4 color fix

But alas, I probably won’t get one.

So, my LCS (The Million Year Picnic) used to own a domain name (millionyearpicnic.com), which they cleverly let fall into the hands of a cybersquatter. I noticed that the domain for the actual name of the store was available (THEmillionyearpicnic.com), so, being a freelancer and all, I snapped it up, told them I’d grabbed it for them, and that I would be happy to hand it over, or to host whatever they might want to put there, or even sell them any design or consulting services they might want to buy. I checked in with the owner - who knows me by name - about this every few months for a while, but he and his wife were busy having a baby at the time and were understandably distracted or something, and I got to feeling like a bother so I finally just shut up about it.

From my LCS’ email announcement list over the weekend:

2. IF you are the person who set up http://themillionyearpicnic.com/ for us, could you please PLEASE contact me? Send email here or to [redacted] (our other email address). If you call the store, leave a message with someone with your name and your phone # or email address. Thanks!

Two years later. Once again, that’s: 

Two. Years. Later.

Back when I was a kid in the 70s, talented writer/artist Jim Starlin was making some really cool comics. In a (not so) recent interview, Grant Morrison remarked on the contribution of Starlin and some of his contemporaries to the comics of today:

[they] established all the rules of the so-called ‘Dark Age’ of comics in the mid-70s. They planted the seeds that grew to fruition in Dark Knight and Watchmen… but they rarely get accorded their place in the history books. Gerber, along with Steve Engelhart, Doug Moench, Jim Starlin, Don McGregor and others, worked with some amazing artists to bring elements of cynical humor, real world violence, psychedelic storytelling, poetry, philosophy, cinematic panel transitions and experimental layouts to mainstream comics, but they rarely get credit for it.

…and that sounds about right to me. My favorite among Starlin’s stuff was the Adam Warlock storyline, which appeared variously in places like Strange Tales and Marvel Two-in-One, before landing its own title. Though I dont’ find too much to like in the superhero comics of today, I’m still a sucker for what professional inker Charles Yoakum calls “The Starlinverse”, which is

pretty much 45% kirby, 45% starlin and about 10% everyone else that ever tried to make sense of the cosmic thing. I guess that claremont gets about half a percent for the Shiar galaxy, but still…. Starlin brought up the universal protector thing, revived Him into something special, was one of the few who out Kirbyied Kirby with Thanos; a much more engaging and dangerous villan than Darksied when handled right.

…or more simply, your basic 60’s superhero goofiness in a sort of cosmic space opera context.

So with all that out of the way, here’s the fun part: In June of 1975, Starlin introduced a supporting character in the Warlock stories: Gamora, The Deadliest Woman In The Whole Galaxy.

Lots more, and some fairly large scans, after the jump:

Read the rest of this entry »

America’s First anti-Jihadist Comic Book Hero:

FP: What made you produce Matamoros ? Tell us exactly what it is about.

LaMonica: My co-writer, Sleet, actually made the decision with an off-hand remark. Last year we were having a discussion about how popular culture has ignored the war with radical Islam and our talk turned to the death of Steve Rogers, Marvel Comics’ original Captain America. Sleet was particularly annoyed at this event and said to me “You’re a comic book fan. Why don’t we write our own comic?” So we wrote a script and I decided to contact the popular political cartoon team of Cox & Forkum for an artist referral since neither Sleet nor I can draw. John Cox read the script and really enjoyed it so he decided to come on board with the project instead of referring us to another artist.

“Matamoros” follows an American NCO, Charles Sobietti, who is wounded in the war, undergoes an experimental medical procedure to recover, returns home to New York to recuperate and then discovers a radical Islamic terror cell in Queens. We put Sobietti in New York because radical Islam has been there for quite a while. The blind sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman reached New York mosques in 1990 and currently a radical group called the Islamic Thinkers Society is located in Queens. This group is believed to be an offshoot of the UK’s al Mahajiroun, the radical group that is now banned by the British government. And of course we all know what radical Islam did to New York in 2001.

Well, damn! Good for them. I find the whole Captain America fighting the Nazis (and before the US was) thing a bit weird, though this may be I’m coming to realize that the time Simon and Kirby grew up in was pretty crazy by modern standards, but OTOH I find the absolute abhorrence most producers of entertainment media have towards appearing in the slightest bit patriotic to be both bizarre and disappointing. Though sadly not at all surprising.

From the look of the previews, the art seems a little fannish, and maybe they should have found a pro (not that Cox isn’t a pro at cartooning, but his style seems misplaced here). I’ll probably check it out anyway.

I ran across this guy’s website, and was quite taken with its excellent minimalist theme - The Journalist, by Lucian Marin. I grabbed it and installed it, only to find it appears to have evolved since being deployed on wordpress.com. I like it, and the addition of the little word balloon bearing the blog’s subtitle is cool, but I much prefer the older version, which I’d like to customize. Ah, well - I guess I’ve got a little more CSS hackery in my future than I was planning on. I think I’m going to have to go on a two week blogfast to get all the stuff done I’ve got piling up on my plate - keeping up with what’s going on in all the little corners of the internet that interest me is just too time-consuming.

This post has been gathering dust as a saved draft for a while, so some of the following might be a bit stale (caveat emptor, you get what you pay for, etc). I’ll update it if it turns out to be necessary. Anyway:

Two recent comic retailer brouhahas caught my attention recently - in one case some retailers got bent out of shape over indie publishers selling their wares at trade shows before the retailers had a chance to stock them, and the other case involved Boom! Studios’ posting digital versions of their 5-issue series North Wind on MySpace. Both cases boil down to (some) retailers objecting to publishers’ marketing activities. I mentioned both in opening because it’s interesting to see how reactionary and short-term some retailers’ thinking can be. The indie publishers defended their behavior by responding that since most LCS’ don’t carry much indie product, there aren’t really any sales for their trade show activities to cannibalize, and that seems like a reasonable point of view to me. But my real interest here is in the Boom! Studios case. I believe Boom! Studios neglected to mention to anyone that they’d be releasing complete digital versions of each comic on MySpace simultaneous to the release of the printed version. Since the number of issues ordered by a given retailer may have been informed by this, I think there’s legitimate cause for complaint there - but the complaints certainly reveal a lack of vision. What this “only I can markets and sell these books” attitude says to me is that retailers like the Direct Market Comics Ghetto (and I suppose this isn’t too surprising, since they ARE the ghetto), and prefer a situation where they have All The Money, no matter how little money there is, to a situation where the pie grows and they get richer even if they don’t bother competing to increase their percentage of the pie.

Boom! Studios reports:

Five thousand views in fourty-eight hours. That was the final result when the trailer for NORTH WIND, BOOM! Studios’ latest mini-series, was featured on MySpaceTV over the weekend.

Supporting the historic simultaneous release of NORTH WIND in stores and online at MySpace Comic Books (http://myspace.com/comicbooks), the NORTH WIND trailer serves as another way to get people excited about BOOM! Studios’ latest comic book offering.

“MySpace Comic Books directly targets their 145,000 friends, but we knew we wanted to reach beyond that targeted group. Getting the NORTH WIND trailer featured on MySpaceTv in conjunction with our current promotion with MySpace Comic Books allowed us to interest a wider group on MySpace. And, you know, doing a trailer is just a cool way to promote any comic!” Chip Mosher, Marketing and Sales Director for BOOM! Studios said.

Further, issue #1 of North Wind promptly sold out in just 10 days, and they’re planning on reprinting it. If I were an LCS, I’d be watching like a hawk to see what happens with issues #2 and #3… because if folks who see a digital version of an entire comic can be turned into buyers of the printed version that easily, what will happen to the LCSes when publishers can work with online retailers to host complete digital previews of their comics alongside “BUY THIS ISSUE” and “SUBSCRIBE TO THIS TITLE” buttons?

Even though things are looking promising now, it’s hard to know for sure what will happen with Boom! Studios experiment. And it must have been a big gamble for them - they’re hoping that a digital version of a comic is not a replacement good for the printed version, at least not to enough people to prevent the digital comic to serve as an advertisement for the printed version. It seems like a lot of risk to take, especially when you have no way to know whether your guess is right. Or did they already have an indication that they were right? Boom! Studios co-founder Andrew Cosby is the creator of the television show Eureka, which runs (ran?) on the SciFI channel - maybe he was paying attention to the Battlestar Galactica case:

It is estimated that upwards of 60% of all traffic on the Internet is composed of BitTorrent transfers. Much of this traffic is perfectly legitimate – software, such as the free Linux operating system, is distributed using BitTorrent. Still, it is well known that movies and television programmes are also distributed using BitTorrent, in violation of copyright. This became absolutely clear on the 14th of October 2004, when Sky Broadcasting in the UK premiered the first episode of Battlestar Galactica, Ron Moore’s dark re-imagining of the famous shlocky 1970s TV series. Because the American distributor, SciFi Channel, had chosen to hold off until January to broadcast the series, fans in the UK recorded the programmes and posted them to BitTorrent for American fans to download. Hundreds of thousands of copies of the episodes circulated in the United States – and conventional thinking would reckon that this would seriously impact the ratings of the show upon its US premiere. In fact, precisely the opposite happened: the show was so well written and produced that the word-of-mouth engendered by all this mass piracy created an enormous broadcast audience for the series, making it the most successful in SciFi Channel history.

(you ought to read the whole article, and sub to the human network’s feed, it’s a fascinating blog)

The lesson here seems to be that social networks can be a powerful selling tool. How many issues would Boom! Studios have sold if they had more on hand for their debut? Given that interested buyers had to make their way to an LCS, how many more issues would they have sold if impulse purchases had been possible right on the social networking site?

The only thing I can think of that an LCS can currently offer that a NLCS can’t is the ability to browse offerings before buying (and Colleen Doran asserts in some thread I’m too lazy to dig up a link to that some LCSes are too stupid to even permit this, in true neanderthal “Hey, kid, this ain’t no liberry” fashion). Even book publishers are recognizing the value in browsing and getting into the try-before-you-buy thing:

In an attempt to increase book sales, HarperCollins Publishers will begin offering free electronic editions of some of its books on its Web site, including a novel by Paulo Coelho and a cookbook by the Food Network star Robert Irvine.

The idea is to give readers the opportunity to sample the books online in the same way that prospective buyers can flip through books in a bookstore.

“It’s like taking the shrink wrap off a book,” said Jane Friedman, chief executive of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide. “The best way to sell books is to have the consumer be able to read some of that content.”

If the Boom! Studios test case shows that digital browsing of comic books (at point of sale or elsewhere) is effective enough to help publishers overcome their horror of losing control of copies of their product, then I’d expect tough times ahead for brick and mortar LCSes.

Chris Onstad, creator of Achewood:

Coming up in the next weeks: updates on the status of the Great Outdoor Fight hardcover I’m doing with Dark Horse, Achewood Cookbook II, the “how to make a living off web-comics” book I hope to distribute as a PDF soon, and a really kickin’ version of the 1969 GOF announcement poster. (I am trying to at least do one of these from each decade.)

Emphasis mine.

The QM wrote quite some time ago to ask for some comic recommendations. Naturally, I thought “here’s something that I can use to motivate myself to set up a comics blog”, and consequently he’s had to wait a few months (yes, I’m that lazy) for my response. So, here’s what I’ve been reading lately:

• 100 Bullets: which I admit is great but I find I’m caring less about it every month because I’m unable to retain much about what’s going on (file under: Cerebus and just read the whole thing through when it’s over). Eduardo Risso is fantastic (random thought: I was impressed that one issue of 100 Bullets that took place in Boston actually featured the correct skyline). On a related note I found a sci fi graphic novel he illustrated that was recently translated into English (he’s Argentinian, I think). The writing is sort of goofy in a European way, but the book is cool, overall.
• Hellblazer: I thought Mike Carey’s run was outstanding, but when it ended DC appointed some idiot to write it for something like a year, which was a total waste of everybody’s time (though I suppose it could just have been me, and the rest of the world loved it or something - I wonder what happened to sales?), and now there’s a new guy who I’m thinking might be OK.
• East Coast Rising: Becky Cloonan is awesome. The fact that the story’s told in a simple, accessible-to-younger-readers way doesn’t detract at all. This kid’s going places.
• The Pirates of Coney Island: The writing’s not bad, and clever, and illustrator Vasilis Lolos (apparently a friend of Cloonan’s) is like a strange fusion of Jamie Hewlett (Tank Girl, Gorillaz) and The King. Lolos is also responsible for the absolutely outstanding The Last Call (preview here), which is one of my top three picks for 2007. This kid’s also going places.
• All-Star Superman: Morrison & Quitely really manage to bring a mythological feel to the story that’s both contemporary and faithful that 1950s golden age stuff, where the science fiction stuff might as well be magic, it’s so fantastic and free from logic. I’m a huge fan of Morrison’s Invisibles, but hadn’t bothered to read any of his underwear comics, because, you know, they’re about characters who run around in their underwear. This one’s definitely worth it.
• BPRD & Hellboy, whenever they’re published. These never disappoint. Lobster Johnson I could’ve done without, but I understand that it’s just a vehicle Mignola’s using to fill in some backstory that will come in useful later.
• Paul Pope’s PulpHope art book was outstanding. I buy anything Pope does (I’m sure I’ve missed the occasional bit of work-for-hire for one of the big two, but that’s OK).
• I’ve been trying out some new stuff via the excellent Heavy Ink (I’ll be moving most of my subs there shortly): Atomic Robo, Infinite Horizon, and Narcopolis. All three are pretty good - I’m a big Delano fan (I still get weepy about the cancellation of Outlaw Nation) so I’m most excited about Narcopolis, despite the only-passable art. Infinite Horizon is good, but the stories feel a bit empty and the art seems a bit phoned in - in short, I think the book deserves more from its creators. If the books were longer and the story denser, and if more time and attention were spent on the art, this would be top-notch. As it is, it’s just floating around “pretty good”. While I may pick up another issue or two to see if quality trends up, down, or stays the same, I’m hardly waiting to see what happens next. I mean, it’s the Odyssey - everyone already knows what happens next, so there’s got to be a better reason to keep buying. Atomic Robo is obviously heavily Hellboy-influenced in its feel, but’s its scifi, not myth and horror. It’s cool, has great energy, and while it’s not quite my thing it’s very close, and I can see story and art quality trending upward already. I expect it to really go places. Oh - I forgot to mention Brian Wood’s Northlanders, but so far there’s not much good to say about it anyway. Wood’s already got one strike against him (in my book, at least), but I’m giving this one a chance because the subject matter has, or at least should have, potential. So far, not recommended. If I’m wrong about it, you can always pick up the trade. Anyway, more on this after another issue or two come out.
• Super-secret-civil-identity-annihilation-wars: OK, well, it didn’t take long for me to expose myself as a hypocrite. I have a pathetic weakness for anything with Thanos, Adam Warlock, etc., from those 70s Marvel sci fi stories, in which the characters - yes - run around in their underwear. I picked up the six-issue Annihilation series. I thought the covers were painted by Christopher Mueller (no wikipedia page, but here’s a gallery) but I was wrong. Most of the stuff I give in to and buy in this category disappoints tremendously, but this wasn’t too bad - it was just really skeletal, and I’m sure I was supposed to buy five hundred other titles I don’t care about that were tied in. Sorry, Marvel - no yes. [UPDATE: whoops - I went ahead and bought some more of this stuff. I'll review it later.]

It’s funny - I’m reading fewer comics now than ever, but it seems like there are some real gems out there, so I’m really enjoying comics these days. Maybe the trick it to avoid as much of the crap as you can. Whenever I happen to hit the Picnic and there’s nothing in my sub folder or on the shelves that looks interesting (as is frequently the case), I just pick up another Tintin or Asterix book - I used to have them all when I was a kid, and I’m not sure what happened to them. Given how little of what’s being published these days is any good, it won’t take too long to replenish my collection at a book or two per otherwise fruitless trip.

There’s probably more but I can’t think of them now.

One last thing: Five or ten years back I bought a Corto Maltese book, but somehow lost it in a pile of other stuff and didn’t read it until I re-discovered it last year. The company that translated them into English went out of business in the 80s or 90s, so they’re hard to find. I’ve got three or four now, and read a rumor somewhere that someone may be releasing them, or a similar translation, again sometime soon. I’ll have to dig up the link.

The origin story:

(clicky to embigify)

I guess in my case HeavyInk is both an NLCS (Non-local Comic Shop) and an LCS, as they’re close enough for me to pop in an pre-empt actual USPSing of my comics when so inclined.

I’ve been buying comics from The Million Year Picnic for a little over two decades now (yikes!). I think they were the first specialty comic shop in New England, and one of the first in the US. If memory serves, it’s named after the last chapter of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. Absurdly, I had to link to a recent wikipedia entry, because the Picnic does not have its own website. The closest thing to an internet presence I’ve noticed has been an email account from which it will send a list of the week’s new comics in ridiculous all-caps. I recall that back in the 90s they used to have an ugly web page of sorts. However, they’ve since let their domain name lapse, presumably because ten bucks a year was too much to spend to keep open the possibility of using the best thing to come along since the printing press to grow your business:

Domain Name: MILLIONYEARPICNIC.COM
Registrar: MONIKER ONLINE SERVICES, INC.
Whois Server: whois.moniker.com
Referral URL: http://www.moniker.com/whois.html
Name Server: NS1.DSREDIRECTION.COM
Name Server: NS2.DSREDIRECTION.COM
Updated Date: 27-nov-2006
Creation Date: 18-may-2005
Expiration Date: 18-may-2008

Administrative Contact [460593]:
Admin Admin admin@internetlandandcattle.com
Internet Land and Cattle, LLC
1055 East Colorado Blvd
Suite 500
Pasadena
CA
91106
US
Phone: +1.6262044067

Internet Land and Cattle?? Whoops!

UPDATE: I’ve since learned they have a presence on livejournal. I think my point still stands, though.