Hello to all visitors! I’m still tied up with some important business, and it’ll take until next for me to resume blogging, but for now, featuring some great folks from the Golden & Silver Age, Allan Bellman, George Gladir, Lily Renee Phillips and also Mel Keefer, who were together with Mark Evanier on one of the panels. They were met with warm applause.

I’m going to be doing extra work within the next two weeks that may keep me away from the keyboard, so I have no idea if I’ll be able to update as often as I’d like to. Stay tuned until then, and I hope I’ll be able to make time to do some more write-ups within that time!

, one of the art directors for the US Postal Service who’s worked on the designing of the new Marvel stamp commemorative series and who’d also worked on the designing for DC’s own stamp commemorations earlier.

, it sounds like Japanese manga may be ahead of American comics in some respects: they provide interesting vocabulary in their pages:

Kaplan, the test-prep company, and publisher TOKYOPOP partnered on three Manga novels, released in early July, that included vocabulary words such as “exculpate,” “sanctimonious,” and “unfetter.” The words are underlined and are defined in a box on the same page.

Exactly what comic books, both for the young and old alike, can use.

This is a little list of things that, IMHO, are responsible for leading to poor quality in comics today:

• Editors who force mandates/edicts and crossovers upon almost an entire line, which leads to a lot of “developments” that are in poor taste, and/or don’t suit the characters, and are just plain implausible, adding nothing positive whatsoever.
• Editors who choose the writers - and artists - according to their popularity in a specific genre and with specific audiences, but not according to if they understand what makes the book work. (And if it’s artists we’re talking about, regardless of whether their artwork is dreadful a la Liefeld.)
• Writers who knee-jerkity go along with the plans of the above, which puts their devotion and dedication in doubt.
• Marvel zombies, and also DC zombies, who buy what they’re told to by those doing the promotion, regardless of quality, and regardless of whether the assigned writers are doing a bad job, implying that they don’t think for themselves.
• Speculators, aka collectors who don’t buy for if there’s a fun story in store, but rather, in hopes that the comics they buy will be worth plenty of money someday.
• People who buy a comic book because it touts the death of a protagonist, and are willing to tolerate the marketing of death as something great to check out, among other bad things.
• Mainstream press companies and reporters who serve as cheerleaders for those doing all these things no matter how bad they are, and without even asking if there’s something wrong with the whole approach.

There’s probably plenty more examples that I could think of here, but for now, these are but a few of the problems I see as driving the quality of comics into the mud swamp today, and also giving a bad impression to people outside of comic books of what their audience are like. In reference to say, “zombies” I see them as being a source that’ll inevitably have to be criticized for destroying the Marvel universe and all chances of good developments. And market speculators will also have to be frowned upon, since they’re making a joke out of themselves.

Once again, there’s an amazing difference on display in sales, about how Marvel continues, no matter the low-ranking quality of any of their books now, , World War Hulk being the main example of the moment, whereas DC is falling . As Amazons Attack has shown, crossovers, at least at DC, may be starting to backfire (via ).

A reasonable explanation for this difference, why Marvel is selling relatively well, even if it’s far behind what comic sales were like up to the early 1990s, is because, simply put, they long ago succeeded in garnering a zombie base that DC never managed to maintain, whom some people tend to describe as “Marvel zombies”. It may have once been a kindly phrase, but now, I’ve got a feeling that it could all change to something way different.

This is something that’s going to have to be taken issue with, about why Marvel - but also DC - zombies are undermining story quality as much as the editors and writers themselves are. In fact, I thought of trying to write up a bulleted list of things that could be causing the problems comics now face. I’ll see in time if I can do that.

over NBM Publishing’s “Treasury of Victorian Murder” and its latest entry, “The Saga of the Bloody Benders”, which is set in Kansas during the 1870s. And the article really caps itself with a manhole cover when it says:

One thing’s for sure: If you think the serial killer is a modern phenomenon, think again. Only in the 19th century, as rendered by Geary, murder was a lot better looking.

We have enough cruelty, sadism and murder galore going on in comics as it is, and I think that enough is enough already. But the real problem here is how blatantly they sensationalize the talk of murder. Murder is NEVER a good looking act, it is one of the sickest, ugliest acts humankind can commit. That line there above is pure bottom-of-the-barrel sleaze. And that’s probably the main reason why I wouldn’t dare run the gauntlet of buying books like those.

Nothing is good about murder. Not in fiction, nor in real life. Bleah.

, has an article about a new book by Tim Lasiuta called Brush Strokes With Greatness that does a special tribute to artist Joe Sinnott, who’d been one of Marvel’s most notable artists/inkers in the past few decades, having joined in the 1950s to work with Stan Lee on the thriller comics he wrote and edited at the time, and then becoming an assistant to Jack Kirby on Fantastic Four in the Silver Age.

With the success of the Transformers movie, that’s doubtless what’s led to a possible .* And if there is to be one, then here’s what’s needed for it to work:

• It should be set in modern times.
• The main adversary should be Cobra. They’re the most recognizable and formidable nemeses of GI Joe for many years now.
• Cobra should be portrayed as the terrorist gang of conquestors they are.
• The filmmakers should not stray from the subject of terrorism under any circumstances, and should deal with it as meat-and-potatoes as a semi-sci-fi concept like this can.
• They should make sure to include Cobra’s self-named battle call, because for them, it reflects their own terrorist unification perfectly.
• They should likewise make sure to include GI Joe’s own battle call, “YO JOE!”
• There should be plenty of advanced weaponry on hand to see, for both sides.
• If Scarlett’s in the movie, she should be portrayed as a convincing butt-kicker. I’ve noticed how a few movies based on comics and other surrealistic items (the Daredevil movie, for example?) seem to have contempt for karate chicks and the filmmakers tend to water down their talents considerably. That should not be the case here.

If the filmmakers working on this fulfill all these important details, then we may get a perfect GI Joe movie that doesn’t stray from effective storytelling. And if we do, then all Joe fans can say…

* And GI Joe has even more roots in comics than it seems, since the earliest template for the Joes was in a comic strip by David Breger for Stars and Stripes first published in 1942.

The female counterpart of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian, both of whom were stars in comics from Marvel for many years, is over who gets the rights to ownership of the merchandise and revenue. The article also gives a little history over how the She-Devil with a Sword came to be:

The lawsuit was filed in April 2006 by Red Sonja LLC, shortly after Paradox Entertainment issued a news release announcing it had completed a deal with Howard’s estate to acquire the rights to all of Howard’s work, including Red Sonya with a “y.”

That Red Sonya appeared in the single 1930s short story “Shadow of the Vulture,” in which she is described as “a tall, Russian warrior woman who carries a saber, a dagger and two pistols,” and who lived in Vienna in the 16th century and fought invading Turks.

[…]

According to court papers, the birth of Red Sonja with a “j” came around 1973, when one of the authors of Conan the Barbarian comic books was looking for “a roughly equivalent female hero” and stumbled on the 1930s story.

Roy Thomas changed the “y” to a “j,” took away her pistols and transported the tall, red-headed warrior back in time to be a contemporary of Conan, according to the lawsuit. The rights to that character were sold by Howard’s estate in 1982.

There’s considered to be two different Reds here? That puzzles me a bit. Roy may have reworked her into a protagonist of the world in which Conan dwells, but surely she’s still the same character as the original one who lived in the 16th century?