Rants & Raves

STAN LEE: BOOM! COMICS APP

 

Stan Lee’s Soldier Zero, The Traveler, and Starborn, are soon (perhaps even now) available for online and mobile devices through “Stan Lee BOOM! Comics App.” Lee told the Associated Press that with the proliferation of comic books into the digital sphere, it made sense to bring his own titles to market that way. Said Lee: “Comics are a medium that transcends age, appealing not only to today’s young readers but older ones, as well. And by giving them an unprecedented level of access, we’re ensuring that the fantastic stories, characters and worlds found only in comics will endure for many years to come.”

WIMPY KID REVISITED

Every time I have mentioned Jeff Kinney’s Wimpy Kid works, I usually opined that they weren’t, really, specimens of cartooning because the pictures merely illustrated the text and didn’t add any new  narrative information. And that’s what comics generally do: the pictures add new information to the verbiage, and together, words and pictures create a meaning neither conveys alone without the other. But I’ve finally read more than a page or two of one of the Wimpys, and I must revise my estimate: Kinney’s pictures often add to the meaning of the words, sometimes by satirically contradicting them.

For the newest manifestation of the Wimpy phenomenon, Abrams is printing six million copies. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Cabin Fever is due out on November 15th. The last three volumes of the Wimpy Kid series, according to ICv2.com,  have all topped overall bestseller lists, and the six million first printing of Cabin Fever is the largest announced so far for 2011. According to USA Today, the events in Cabin Fever were inspired by a snowstorm in Massachusetts last winter that trapped Kinney in his home without power or heat.

 

THE LOONEY TOONS SHOW

The Cartoon Network is launching a new show, "The Looney Tunes Show," starring Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, who now live together as roommates. Adrienne Johnson Martin at newsobserver.com reports that in the first of the hour-long shows, “Best Friends,” Daffy satisfies a long-held desire to go on a tv game show, “Besties,” where friends earn money by sharing their knowledge of each other. “But it turns out that the completely self-absorbed Daffy doesn't know anything about his roomie. He hasn't even caught on that Bugs' last name is Bunny. If I have one complaint about the episode it's that Bugs is pretty much turned into a straight hare; he's so reasonable next to Daffy, there's no room for trademark Bugs' hilarity. Let's hope that's just in this episode.”

WALLY WOOD AND HIS MASTERPIECE

In Wild Wood: 100 Pages of Art and Text (154 8x11-inch pages, b/w; Pure Imagination paperback, $25) edited by Greg Theakston, we have Woodwork that ranges from astonishingly good reproduction to complete desecration, lines lost and shading gone entirely awry. But the book is worth owning for a single legendary item: the Wood masterpiece of a comics art storytelling guide, “Wally Wood’s 22 Panels That Always Work,” poorly reproduced in the book, brilliant nonetheless. Another rare artifact herein is Wood’s Prince Valiant try-out page, a stunning imitation of Hal Foster.

Adopting the narrative mannerisms of a hard-boiled detective, editor/publisher Theakston regales us with a story about how he met and disappointed Wood, then interviews several notables who began as Wood’s assistants — Joe Orlando, Ralph Reese, Dan Adkins, and Paul Kirchner, all of whom testify to Wood’s seemingly inexhaustible capacity for work and his contribution to their own development as comic book artists. Kirchner is the most detailed on the latter topic:

“It wasn’t so much outright teaching: you just picked up things. ... I used to do rough pencils and layouts, and Woody would go over the job and make corrections. Watching him correct my work was the best kind of education: he would leave what was good and correct and alter my weak points. I could see exactly where my work needed help.”

The Wood work includes material from as early as 1950 and as late as 1975, but not all of the content here is dated or sourced. Sscattered throughout is pulp art from 1957 (wash drawings mostly); mildly risque girlie gag cartoons; unpublished humor art from the sixties; the entire 1967 comic book adaptation of the “Fantastic Voyage” movie; and The Destructor, No. 2, April 1975, penciled by Steve Ditko and inked by Wood.

ERIK LARSEN'S HERCULIAN

Erik Larsen's giant-sized 8x12-inch comic book one-shot, the 48-page Herculian, features a 24-hour comic that Larsen produced at a friend’s house during a single 24-hour period. The book also includes a smattering of bizarrely humorous pieces, both short and shorter. One is entitled “Mickey Maus,” wherein a pasty-faced Mickey shows up with a bunch of Spiegelman mice, all in the striped uniforms of WWI Nazi concentration camps; Mickey says, “I guess those Nazis aren’t all bad: at least they’re letting us have a shower.”

There are six one-page comics entitled “Reggie the Veggie,” starring a man with no legs who sits, throughout — all six pagers — on his wheeled cart, motionless, with virtually nothing happening. In one, a fly lands on his nose and then flies off; in another, Reggie is snowed on. Wonderful, sick nonsense.

The title piece, a 24-page epic, is entitled “Guy Talk” and takes place in a diner where two friends have met to have a cup of coffee. One of them tells the other that he plans to get married; the other guy, disparaging marriage, tries to talk him out of it. While this is earnestly transpiring, the superhero Herculian shows up and engages in a savage fist-fight with a buxom superheroine and her vicious dog. The guys continue their talk, oblivious to the property damage and all-out havoc being wrought all around them. The ending is another of the shaggy-dog endings that distinguish the rest of Larsen’s oeuvre in this tome. Aside from the dubious comedy (which I enthusiastically applaud), the book offers a generous display of Larsen’s best high-energy drawing, sample pages of which we append here.

 

BURN NOTICE: A NEW DAY

Cable network USA and DC Comics debuted Chapter 1 of its Burn Notice interactive graphic novel, A New Day, alongside the show's Season 5 premiere on Thursday, June 23. In the first day, reported Jethro Nededog at Hollywood Reporter, A New Day scored more than 100,000 page views, according to the network. Written by the creative team behind the series, 11 more chapters will be released weekly during the season featuring illustrations from DC Comics, original video, interactive features, and gaming content. The interactive graphic novel series is available at usanetwork.com, Facebook, on compatible Apple devices, and as an Android App on select devices. Said USA's vp of Digital Jesse Redniss:  "We are pushing the technology boundaries to enhance the user experience beyond the one-hour telecast and expanding the story arc into new arenas."

SKIPPY VERSUS THE MOB

Skippy vs. the Mob: The Fight for Vesey Street and the American Soul (208 12x6-inch pages, b/w; Rosebud Archives, paperback, $24.95) collects, the publisher’s press release divulges, “the only continuity Percy Crosby ever drew in his widely-syndicated Skippy strip, and features a comprehensive essay by the artist’s daughter, chronicling an astonishing history of fraud, persecution, and betrayal.” Crosby took on organized crime, and organized crime turned on the upstart cartoonist, effectively destroying him through the corporate machinations of the Skippy peanut butter people, who had adopted Crosby’s character’s name and the strip’s iconic fence as the label on their product. The peanut butter aspect of the operation (as well as the history of the strip and Crosby’s spectacular artistry) is discussed in Harv’s Hindsights for April 2004 at the Usual Place; and the continuing saga of the fight is taken up in Rants & Raves, Ops. 70, 123, 172, and 272.

In the book at hand, Crosby’s daughter, Joan Crosby Tibbetts, examines the peanut butter battle in the context of her father’s 1930s crusade against “Al Capone” and his ilk. Engaging (even terrifying) as that narrative is, the Skippy strips tell an equally daunting tale. One of the astonishing things about the volume is that it reprints some of the 1930 sequence from original art (August through mid-November), where Crosby’s sketchy pen flies across the panels with all the energy of the kid whose actions he’s depicting. A treat on every page.

DENIS KITCHEN'S CHIPBOARD SKETCHBOOK

Denis Kitchen’s Chipboard Sketchbook (130 6x9-inch pages, b/w mostly with flecks of color; Boom! Town, hardcover, $19.95) might well be called The Book of Boredom. But you won’t be bored: you’ll be vastly amused by this collection of doodles Kitchen committed while bored in bored meetings and other convenings that he was subjected to while running Kitchen Sink Press. To stay awake, he says in the Introduction (the only text in the book, merely five pages of it, and some pages are half illustration), he doodled with a Sharpie pen and Uni-Ball Micro ballpoint on the cardboard backing of tablets of writing paper—what printers call “chipboard.”

Sometimes cartooning is just fun. Fun. And/or funny. And this fugitive from the Kitchen is instance of this happy confluence. Greg Sadowski’s design results in the entire content being printed on paper that strenuously resembles chipboard, so we get the authentic experience of seeing Kitchen’s pictures in their native habitat.

The entire sordid story of Kitchen and his Sink Press is related in copious detail the Usual Place in Harv’s Hindsight for September 2009, should you want to re-acquaint yourself with it for the sake of deeper appreciation of the whole Kitchen enchilada.

ZITS

Squelching rumors that Zits will find life on television in a live-action interpretation, Jim Borgman, who draws the strip over Jerry Scott’s jokes, told jkiesewetter at cincinnati.com/blogs that CBS had turned down a pilot script. “Borgman says everyone at CBS liked the pilot script except for Les Moonves, CBS Corp. president and CEO. And that killed their chances at CBS. A TV version of Zits is not totally dead, but Borgman isn't counting on it ever seeing it. ‘It’s off my radar screen,’ Borgman said.” In 2000, another round of rumors said that Borgman and Scott had a deal for a Zits movie, but that faded, too.

MICHAEL RAMIREZ'S JOB INTERVIEW

Michael Ramirez is one of a very tiny minority: he’s a conservative political cartoonist. Interviewed by John Read in the latest issue of Stay Tooned (No. 9), Ramirez talks about his job interview at the Los Angeles Times, where he replaced Paul Conrad, among the most rabid of liberal cartoonists (in italics):

I was the only editorial cartoonist who didn’t apply for the job. ... You can’t find two people who are as diametrically opposed philosophically as Paul and I. So I was surprised when I got the call from them and they flew me out [from his then-current gig at the Memphis Commercial Appeal] for an interview. The first thing I said, during our initial meeting, as the introductions were being made with the editorial page editor, the editor and the op-ed page editor, was, “Look—I’m a capitalist; you guys are communists. This obviously isn’t gonna work.” [Laughter ensued.] I said, “I think you want to hire me because my last name is Ramirez and I represent the racial demographic here in L.A. because I’m one-quarter Spanish, one-quarter Mexican and half-Japanese.” ... They said, "Well, we’ve been taking your syndication for a long time, and we know exactly where you stand." And I said, "Well, obviously you know that I’m very different from Paul Conrad, and, frankly, I don’t trust your judgment.” Laughter ensued some more.

Ramirez was hired and stayed at the Los Angeles Times for 12 years, until, let go in what the paper called a budgetary consideration, he was hired in 2006 by the Investors Business Daily — people who know business and what makes successful investments, and they clearly knew an editorial cartoonist would be a good investment in the newspaper’s business; nicely ironic. Asked about the future of his profession, Ramirez said he has hope for the print medium. “There will come a time,” he predicted, “when the dust settles, that electronic and print will co-exist, each delivering the news their own way but offering something the other cannot.”

GOODWILL TO GOODWILL

NewsChannel15 in Nashville reported that an anonymous donor dropped off at a Goodwill store 12,626 comic books, all in pristine condition — valued at $42,000. “The donor said he had been collecting them since he was very young, and the collection came together over the last 30 years. The comic books are being sold through Goodwill's auction site with more than a dozen lots up for sale. To date, the highest price paid for one of the comic books was $161 for the Amazing Spiderman, Vulture's Prey No. 64, published by Marvel Comics Group in 1968.”

HOLY TERROR

From ICv2.com: Ten years after the September 11th attacks, the Frank Miller revenge saga inspired by 9/11 will be published by Legendary Comics as a $29.95 hardcover graphic novel. Originally the project was Batman: Holy Terror, and it was the Dark Knight who exacted a singular revenge on the terrorists. But the departure of Bob Schreck from DC Comics in 2008 due to some controversial dialogue in All Star Batman and Robin No. 10 meant the end of Miller’s Batman: Holy Terror project at DC. However, as BleedingCool.com puts it, “when you hire Bob Schreck, you get Frank Miller.” Well at least if you are Legendary Comics, an off-shoot of Legendary Pictures (Batman, The Hangover) and you make Bob Schreck your EIC,  you get a revised version of Holy Terror now set in "Empire City" with a protagonist known as The Fixer leading a one-man crusade against an army of murderous zealots.

THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN

Now we can take a gander at the first official trailer for Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, which will debut in the U.S. on December 23rd in 3-D. It appears from the trailer that this will be a reverential, almost shot-for-comic-panel adaptation of Herge's hugely popular (everywhere in the world except the U.S.) graphic novel. If Spielberg's film, which cost $135 million to produce, is successful, it could establish a niche for motion-capture animation. If not, it  --  along with the massive failure of Disney's Mars Need Moms  --  could sound the death knell for the format.