I've been curb stomped by work.
*Don’t worry, me! The pain will be over tomorrow, just in time for fresh new pain to begin! Mmmmm!
*Someone Was Bound To Try Dept: I suppose you’ve heard whispers about a certain recent online column written by Paty Cockrum, sporting some rather interesting interpretations of recent Marvel storylines and the intent of various creators. To wit:
“The most recent Wolverine is the most blatant exercise in anti-Semitism and misinformation about the Holocaust storylines that has ever been printed.”
And:
“Joey the Q apparently got his nose outta joint when Arad stormed into the Marvel offices after Grant Morrison’s abortion Planet X hit the stands, totally trashing Magneto’s characterization… In typical racist form, Morrison had taken a character and made him so vile that he supposed that Magneto fans would flee the character for good. I mean… if Magneto had to be Jewish, they were gonna make him as vile as they possibly could by turning him into the very thing he hated… a crematoria-building, innocents-burning monster.”
It’s the sort of thing that one can only blink at in mild disbelief, then go off to reading something else. An answer almost seems beside the point. But Rich Johnston opts to devote much of this week’s column to rebutting these and various other claims, and it’s fairly compelling reading, when taken as sort of an Act II of a still-ongoing comics drama. Ah, Fanboy Rampage, look what happens as soon as you go away…
*Still smarting over The Intimates’ cancellation? Writer Joe Casey essentially gets interviewed on all the behind-the-scenes action by Matt Fraction in their own column this week (exquisite taste in links there too). Lots of nice tidbits are provided:
“Frankly, I'm still shocked we got twelve issues out of it.”
“The moment I typed "Continued" at the end of issue #8, I knew I'd personally jumped the shark on writing this series.”
“As for the tone of the final issue... I guess I felt like nobody was really watching. Certainly nobody at the company I was writing it for (even one or two of the artists filling in at the end weren't really reading the scripts all that closely, resulting in a lot of post-production fixes and various art patches).”
Pretty much mandatory reading for followers of the series.
*Ian has a nice post up of Gerard Jones’ Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book. I just finished it myself, though it might have been better to blow through the last four or five chapters all at once; Jones plainly wants to take his story into the modern day, to add a necessary sense of finality, but he also attempts to track further progressions in the comics scene, which can’t really help but come off as a bit facile when compared with the huge detail lavished on earlier days. Basically, everything after the Comics Code gets rocketed through, mostly as a means of creating context for the ends of the lives of the book’s main subjects. And that’s ok, but it doesn’t explain why artists like Robert Crumb are suddenly brought up then dropped after a few paragraphs, relegated to ‘the times are changing’ background dressing. Still, it’s not like these younger talents were the focus of the book anyway (I did get a nice jolt when Jones refers to Bob Kane and Bill Finger as creators of Batman near the very end). It’s certainly a book worth reading for its lavish analysis of the earliest days of comics.
*Someone Was Bound To Try Dept: I suppose you’ve heard whispers about a certain recent online column written by Paty Cockrum, sporting some rather interesting interpretations of recent Marvel storylines and the intent of various creators. To wit:
“The most recent Wolverine is the most blatant exercise in anti-Semitism and misinformation about the Holocaust storylines that has ever been printed.”
And:
“Joey the Q apparently got his nose outta joint when Arad stormed into the Marvel offices after Grant Morrison’s abortion Planet X hit the stands, totally trashing Magneto’s characterization… In typical racist form, Morrison had taken a character and made him so vile that he supposed that Magneto fans would flee the character for good. I mean… if Magneto had to be Jewish, they were gonna make him as vile as they possibly could by turning him into the very thing he hated… a crematoria-building, innocents-burning monster.”
It’s the sort of thing that one can only blink at in mild disbelief, then go off to reading something else. An answer almost seems beside the point. But Rich Johnston opts to devote much of this week’s column to rebutting these and various other claims, and it’s fairly compelling reading, when taken as sort of an Act II of a still-ongoing comics drama. Ah, Fanboy Rampage, look what happens as soon as you go away…
*Still smarting over The Intimates’ cancellation? Writer Joe Casey essentially gets interviewed on all the behind-the-scenes action by Matt Fraction in their own column this week (exquisite taste in links there too). Lots of nice tidbits are provided:
“Frankly, I'm still shocked we got twelve issues out of it.”
“The moment I typed "Continued" at the end of issue #8, I knew I'd personally jumped the shark on writing this series.”
“As for the tone of the final issue... I guess I felt like nobody was really watching. Certainly nobody at the company I was writing it for (even one or two of the artists filling in at the end weren't really reading the scripts all that closely, resulting in a lot of post-production fixes and various art patches).”
Pretty much mandatory reading for followers of the series.
*Ian has a nice post up of Gerard Jones’ Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book. I just finished it myself, though it might have been better to blow through the last four or five chapters all at once; Jones plainly wants to take his story into the modern day, to add a necessary sense of finality, but he also attempts to track further progressions in the comics scene, which can’t really help but come off as a bit facile when compared with the huge detail lavished on earlier days. Basically, everything after the Comics Code gets rocketed through, mostly as a means of creating context for the ends of the lives of the book’s main subjects. And that’s ok, but it doesn’t explain why artists like Robert Crumb are suddenly brought up then dropped after a few paragraphs, relegated to ‘the times are changing’ background dressing. Still, it’s not like these younger talents were the focus of the book anyway (I did get a nice jolt when Jones refers to Bob Kane and Bill Finger as creators of Batman near the very end). It’s certainly a book worth reading for its lavish analysis of the earliest days of comics.
posted by Jog at 10:46 PM
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