of more artistically fulfilling side projects by mainstream comics professionals led by Wally Wood. In his very first panel, the Objectivist hero addresses his readers directly, stating his case that in moral life, there are no shades of gray, only evil or good, black or white. The hero stares at us, blank, emotionless. There’s a montage around him showing that his calm face is actually a metal mask, and that evil is truly disgusting. At the story’s end, Mr. A. beats up a nasty juvenile delinquent, ironically named Angel, and then allows the kid to fall to his death from a city rooftop. -
Pat Barrett [more inside]
posted by Egg Shen
on Sep 22, 2012 -
46 comments
Decompressed is a podcast in which comics writer and former Rock Paper Shotgun journalist Kieron Gillen (X-Men, Thor,
Phonogram) talks to artists and writers about the process involved in writing a single issue of a comic.
Decompressed 6 broke format and is instead a discussion with
Mark Waid and
Matt Fraction about scripting comics using the
"Marvel Method", or "plot first" - in which the artist draws the comic from a story outline and dialogue is added later, rather than the writer supplying a panel by panel script. For a while out of favour even at Marvel, the method is seeing a resurgance. The podcast page contains visual aids, and embedded version of the podcast, the script of DEFENDERS #9 complete with B&W art and additional links, including links to Warren Ellis’ 3-part tutorial on writing comics (
1,
2,
3).
Jamie McKelvie and a vultue put in guest appearances. Further example comicbook scripts are available at the
Comic Book Script Archive (
previously).
posted by Artw
on Aug 26, 2012 -
29 comments
Crisis on Infinite Earths was a 12-issue comic book maxi-series published in 1985 and 1986 in which DC Comics condensed their multiverse into a single universe, thus "simplifying" and "improving" it. Whether they succeeded in that goal is a good question, and one I shan't address. Crisis is, however, incredibly important to understanding DC continuity, as well as being possibly the most significant crossover series of all time.
posted by Egg Shen
on Aug 22, 2012 -
121 comments
A tale of science gone mad, global conspiracies, and the dangers of hubris. Drake, Jay-Z, Beyonce, Kanye, Weezy, Birdman, Noah Shebib, Rihanna, and Nicki Minaj in:
Hottest Chick in the Game, a comic by
Sean T. Collins, and
Andrew White.
posted by codacorolla
on Aug 22, 2012 -
7 comments
Cul de Sac, (previously) generally considered the best newspaper comic strip of recent years (and which may be the last great newspaper comic strip)
will end next month, due to the worsening Parkinson's of creator Richard Thompson. His illness had previously motivated
an impressive artistic show of support from all kinds of comics artists (newspaper strips, editorial cartoons, magazine illustrations, webcomics and one guy who hadn't done much lately)
(previously) I, for one, hope he gets to spend some time hanging out with Bill W.
posted by oneswellfoop
on Aug 17, 2012 -
23 comments
In preparation for his then upcoming retrospective Transe Forme, Fondation Cartier recorded Moebius doing a series of digital drawings. Recorded in late 2010, these are some of, if not, the last recordings of Moebius drawing that we are likely to see. -
Moebius Drawing
posted by Artw
on Aug 6, 2012 -
18 comments
Comics artist Frazer Irving adapts Mary Shelly's Frankenstein in hauntingly beautiful black and white:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10,
11,
12,
13,
14,
15,
16,
17,
18.
posted by Artw
on Aug 2, 2012 -
11 comments
"Among all who read Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories during the ‘40s and ‘50s, there was one common term for the unknown artist who drew the Donald Duck stories. Comics readers and comics fans all over the U.S. independently applied the same term to him. To fans in Ohio, California, Arkansas and Pennsylvania, he was 'The Good Artist.' His name was never signed to his work, and his publishers—until the early ‘60s—never revealed his name to his public, though many of us wrote (unforwarded) fan letters. His name, as we finally learned, is Carl Barks." How two determined fans found out
who the Good Duck Artist was.
posted by MartinWisse
on Jul 27, 2012 -
40 comments
False Positive is a a short story, webcomic anthology, which author and illustrator Mike Walton
likes to call a stew, cooked from the gut, made with "a scoop of horror, a pinch of science-fiction, a dash of fantasy, and a bit of (To Be Determined)."
Mike says the language could be rated PG-13, and the visuals feature a varying degrees of comic book violence and gore. There are 10 stand-alone "chapters" posted now, and new posts are made every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Mike also made
a short trailer to further pique your interest.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Jul 23, 2012 -
10 comments
