At any rate, if you're on the...Twitter...?...you can feel free to "follow" me if you like. I have pretty much no idea what exactly I'm going to do with the account yet, beyond using it to keep better track of various comics-type folks so as to better cover comics here and at the other sites I write for, but right now I imagine I'll do more of my link-blogging and talking-about-stuff-that's-not-exactly-comics-and-doesn't-quite-fit-here over there.
You can search for me by my name, I think. Otherwise, my "tag" or "handle" is "@jkaylub", because someone else already beat me to "caleb" and "EDILW." I should probably also note that I haven't really started tweeting yet, so there's nothing to see if you do follow me at this point.
Anyway. Social media! Yeah!
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Here's a pretty nice drawing of Catwoman by Katie Skelly, creator of Pandaface (Oh, and of Nurse Nurse too). (Via Spurgeon)
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When Ms. magazine and MAC cosmetics think Wonder Woman, they think Mike and Laura Allred. When DC Comics thinks Wonder Woman, they think Cliff Chiang, Tony Akins and Jim Lee (and Don Kramer, Eduardo Pansica, Nicola Scott, Aaron Lopresti, Bernand Chang, Terry Dodson, Paco Diaz, Ed Benes and Pete Woods).
Now, I like Cliff Chiang's art a whole heck of a lot (as I do that of his occasional fill-in artist Akins, and the work of a few of the others mentioned in that list of folks who have been drawing her over the course of the last two volumes of Wonder Woman and related books), and I am super-psyched that he's been drawing Wonder Woman this past last year (and that he doesn't seem to be leaving it any time soon). But, personally, I sure would like to have seen more Allred and less lack of Allred over the past, oh, five years of Wonder Woman comics.
Anyway,I'm kind of intrigued to see the Allreds being called on to contribute another image of Wonder Woman for the civilian masses, as it makes them seem like the go-to Wonder Woman artists when you need an image that says "Wonder Woman" to the general public, while the makers of Wonder Woman's comics gravitate towards artists with a much different style and take on the character (Of course, the space between the style of Chiang and Allred isn't nearly so wide as the space between Allred's style and that of Lee or Lopresti).
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So I pretty much link to Tucker Stone, Nate Bulmer and Abhay Khosla's "Comics of the Weak" feature at The Comics Journal every goddam week, don't I? Well, let's not mess with tradition.
In his portion, Khosla kills it in his discussion of that Grant Morrison interview with The New Statesmen (discussed in this space here last week). I followed one of his links to an interesting piece by Paul Gravett that I somehow missed the first time around, and holy shit, you know that fucked up part of Supergods where Morrison takes National Comics side over Siegel and Shuster's in the "comics original sin" moment...? According to Gravett, that passage was even worse in an earlier draft of the book, and included the italicized words "they wanted to be bought", referring to Siegel and Shuster's "sale" of Superman to National (As I've noted a couple of times, they sold the first Superman story for a page rate; they didn't sell the character at that time).
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I know they say size doesn't matter at all, but I honestly put Grant Morrison and Darick Robertson's Happy #1 back on the rack when I saw the size of the My Little Pony in it. Like, if it were a full-sized pony, I would have been into it, but the fact that it was a tiny little pony? That really didn't do anything for me. I don't have an explanation for why that is.
Although I suppose I could have just been so grossed out by Grant Morrison that my reptile brain was repulsed by the thought of buying a Grant Morrison comic Wednesday, and my higher brain translated that into an excuse signal about the size of the hallucinatory pony.
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Things I totally forgot this weekend: There was a new movie based on Judge Dredd comics that came out in theaters, and the comics convention in my former stomping grounds of Columbus that used to be Mid-Ohio Con but now has the words "Wizard World" grafted on to it occurred.
I don't mind missing the latter much—obviously, since I completely forgot about it and didn't remember its existence until I started seeing pictures posted on Facebook—but I feel kind of bad about my ignorance of a new Dredd movie. Like I should lose some points or get a demerit or something for not seeing it.
Was Judge Death or that big dinosaur in it? I want to see Judge Death and that big mutant dinosaur in a movie.
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I would like this cover better if the artist placed the really tall minaret a little more to the left, so it looked like it was hiding an erection. As is, it's just close enough to make me think about that dude's penis and note that there could very easily be a dick joke in the image and then feel disappointment at the image's lack of a dick joke.
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Wait, you can just stop...?
I think the reason Ms. and MAC cosmetics are using the Allreds to draw Wonder Woman is that their art reads very "comic booky" according to older notions of what comics art looks like. Note that all the illustrations use (simulated) Ben-Day dots for that Pop Art/Roy Lichtenstein feel.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, to me, Mike Allred's art has always seemed somewhat like a caricature of straight superhero art. That's one reason I think it's worked well on things like X-Statix, which was as much a commentary on superheroes as a superhero comic per se, but less well on more typical comics.