Because a prominent comics professional demanded it!

For those whose lives are busier than mine, please enjoy the edited highlights of the current John Byrne/Peter David fight. It’s nothing new, of course, just the continued bad blood of two men with beards and too much love for Spider-Man in their hearts, but that doesn’t stop it be entertaining.

It all started in a thread on the Byrne Board called “Has the Internet Ruined Comics?” (The answer, by the way, is “Only if you’re a retailer who liked Dragon Head“), when Byrne explained that spoilers were hard to avoid no matter where you lurk:

Peter David handed out xeroxes of Guardian’s death at a con about a month before the book shipped… To this day, he maintains he was. “I was doing my job!” — as PR flak for Marvel. Someday, I hope some asshole does the same to him.

Peter David replied over on his blog:

Nnnnnno. A popular lie of John’s, but no. Number one, it wasn’t at a convention; it was at a get-together for retailers. Number two, it wasn’t Guardian’s death. It was an unlettered two page dream sequence in which Heather was seeing a dessicated Guardian tearing out the ground. Number three, it was part of a package of about two dozen photocopied highlights from assorted Marvel titles. Number four, the material in question was handed to me by Denny O’Neil, the book’s editor when I–in my capacity as sales manager at the time–was going around collecting material to put into the package. And when I said to him, “Are you sure you want me to include this in the material?” Denny replied, “Sure, what’s the harm?” Number five, retailers at the get together had no idea that the sequence actually indicated that Guardian really died. I know this because when John showed up at the get-together, he looked at the material, screamed at me at the top of his lungs, “How could you be showing this to retailers?!? It gives away the fact that Guardian dies!” and stormed out of the room, slowing only long enough to kick over a standing ashtray on his way out. At which point stunned retailers said, “Guardian DIES?,” started looking at the xeroxes again, and were muttering, “I thought it was just a dream sequence…”

Suddenly, the battle was joined!

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Here in sunny San Francisco, Shannon Garrity plots the evolution of webcomic hub Modern Tales:

MT Longplay, our haven for longform webcomics, has relaunched with It’s About Girls, by writer William G and artist Sahsha Andrade. From now on, each new chapter of It’s About Girls will update on Longplay, as well as on its own site on WebComicsNation.

Longplay will feature two types of comics: completed comics of 24 pages or longer, and ongoing serialized graphic novels like It’s About Girls. All Longplay comics will be free to the public, like the comics in the MT Strip Lounge.

So enjoy! And if you have work you’d like to submit to Longplay (or the Strip Lounge or VIP Room), email moderntales.submissions@gmail.com.

Brad Meltzer calls them “ego characters” — those who, in his words, are put on the team so that everyone remembers them. “It’s in just about every run of every Justice League and it’s in just about every run of every Avengers,” he told Brian Bendis in an interview earlier this week.

Meltzer wants his run on Justice League of America vol. 2 to be ego-character-free, and while history has yet to evaluate the wisdom of his picks, at least he’s not stacking the lineup with his own creations.

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So, after proclaiming the death of the comics industry in a way in which no-one had thought of yesterday, Mark Millar revealed his new theory this morning… only to show that, well, lots of people had thought of it before:

Something that just hit me a couple of days ago and that was that the very thing that helped us in recent years. The huge boost of money and interest injected into the comic-market is exactly what might prove our demise a little less than a decade from now.

And that, my friends, is Hollywood.

You will find no bigger cheerleader than me for the impact Hollywood has had on the industry. It’s brought in a whole new wave of readers whose first experience of X-Men and Wolverine was Bryan Singer and Hugh Jackman. It’s made it possible for comic pros to avoid mainstream superheroes if they desire and still make a good living with the number of indie books being snapped up and the symbiotic growth of their brands whether it’s Hellboy, Sin City or Max Allen Collins Road to Perdition books. But the fact that Hollywood knows where we ARE now is both thrilling and terrifying: Because the poaching has begun and many of our favourite creators are going to be disappearing over the next few years.

This really struck me a few days ago when I requested an artist and discovered he’d be out of commission for the next eighteen months because he’d just landed a gig on a huge sci-fi movie. Eighteen months is a long time for a comics artist to be gone and this guy is so good, so popular, that I know he’ll have another three movie gigs waiting for him when his current commitment is done. And he’s not alone. Six months ago, John Cassaday signed a deal to direct his first motion picture. Adi Granov can’t do comics for the foreseeable future because he’s running the design department on the upcoming Iron Man movie. Producers have finally wised up to the fact that a huge amount of talented people are working in this business and we’re no longer just being used as R&D for Hollywood guys looking to buy something cheap. A guy like John Cassaday, for example, is a brilliant visual storyteller and, as far as producers are concerned, could be the next Frank Miller. They’re scouting hard already, but imagine how ferocious this is going to get once these guys have a few movie hits under their belt.

Likewise, every writer I know has a movie deal at the moment. I can’t think of a single working pro at the big two who isn’t involved with Hollywood in at least some capacity. And the more I like their comics work, the more Hollywood seems to like them too. It wouldn’t be inconceivable to imagine that their part-time movie gigs become full-time over the next few years and I’ll give you an example in numbers. Supposing a writer had an idea for a brand new, four part series. Selling this to a comic company might net him anywhere from 10,000 dollars to 40,000 dollars. It’s a lot of money, of course, and especially sweet when it’s doing something you love. But taking that same story and writing a first draft of a screenplay (something that takes about the same length of time as a four issue mini) and you could be looking at ten times the amount. Get a bidding war going and you might be looking at two or three million dollars for your cool little concept (as a couple of comic-book pros managed recently when they flogged a couple of original screenplays). As much as people love this biz, and I don’t think I’ve met a pro who doesn’t LOVE what he or she is doing, that’s a lot of cash to turn down. I think it will be especially hard for artists. They can only have a much more limited amount of work in print and, even if they aren’t creating anything, could make ten or twenty times their comic-book salaries every week if they take a good production jobs on a major motion picture.

This isn’t speculation. It’s happening right now.

That’s right… It’s the return of the “Hollywood is stealing our children… I mean, creators, stealing our creators” theory. Are you as shocked as Mark claimed everyone else was, yesterday?
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I linked to the LEGO Han Solo and Stormtrooper drawing tutorial last week, so it would be wrong of me to neglect Lando and Chewbacca.

California’s East Bay Express visits Berkeley’s Comic Relief to get a snapshot of the direct market crowd on New Comics Day.

So what are they reading? Astro City, 52, Civil War, B.P.R.D., The Walking Dead and Usagi Yojimbo, to name a few.

Near the back wall, carpenter Don Simonds peruses an issue of Fantastic Four. “Civil War‘s been fun,” he says, referring to the recent Marvel comic about superheroes taking sides over a federal Super-human Registration Act. “I like that they have Captain America as one of the rebels going against the government.” Raised by a beatnik father and a flower-power mother, Simonds relates most to the character Green Arrow: “He’s something of an iconoclast. He’s kind of a hippie. With a bow. And exploding arrows.”

Related (sort of): A Justice League primer

Toon Zone talks with Marvel’s Chris Yost about the Fantastic Four animated series, which premieres Saturday at 8 p.m. Eastern on Cartoon Network:

Toon Zone: Would you say that you’re drawing inspiration primarily from the seminal Lee-Kirby run on the comic, or have other creator’s runs been taken into consideration, such as John Byrne, Mark Waid or Walt Simonson’s work?

Yost: I’m a huge comic book fan, and there’s nothing in FF lore we didn’t look at when drumming up episodes for this series. There’s a good mix of Lee/Kirby, Byrne and Waid in there, but it’s more like elements from their great runs, all thrown together into a new bag.

And I desperately wanted to do the Doom/Reed time travel fight from Walt Simonson’s run, but it made my head blow up too much.

Animated Bliss has summaries for the first four episodes.

…as well as Vol. 1, actually, but nonetheless … check out a sketch that Jeff Smith posted on his blog in celebration of Walt Kelly’s birthday last week:

Jeff says:

Fantagraphics is doing a second volume of Walt Kelly’s Our Gang comics from the 1940s. The first collection was a pretty straight forward adaptation of the short films in terms of setting and characters. This one has Kelly starting to take control; Spanky has been replaced by Happy (essentially Spanky with freckles at this stage), and the gang has a multi-part adventure on the high seas when they are accidentally marooned aboard a floating movie-prop pirate ship.

Volume 1 shipped earlier this summer.

The Toronto Globe and Mail spotlights Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins of Penny Arcade, focusing on last weekend’s Penny Arcade Expo, as well as the webcomic’s influential, and profitable role, in gaming culture:

Penny Arcade earned its trusted role among those sites because it has unashamedly celebrated gaming culture since its inception in 1998. It is the work of two men, Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins, who are more widely known by their noms de guerre, Gabe and Tycho. Gabe does the drawing and Tycho the writing, and what began as a regular comic about playing video games has grown into a publishing and merchandising juggernaut. They sell T-shirts, best-selling books and ads on the site, which draws millions of eyes each month. To keep karma on their side, Krahulik and Holkins also run a charity called Child’s Play that raises money for hospitals — over $600,000 (U.S.) last year.

On the Penny Arcade blog, Krahulik reports that attendance for last weekend’s convention was 19,323, slightly more than the 17,000 predicted — and more than double last year’s figure. Next year, PAX will move from its Bellevue location to the much larger Washington State Convention & Trade Center in downtown Seattle.

Stanford University’s student newspaper rattles off its list of “Top Five Shockers of Summer,” with nods to Mel Gibson’s wild ride, and Pluto’s demotion. But what makes No. 2? No, not Parison Hilton’s annoucement of celibacy; that’s No. 4. The No. 2 spot goes to Spider-Man’s unmasking in Civil War #2:

Spiderman Unmasked — comic book nerds let out a collective gasp of horror as Marvel comics did the unthinkable: revealed Spiderman’s secret identity to the public. In what could only be described as the smartest marketing ploy ever, every enemy, friend and shmoe on the street knows that Peter Parker is your friendly neighborhood Spiderman — and Marvel’s sales execs couldn’t be happier. And while Marvel might be happy with the extra dough from the Civil War storyline they’ve been putting out, you have to ask yourself, “What on earth were they thinking?”

In case you were wondering, Gibson was No. 1.

Chris Mautner at Panels & Pixels shares a heartbreaking story from a recent trip to the comic shop:

A young boy of about six or seven was terribly upset because he had saved his money to puchase a Daredevil comic, Daredevil being his favorite hero currently. Trouble is, the storeowner didn’t really have any Daredevil comics suitable for a six year old. I haven’t followed the character lately, but I can imagine how grim and gritty Matt Murdock has gotten over the years. Heck, I wouldn’t want my kids reading the Frank Miller stuff at that age.

Anyway, this poor boy was terribly upset and crying and the storeowner (who I shall call Jim because that’s his name) was frantically seraching for something suitable and not coming up with anything. Eventually the kid had to settle for something else (I think it was the Flash) and go home rather dejectedly.

Now, for those who may be thinking that Jim may have been overreacting, realize that the boy didn’t have his parents with him. It was an aunt or babysitter or some such thing, so I can perfectly understand Jim’s reluctance. What retailer wants an angry parent barging into their store a few days later asking what the hell kind of material does he sell to kids with the knives and the bleeding and the violence and whatnot.

Three things that come to mind about this story:

1) You have to wonder if the kid likes Daredevil so much because he’s seen the movie; if that was the case, I’m not sure the store owner has to worry about the parents throwing a fit over what the kid brings home.

2) I bought the first Frank Miller-drawn issue of Daredevil, #158, off the stands when I was maybe a year older than the kid referenced in the story. And when Miller took over the writing a few issues later, Daredevil was a staple at our house … it was one of the first comics my brother and I subscribed to (along with Uncanny X-Men, the Avengers and Amazing Spider-Man).

As you can see from the cover of #160 above, where Bullseye looks to be strangling the Black Widow with a hair dryer, Daredevil hasn’t exactly been a “kid-friendly” comic in a long time … yet somehow I escaped from childhood unharmed by my exposure to it and haven’t killed anybody (yet) as a result of reading it.

3) I wonder if a Marvel Adventures Daredevil title would be able to present a kid-friendly version of Hornhead without watering down the character so much that he’d be barely recognizable … not to mention the fact that some parents might simply be put off by his name and look.

So what do you say? Kid-friendly Daredevil, yes or no?

Sorry for the delay on this week’s article, folks. A little computer trouble has me coming in a little late with things, but I promise it’ll look great in the trade!

It’s Wednesday, the new Previews is out, so why not take a look at where things are headed for the Marvel Universe? Please note that these are just things that caught my eye and aren’t particularly ranked or anything.

Shall we?

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For the next eight days, Marvel is previewing a page a day of Warren Ellis and Salvador Larroca’s Newuniversal #1 on its website. The issue premieres in December.

In the latest installment of “Tarento People” at Tokyopop.com, Chris Arrant chats with Becky Cloonan about her current reading list, creating long-form comics like American Virgin and East Coast Rising, and her love of making minicomics:

There’s something very satisfying about it. Maybe some of it is nostalgia for my time making them before; it was a huge part of my life. I think I can compare it best to growing your own vegetables! Ones you get from the store taste good, but when you pick them from your own garden there’s a huge sense of reward.

Handing someone a comic that I had published is a different feeling from handing somebody a mini comic and being like “I made this. I was responsible for every step, from paper selection to layout and design, it’s all mine 100%!” Now that may be the control-freak in me speaking, but regardless it all comes from the heart and that’s what makes mini comics so beautiful. Comics are a beautiful thing!!

Much more, including art, at the link.

It’s been awhile in coming, but the new, improved Comics Journal website is up. Webeditor Dirk Deppey should feel proud, instead of just exhausted.

Over on the First Second blog, Mark Siegel links to a video game based upon one of their upcoming fall books, the (very good) American Born Chinese. Because, really, you didn’t have any work to do today anyway, did you?

Related: Gene Yang on the origins of American Born Chinese, parts 1, 2 and 3.

If Mark Millar didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him:

Comics are doomed! Want to know why? Read my next column in SFX in a couple of months.

And no, this isn’t the usual shite where people say GAMES will replace comics. That argument was crap and made about as much sense as CHEESE replacing comics, the two things being totally different. No, this is for real. And take it from the politics buff who noticed in 1995 an old interview by Denny O’Neil which sparked off my eye for the TRENDS in comics that had ran for three generations. The biggest boom EVER is coming between 2010 and 2013, but then it all crashes and will be as defunct as the British comics scene. For exactly the same reasons. You’ll see what I mean when you read the column and realize why it can’t ever rcover. Just like commercial British comics.

They’ll still exist in some format, but… Well, you’ll see what I mean. But this just struck me a couple of days back and I almost, as they say, shat a brick. It’s good for creators, but very bad for fans.

Fans aren’t convinced, for obvious reasons:

“I assume you mean comics in their current format? I shouldn’t get to worried Mark, your predictions arn’t always true, you did after all think Superman Returns was gonna be the biggest film since Titanic.”

Mark’s response:

It would have been with the right team.

But they won’t change format as such. In a way, yeah, but only in a small way. Marvel and DC won’t be producing even a fraction of the comics they’re producing now. It’ll be the biggest cutback ever and make the 90s collapse look like the eighties boom. There’s no way this won’t happen. Again, see what I mean because I’m right in the middle of WHY it’ll happen and can lay it all out for you clearly in my piece.

The thread devolves from there pretty swiftly, with Mark continually trying to hype his (admittedly unwritten) column for SFX magazine by simultaneously prophesizing fortune and doom for the comics industry while no-one really falls for it.

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Over on the mothership, Garth Ennis answers seven questions about his upcoming Virgin title, Seven Brothers:

[The title refers to] seven powerful men with little idea of what they’re doing and no particular affection for each other who must unite to save the world. One long-suffering woman has the thankless task of knocking them into shape – hopefully quite quickly, because evil is on its way: all-consuming, all-powerful, rather well-dressed… It’s somewhat more grand in scope. An epic, widescreen adventure rather than claustrophobic urban drama.

It’s an interview that teases as much as answers any questions outright, and really just something I use as an excuse to link to Larry Young explaining the difference between AiT-PlanetLar’s upcoming Seven Sons (formerly Seven Brothers) and the Ennis book:

SEVEN SONS: It’s the one not by Garth Ennis and John Woo.

SEVEN SONS: It’s done, and I’m pretty sure Garth’s isn’t.

Alan Moore continues his Lost Girls mainstream media tour with an interview in USA Today that touches on the “vaguely creepy” feel of the book in the shadow of the JonBenét Ramsey case:

“Obviously the JonBenét case is bigger in the U.S., but we’ve been following it here in England,” Moore says. “Remember, we began writing these stories 16 years ago. We had no idea when we were going to have it finished, or what kind of world it would be emerging into. But we are not talking about reality.

“Our position is this is art and pornography. What we intended with The Lost Girls was to sever the connection between pornography and embarrassment, and between the pornographic imagination and the real world. These are two very distinctive spaces.”

There’s also mention of Moore’s disputes with DC Comics — and a diplomatic response from Paul Levitz — as well as a quick-hit sidebar with comments on League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, and the writer’s thoughts on the V for Vendetta film.

Related: “Graphic novel makes booksellers nervous”

The San Antonio Current talks with cartoonist Jaime Hernandez about his New York Times Magazine serial and his most recent book, Ghost of Hoppers. But mostly the article focuses on his characters Maggie Chascarrillo and Hopey Glass:

Hernandez has resisted pleas from readers who hated to see Maggie and Hopey grow apart and — horror of horrors — succumb to the physical realities of aging. He treats his characters like actual people, which is more common in the “alternative” comics realm than in the superhero world, but still rankles plenty of fans. When asked about his affinity for non-traditional, realistic characters, he’s matter-of-fact: “When we started, we thought what was happening around us was far more interesting than what was happening in comics.”

Asked how long it took him to realize he’d be telling Hopey/Maggie stories for years to come — almost his whole career to date, with the exception of occasional work-for-hire illustration gigs — the answer is surprising: “As soon as readers told me they liked them after the first issue.”

You can read Hernandez’s New York Times Magazine serial, La Maggie La Loca, here.