Rolling 2015 Reading Funnybooks Thread

that's an interesting story

Monica Rambeau has been in Mighty Avengers for a while as Spectrum, behaving like a fairly new character and drawn in a Greg Land style. She turns up in Secret Avengers this week and creates a very bright flash while talking about the Beyond Corporation and after she steps out of the light that stops you from seeing her... She looks like she's drawn by Stuart Immonen and is wearing her Nextwave uniform again. Plus she uses the skull asterisks from The Captain's name.

heh nice

hah! She did mumble something in a previous Mighty Avengers issue about having done all this shit in the midwest no one seems to remember

did this get conversation on a different board?
https://storify.com/debaoki/do-you-have-to-be-japanese-to-make-manga

I can't even begin to understand what's happening

Kind of glad I just try to read The Walking Dead and some crime comics and shit, the DC Convergence event and THE END OF THE MARVEL UNIVERSE and trying to parse what's happening over 50 different titles would drive me insane.

what's happening with the Marvel Secret Wars event*

that stuff about chris sims harrassing valerie d'orazio is really disappointing. i've been reading and enjoying his comics blogging for years and i was intrigued by his x-men project. i had no idea he was such a fucking asshole :(

weird that a grown man known for his astonishing breadth of knowledge about comic books and children's television is an inept creep when dealing with women

true, but i never got that impression from the stuff of his i've read - he works for comics alliance which is pretty good at supporting diversity in comics afaik - which makes it all the more shitty.

he can be a reasonably engaging writer for sure. still one time i saw a picture of him wearing a my little pony tshirt and it was like, oh ok just because this guy is more coherent than most of his peers doesn't mean he's not a creep.

He's also guested a few times on Rachel and Miles, and they're hella progressive, thoughtful, don't seem like they'd hold much truck with misogynist bullying. I have no doubt that Rachel has weighed in on this, but I haven't had the time to check her twitter or blog.

http://postcardsfromspace.tumblr.com/post/113923434118/do-you-have-any-advice-thought-on-processing-the

did this get conversation on a different board?
https://storify.com/debaoki/do-you-have-to-be-japanese-to-make-manga

― Maybe in 100 years someone will say damn Dawn was dope. (forksclovetofu), Thursday, 19 March 2015 03:27

Don't know.

Quite funny but also terrifying, that guy who says he could get 20 years jail in Indonesia for what he draws.

I don't think the negative reactions to a lot of typical modern angular Japanese style stuff are totally unreasonable, any more than people not liking the Pixar or 90s superhero style. I don't think it's a good thing that mainstream Japanese styles tend to be treated so separately.
I remember being told by art teachers to broaden my horizons for art and it hurt at the time but it's what a good teacher should do. It should be a cause for concern when a student places themselves firmly in a narrow, already established style with all the solutions ready for them; some kids will grow out of it by themselves but some will need more encouragement.

sims has posted a piece on comicsalliance: http://comicsalliance.com/ask-chris-being-part-of-the-problem/

about as mature and reasoned a self-examination as you could hope for, i guess, but that's not going to cure valerie d'orazio's ptsd.

jesus, that backlash in what forks posted is ridiculous. american tumblr youth screaming at fellow americans for doing anime/manga wrong because they aren't japanese seems very tumblr, though

"I have PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder. I have specifically been diagnosed with it because of cyberbullying that I experienced between 2007-2010."

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

care to elaborate on that?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

okay, then i guess i'll continue to assume that you're consciously choosing to disbelieve a woman's claims that bullying led to mental health problems

i think mordy believes her, his stance is more tough shit/deal with it

at least that's how i read those runes

i guess we'll never know

imo there are definitely shitty parts of the web that are worth avoiding, especially if they're places where you've been repeatedly harassed, but when it comes down to it you can't really be a successful person in the comics world without any sort of engagement in the news/forum/social network realm. and if those areas are full of harassment, it hinders your professional career.

there's a bunch of macho shit-talk that is completely unnecessary and some forums and websites should probably be shunned, but if some asshole writer is specifically calling you out, repeatedly, for no reason other than the fact you're a woman and a convenient target, it's bullshit.

the shrugging-off of her concerns might be intended to read like "well, if it bothers you when these communities are shitty, don't engage in them!" but the real message is "if if bothers you, I guess comics aren't for you!"

otm

yup, otm. it's the shrugging-off of those concerns that creates the environment where bullshit like gamergate can fester

otm

I'm even willing to believe Chris Sims and other bullheaded people can change, and even internalize what they're saying in public to the point where apologies are legitimate and directed and phrased in a way that doesn't seem creepy!

The other side of this is the festering rot in these communities that will see any apology as kowtowing to perceived hostile forces. You have to ignore those people, because they're never going to be placated as they will never get that their investment in a fucked-up status quo is hindering not just their community, but their own development. I didn't get into mainstream comics in the early 90s (oh god) because they were a gross shithole with bad sexist imagery, I got into them because they seemed cool and exciting when I was a kid.

If comics and the corresponding community had more diverse, interesting characters (which there were, I ended up buying as much independent stuff and things like the Vertigo line when I could) available it wouldn't have turned me off of comics, it would have helped me be a more well-rounded person.

not belittling anyone's concerns or problems but

when it comes down to it you can't really be a successful person in the comics world without any sort of engagement in the news/forum/social network realm.

are there any writers/artists with no web presence who also don't do conventions?

xp because it seems to me people could just choose to engage as much or as little as they'd like to, same as in any field where you're self employed and the quality of the work (art, criticism or otherwise) could stand on its own without engaging literally every person who has anything to say about anything you're doing.
again NB: not relating this to Sim's/D'Orazio's situation

and if so, when did they really become established figures and what is their background? xp

there's also a difference between "engaging literally every person" and being specifically targeted, for sure

those creators doing the set-in-japan thing you linked above would have probably been fine just ignoring the people making the most noise and accepting constructive criticism, imo, but I'm not sure what the volume was

xp forks: I don't know how you can be in any self-employed field today without actively engaging potential fans/customers/employers via social media, blogs, forums and so on. no more room for quiet toilers in this age.

and let's face it the quality/"cream rises to the top" method of making it is mostly a myth as well

word

tbh it seems to me that for at least a decade the best thing you could possibly do to "make it" in superhero comis is be volubly encyclopedically fannish online

that, or be a second tier supermarket novelist or third-fourth tier TV guy

xp i won't argue the latter point at all but the former i think is more malleable. people can quietly toil and produce work of quality, just not at the speed of creation that is the current webcomic standard.

It's impossible to do that now, because while there have always been countless talented people working in obscurity, the internet allows/requires them to (*sigh*) brand themselves, advertise, platform. So if you're NOT doing that you're already putting yourself a rung down from thousands of others out there across the planet gunning for the same spots. I suppose that's how capitalism is supposed to function - rewarding the hustle over all else...

my wife went all-in on graphic novels for my birthday, I have quite a lot of reading ahead of me, lots of really cool looking stuff:

Sex Criminals vol. 1
The Technopriests
Megalex
Final Incal
Julio's Day
Love and Rockets #7

Just finishing Megalex, it was pretty batshit insane. Will probably tackle Technopriests next.

that, or be a second tier supermarket novelist or third-fourth tier TV guy

sick, truthful burn

I got the shipping notification that the newest collections of Prophet and Lazarus are heading my way :D

are there any writers/artists with no web presence who also don't do conventions?

Alan Moore?

Carmine Infantino?

I think Moore's Facebook page is managed by his daughter Leah, and he's not particularly active in supplying content for it, but it's an official web presence. And his zine Dodgem Logic had a website when it was a going thing.

The best answer I can come up with is Ditko.

haha yes of course

Obviously it's different for people who were big before the internet was. I don't think a big internet presence is that essential to success but I think it really depends on the sort of audience who's going to like them.
But I think it's different for writers and artists. Writers probably have to work harder at the social media aspect.

Ditko does have a blogging fan that does Kickstarters for him and Robin Snyder.

lol yeah I don't think the most established/known writers/artists of the last few decades necessarily need much press at this point

so do you mean to say that all the major artists/writers for DC have twitter/blog/facebook engagement explicitly about their work? I avoid that shit like plague so i dunno but i would think they would all be under non-disclosure clauses with contract labor or am i being naive?

It is good that people are challenging racist and sexist aspects of comics but even after that most of it's going to be more or less the same junk.
I'm doubtful yet still hopeful that people are going to challenge the way the industry functions and highlight the poison of franchise obsession/loyalty, crass consumerism and collector mania.

What I wrote on a geek thread recently..

There's two new-ish shops in Glasgow with "Geek" in their names. I never went into either but I looked into the window of one of them today and it seemed to be mostly expensive collectable junk. I'm a bit worried but I don't know if this poses much of a new threat to anything that is good but it's not nice seeing more people buying into all the worst aspects of this culture.
People often say that this side of comics fandom is dying out and is being replaced by something more positive but I'm not so sure. The bad side seems to be going more mainstream.

Re: comics pros blogging. I think it's part of the progress now. As well as authors talking about being harassed, Jerry Ordway blogged about suddenly being too old fashioned to get steady work and Jason Pearson talked about an editor treating him badly. This used to be exclusive to places like Comics Journal or talked about in pro-zines decades after it happened but now the dirt can come out immediately.