I like Viz a lot and so this totally pains me to say, but I’m actually pretty bummed about the move to digital-only on Shonen Jump [ref].
Yes, I absolutely think it is a good move to combat piracy. Yes, I think it will significantly improve the reading experience of thousands of die hard fans. I think it being successful will pave the way for other digital partnerships and initiatives at Viz, another good thing. There are a lot of up-sides to this move, and I don’t want to take away from them, but there’s a huge downside to this move that I haven’t seen discussed yet.
The move to digital pulls cheap, accessible comics off of the newsstands of huge parts of North America, where there might not otherwise be comics or manga. Shonen Jump sold in Walmart. It sold in corner stores, it sold (probably terribly but still) in comic stores, it sold to people without Very Expensive pieces of digital technology. It’s read by kids–and teens, and adults too–but it’s $5 and 300 pages of action, adventure, and even romance, and it has all sorts of articles, free Yu-Gi-Oh cards, and more, it is perfect for kids. I know kids read it, and I’m going to come right out and say that it is the single best way that the medium of comics reaches younger readers–100-200,000 copies of Shonen Jump available on magazine racks across North America.
Some kids don’t have credit cards or Apple digital devices or much more than $5 to spend on a comic, and Shonen Jump is how we as a medium get that $5. $5 at Marvel buys you about 1.25 issues of Ultimate Spider-Man. It’ll get you 1.66 issues of Teen Titans over at DC. But at Viz $5 gets you 300 pages of new comics every month. There’s just nothing else like Shonen Jump.
The folks at Viz are smart and passionate people and they love manga, I have no doubt they’ve explored every angle and come to the conclusion that this is the best move on a number of levels. I’m not second-guessing them here. They published this anthology, aimed at kids and tweens and teens, this wonderful ambassador of manga and of comics, of visual storytelling, and they’ve done so for round-about 10 years now. That is a longer and more sustained commitment to comics outreach than Marvel or DC have managed, combined, since Crisis. Viz deserve a huge round of applause for that, and I hope those last few print issues of Shonen Jump will be appropriately celebratory for their fantastic accomplishment.
I just wish it didn’t have to end, because frankly, comics needs Shonen Jump in print every month.
Just want to give a quick shout-out to two excellent indy comics projects that got announced this weekend at NYCC, which may or may not get drowned out in the cacophony of announcements and discussions.
First up, Brian Wood rejoins with Kristian Donaldson (the team previously paired on Supermarket from IDW and DMZ from Vertigo) for THE MASSIVE, a new ongoing series from Dark Horse debuting in June. As the graphic says there’ll be a 3-part prequel running in Dark Horse Presents magazine starting in January. The news has been somewhat overshadowed by the announcement that Wood will be re-teaming with another frequent collaborator, Becky Cloonan, on a new Conan series all for DH. I’m all for that too, Becky told me a little about their plans for the character and they sound… Metal.
Next, it’s FATALE, the new collaboration between Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips (Criminal, Incognito), coming from Image Comics. CBR has an interview and 4-page preview of the work here, and I really think the mix of the teams’ noir stylings with near-Lovecraftian levels of horror has the potential to hit with contemporary comics audiences. Despite my best efforts the duo’s Incognito was always an easier sell than Criminal–I think the sorts of comics audiences likely to pick up monthly comics these days want a supernatural ‘hook’, and this is poised to deliver. The first issue of Fatale, currently scheduled to run at least 12 issues, will drop in January.
Speaking as someone who enjoyed the previous collaborations of both of these creative teams, and is always happy to see new monthly comic books on the stands? This was a great day for comics announcements.
EDIT: Whoops! Guess I shoulda kept reading my email. Look what was buried in there:
Here is the complete press release; there is almost no information in it other than “3 issues” and “2012”. But If I don’t post that here I will get a dozen people asking for more info.
GEOF DARROW’S SHAOLIN COWBOY RETURNS IN AN ALL-NEW THREE ISSUE SERIES FROM DARK HORSE!
NEW YORK, NY, OCTOBER 14– Five years after it’s initial run ended, Geof Darrow’s (Hard Boiled, Big Guy and Rusty) returns in 2012!
Originally published by Burlyman Entertainment, Shaolin Cowboy is a loaf of wry in a wonder bread world, a nicotine patch in a ten pack-a-day universe. He wonders as he wanders through a world where yesterday, today and tomorrow exist in a collage of carnage of his own making!
“Geof Darrow’s relationship with Dark Horse goes back to the early days of the company. I can’t tell you how excited I am to again be publishing his amazing work” said Dark Horse president, Mike Richardson. “Geof’s art literally stopped me in my tracks when I first met him more than two decades ago and his work is every bit as stunning today. Geof has influenced a generation of artists and I am proud and excited to have him back partnered with Dark Horse.”
Shaolin Cowboy returns with all-new stories in 2012!
That is very good news indeed! It’s a great book, and one that’s been absent for far too long. Hopefully an announcement of a collection of the first series will follow soon.
Today is voting day all across the Province, where we decide who will govern us for the next 4 years, give-or-take.
Now, I know it’s not an easy choice this year, what with the incumbent administration having allowed the horror of the G20 on their watch… The tax thing doesn’t bother me as much because the previous administration spent us into a horrorshow of a deficit, all through tax cuts for big business, and what were they gonna do? At least they were reasonably upfront about it.
I generally like the NDP, although I am not terribly inspired by them this election. Their politics–socially, economically–are generally the closest to my own, inasmuch as that matters to you reading. They are probably who I am going to vote for in my riding, which I believe is a reasonably close race between them and the Liberals.
(I don’t care for the Green platform.)
Which brings us to the Conservatives. If there was any chance that the conservatives might take my riding, and the next closest candidate was a Liberal one, you can be sure that my vote would go to that Liberal because Tim Hudak is, by his own account, a terrible human being. He has run an anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-intelligence campaign. He and those running under the banner of the Conservatives have campaigned on fear and outright lies (there will be no tax cuts, there will be no increase in services), and this is for me a rare case of not just disagreeing with someone’s politics, but actively hating the man himself for what he’s trying to do to the political discourse in Ontario. I mean, he called actual Canadian citizens “foreign workers” because of where they used to live. Look it up.
What I’m saying is, please go out and vote against the Conservatives this election. I don’t care who you vote for, but if there’s a chance that you can reduce the hold of an American-style conservative politician over the voting public of Ontario, then please, do it. For yourselves and for the rest of us that are trying to have a civilization over here while the Conservatives do their best to tear it down.
I had music growing up. I say that because, particularly in geek circles, it’s not always assumed that people had music as children. My first boyfriend only owned one CD, and it was the Star Wars symphonic soundtrack, and he didn’t really listen to popular music. Or classical music. He didn’t really ‘listen’ to music, it just happened to be something that was on. That still strikes me as odd to this day, that you can literally, culturally, be immersed in music and have it have no affect on you. It don’t stick. He was a lovely guy though and I liked him a great deal and did my best to try and develop his interest.
I liked to dance as a kid too. Weddings were my favourite, because everyone was dancing and you didn’t have to be self-conscious about the fact that you liked to dance quite a bit more than the other boys.
My parents liked music a lot, my mom’s tastes sort of calcifying around the time of late 80s radio pop, my dad’s much earlier in the late 60s and early 70s–classics but not so far ‘out there’ as Led Zeppelin or anything. Anything earlier than that and it was their parents’ music, anything later and it was ‘crap’. So the soundtrack of my youth was a steady stream of pop music from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Middleschool introduced me to a slightly wider variety of mainstream popular music, as pop R&B and Rap artists of the day–Milli Vanilli, NKOTB, Boys II Men, Whitney, Mariah, Paula, Salt n Peppa, and many more were added to my musical lexicon. And that’s where I discovered R.E.M.
Pop hits like Radio Song (featuring KRS-One, of course), Losing My Religion, and Shiny Happy People were mega-successes, and while I had remembered hearing Stand on the radio, it was that triumverate of songs that caused me to remember who was singing them. It’s kind of funny, I still enjoy those songs a lot, but my favourites from Out Of Time are still Country Feedback and Half A World Away, probably my first exposure to southern gothic anything. They still resonate today.
And then when I was 15, about a month after starting grade 10, they released Automatic For The People. Someone lent me a tape of it, and I listened to it incessantly for months. The first single, Drive, had done my head in. When you’ve just broken up with someone, every song on the radio sounds like a sad love song. When you’re an alienated 15 year old, every song on R.E.M’s Automatic For The People sounds like it is about you and about your life and they are performing the songs directly in your head. I spent about 3 solid months being powerfully depressed about my life and about the world with “MAYBE YOU’RE CRAZY IN THE HEAD” echoing around thanks to Michael Stipe. Drive, and then Try Not To Breathe… how’s that for a one-two-punch to start off an album? For a depressed 15 year old? To this day, Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight still seems sad to me, sandwiched as it is between those two songs and Everybody Hurts.
Everybody Hurts. Fuck. After just months and shitty months, that song on the tv, on the radio, on my cassette player, hearing it constantly from all sides. It was catharsis, a good cry. I still didn’t really snap out of my misery until almost a year later (came out, got some gay friends outside of school), but it was a start. I made a wonderful friend named Isaac during the time, who liked R.E.M. a great deal more than I did, and shared their back-catalogue with me. Green, Out of Time, Document, and the Eponymous singles collection. Their easily-available back catalogue, I guess I should qualify that. Actually I remember Isaac loving Pretty Persuasion and a few other songs, South Central Rain, from their I.R.S. years, but I really don’t remember listening to those songs with him. Probably my fault that they didn’t stick. But Eponymous, that stuck. It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) was my favourite song for almost 10 years, after that. It’s still up there. I still know all the words. That collection of their early years was the then-perfect survey that I needed.
I was a total convert by the time Monster rolled around. My friend Franz lent me Life’s Rich Pagent, Fables of The Reconstruction, Reckoning, and Murmur. I’m still not entirely sure I’ve owned Chronic town. I was pretty well-versed in their catalogue by that point, and I welcomed Monster with open arms. Their fans… did not. I didn’t really understand at the time, I didn’t realize how anyone who liked Drive couldn’t ‘get’ Let Me In, or the clear musical transition from Everybody Hurts to Strange Currencies. And What’s The Frequency Kenneth and Star 69 just kicked ass. But the instumentation had shifted to crunchy rock-guitars that put off their earliest fans, their sexiness and specifically their queerness put off the radio-fans. They still toured to sell-out stadiums, but the show didn’t end until the encore where the hits came out to play.
I finally saw them in concert, on the tour for Monster, by the way. I was 17. It was exactly what I’d hoped for.
And then came the album they recorded on tour for Monster, and it was called New Adventures in Hi-Fi, and if people didn’t like Monster, man did they not like New Adventures in Hi-Fi. It was dark, dark dark dark. The first single, E-Bow the Letter, was the most southern-gothic thing they’d ever done, they brought Patti Smith to wail over top of it. That’s sort of the opposite of radio-friendly. Bittersweet Me had some of the old R.E.M. flavour to it, and it’s a great song, but the video aggressively confused members of my family, with its homaging to obscure italian cinema. It was a bit like a Francesca Fiore/Bruno Puntz Jones thing, but with models. Electrolite would’ve been a touching love song for the radio, if anyone knew Michael Stipe was singing about exactly. I bought the album on release day, and I listened to it over and over again, and I really did like it… But for an arena-rock album it was pretty fucking complicated. Best listened to lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling.
Then Bill Berry left the group, and ‘everyone’ agreed that the band should break up, and they didn’t, and their next album had a drum machine on it and that was pretty much the end of R.E.M. in the public eye. In private though, I loved Up. Just, just loved it. It represented a departure and an evolution, dovetailed nicely with my broadening musical tastes (dance, electronica, and an unhealthy fascination with the lost Beach Boys album SMILE thanks to Matt Fraction). It was a good run for them, and I was secretly quite pleased that I was a fan of one of the biggest bands in the world, but seemingly no one else I knew was. It was all the benefits of both populism AND being avant-garde and cliquey, with none of the work!
I tortured my roomates with Daysleeper. Tortured them.
Sure R.E.M managed to stay relevant and in the headlines. Mike and Peter were on tons of side-projects and events. Michael produced films and music, guest appeared on stuff. Velvet Goldmine was Stipe and friends. And then the Andy Kaufman bio came out and R.E.M. was all over that, with Imitation of Life from Reveal prompting the radio-fans to give them one more go. But Reveal revealed the band wasn’t the same as Green or Out of Time or Automatic for the People, and nor should they be… that was more than 10 years earlier. Summer Turns to High, I’ll Take The Rain, All The Way to Reno? Still make my list.
Then Around The Sun. Then Accelerate. Then a Live Album, finally, after years and years of high-quality bootlegs. And then today, they broke up.
Honestly I’m still processing it… that’s what this is. R.E.M. was not my first music, but it was probably the first music that well-and-truly spoke to me. They’ve been a constant in my life since I really started paying attention to music, and they’ve been recording almost as long as I’ve been alive. They formed when I was 3. I’m sad that there aren’t more R.E.M. albums coming. I’m happy that they made so many and gave me such good music. I’m frustrated at myself that I didn’t respond as intensely to their last few releases, I kind of feel like this is my fault somehow? I’m glad I can turn on my computer and all of their music is there. I’m going to miss them.
I didn’t come to R.E.M. early, and I didn’t recognize them right away, but they have been profoundly important to me for longer than they haven’t. Thanks to Michael, Mike, Peter, and Bill for everything.
I helped arrange a few creators at UDON to participate in this project–I think it’s going to be very cool and worthwhile, raising still-badly-needed funds for Japanese Tsunami and Earthquake relief. If you’re an artist, please consider taking part!
Art For Hope - By Jorge Monlongo
VIZ MEDIA CALLS OUT TO DIGITAL ARTISTS TO SUBMIT WORK FOR ART FOR HOPE TO BENEFIT ONGOING JAPAN DISASTER RELIEF Unique Art Book Project In Partnership With Autodesk Will Curate Digital Artwork Created With Autodesk SketchBook® Software
VIZ Media reaches out to visual, graphic and manga/comic-inspired artists to submit original work and participate in ART FOR HOPE, a special limited edition digital art book anthology, to be sold through VIZManga.com and the VIZ Manga App for iOS devices, with 100% of net proceeds supporting ongoing disaster relief efforts in Japan. Artists interested in submitting work to be considered for the collection can get the full details at www.viz.com/artforhope.
The unique project was launched in partnership with Autodesk, Inc. (NASDAQ: ADSK), a leader in 3D design, engineering and entertainment software, and was initially announced at the 2011 Comic-Con International. All of the artwork for the ART FOR HOPE collection will be rendered using Autodesk SketchBook® digital paint and drawing software applications.
VIZ Media’s editors will collaborate with Autodesk to review and select works for inclusion in the digital anthology, which will be released later this fall through VIZManga.com and the free VIZ Manga App, available on iPad™, iPod Touch™ and iPhone™.
So one of my more sensitive friends had a little mini-blow-up on Twitter the Friday or Saturday of Comic-con—he wasn’t at the show but like the vast majority of the people interested in it, he was following-along online via reportage from Comic Book Resources, Newsarama, Comic Alliance, etc., In dramatic fashion he announced (paraphrasing) that he could no longer follow CBR’s coverage of Comic-Con on Twitter, because they insisted on abbreviating the show by CCI, meaning Comic Con International (the show’s official name), rather than the classic and beloved SDCC, San Diego Comic Con.
I can empathize, to a degree—a press release I wrote using the official CCI got changed by my boss because, frankly, no one uses CCI and no one outside of nerds knows what it is. But I thought it was important to play the game, try and play the game anyway. And CBR, which parks a MUTHAFUCKIN BOAT in the harbour behind the convention centre, and which had more than 40 registered reporters at the show, and is prrrrrretty tight with the Comic Con organization, they’re playing CCI’s game and so they call it CCI. If the fans don’t like it, they can go and get their own boat.
San Diego 2011 was all about playing the game, about recognizing that Comic Con isn’t gonna be what any of us wants or needs or cares about, it’s instead going to try to be a little bit of what everyone who comes there cares about. All the starfuckers just there to see someone who was on TV one time, all of the PR flacks looking for the next big thing or trying to sell us the next big thing, the toy makers, the funny t-shirt hawkers, the deep discounters, the booth-babes, and even the comics folks–this is the year we all just sucked it up and realized that we were all gonna be in this together, and it’s gonna be in the same old San Diego convention centre in the same old gaslamp, and we’re all just gonna get used to it. So we did. We’re all playing the game now.
Note: Placement of all pictures unrelated.
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My SDCC in a nutshell:
Lots of good friends
13 energy drinks
10 different kinds of cheese
7 days
5 badges
3 different hotels
2 booths
1 panel
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I headed to San Diego a day early to decompress from what has been the busiest spring of my entire life. From 2 months before TCAF until the day I left, I was on a rollercoaster of obligations, assignments, and my many day jobs. I thought to myself when booking the flights—I’ll go in a day early, help set up the UDON booth, and just chill. Maybe go for a swim.
What happened was I desperately needed that extra day in Toronto to get shit ready, and I didn’t have it, and so I was a total wreck by the time I got on the plane Tuesday morning. I rolled into San Diego, checked in with Erik Ko of UDON, went back to my hotel room for a nap, and woke up the next morning at 11am. This was followed by a week of hard work, and coming back to another convention I forgot I’d committed to, followed immediately by a vacation to New York, and 2 dozen things due on the same day.
That’s why this con report is 3 weeks late.
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We confirmed a TCAF Guest on honour at the show. Announcement in early September.
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So I wear a lot of hats, metaphorically, at a show like San Diego. I am there representing myself as a journalist/reporter/blogger with Comics212.net, I also represent The Beguiling and our original art sales (run out of a corner of Drawn & Quarterly’s booth on the con floor). I’m also the dude in charge of TCAF, and so I end up taking a few meetings, following up with cartoonists, and planning out the next year’s show while working at this year’s San Diego. This year I added another hat, in that I booth-managed the UDON Entertainment Booth. UDON is a Toronto-area publisher entering their 11th year, best known for their various STREET FIGHTER comics but also translating a wide range of manga and Japanese art books, and publishing original comics and art collections. They’ve been very good friends of mine for years, and I was happy to be able to help them out. They also have almost nothing to do with any of the other tasks I set myself, so hey, no conflict of interest!
Booth managing UDON meant that, out of 5 days of exhibition, I was at their booth working with artists and selling books to fans 4 of those days, meaning I spent 4 days less on the con floor doing my own thing than I have for the past few years. I love having the ability to duck behind a booth and work for a while; just getting out of the aisles and the convention centre crowds is absolutely amazing. But it’s also, heh, it’s also like working a con. I know, that seems obvious, but San Diego (and NYCC) had become a sort of a ‘macro’ working show, where I’d get things going for the year to come. The micro level, actually selling, while I do that a few times a year (most notably Anime North for The Beguiling, and Penny Arcade Expo for UDON), I hadn’t really psyched myself up for that.
It’s hard work to be on your feet hustling all day. Just a reminder.
It was a good show in that respect, I am reminded that I am good at selling things to people, but it was a little tougher than Anime North or PAX because of the sheer number of people that:
a) Do not come to the show with any money in their pockets, they just come for the “experience”, and
b) Are aggressively not interested in what we have to offer.
UDON produce beautiful, exceptionally high-quality books. Meticulously translated, often printed from the same files and at the same printers as the Japanese editions of their work, and with an equal amount of care and attention paid to their original creations. We were debuting 3 new works at the show; an original graphic novel, a limited-edition collection of comics material, and a fan-sourced art collection for a major international IP. I would say that for roughly ¾ of the folks coming by the booth, getting them to even look at the work we were selling was like pulling teeth.
Comic Con is a collection of niche fandoms united by a common spectacle, and particularly where we were situated amongst the video game demo booths (every one of which giving away some tchochke or another), selling a comic or an art book was a foreign—near alien—concept. Some people don’t want art books, some people don’t even want books. Some people were perfectly content to purchase a $25 art print but turned their noses up at paying $10 for a book that had that piece of art in it alongside 200 more pages of art and story.
It’s been said for years that the insane hoops that the public has to jump through for tickets, and the mega-stars that attract folks to Comic Con that have nothing to do with comics or sales or whatever, that hurts the bottom line for book sales at all pubs, and its only the sheer volume of attendees that keep the show profitable or break-even for pubs. Hearing that, and experiencing that, are two very different things.
I would say that I experienced that this year, and the vast majority of publishers I talked to were in the same boat.
In the end, I want to say that the sales were solid and UDON feels like it was a good show. But coming out of doing shows where 100% of the audience was potentially interested in 100% of what I was selling, it was a hell of a different experience.
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I flew to Japan last year, twice. I flew to Seattle, and to New York, and to San Diego. And if you can manage all of that on the same airline, they bump you up to “Elite Status”. You can go into the short line at the airport when you’re checking in, and you don’t pay for checked bags. You’re eligible for free upgrades to business class where there is free-flowing booze, metal utensils, and a choice of braised sirloin or pan-seared mahi mahi. For breakfast.
I’m writing this on the plane on my way back from San Diego, where I ended up business class both ways, and check-in took a grand total of 7 minutes, combined.
+1 Recommended
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After this spectacular bit of hubris, I spilled a gin and tonic narrowly missing my computer, then I ended up in coach on my connecting flight, sat on the tarmac for a little over 2 hours, and ended up landing in Toronto in a lightning storm. Today’s lesson: Never Enjoy Anything.
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My personal book of the show.
Let’s talk about the phrase “…of the show.” When I started going to SDCC, there was a “Book of the show!” every year. One year it was Kramers Ergot, one year it was Blankets. One particularly memorable year it was Bone One Volume Edition. Books of the show, the buzz book, the the comic that everyone was talking about, that people had to get. There hasn’t been a book of the show for a few years now. There have been some great books, for sure, but nothing that has captured the buzz or imagination or… anything… like when I was first going to San Diego.
One of the pieces of press I got Monday morning after San Diego was from a publisher who started off, informally before their PR, with “I’m not sure if you heard, but we won Comic-Con.” In general, I find it hard to disagree with the sentiment of that statement–that publisher had an amazing year. They had good books debuting, they had tons of announcements, they had media buzz (both imminent and future), they had at least one contender for “Book of the show…” They had an awesome year. And yet (and yet) at ICv2 on Monday, all of the news was pretty predictably about Marvel or DC’s show offerings (mostly encapsulating things everyone knew before going into the show), or media, or whatever. That pub did get some coverage, for sure, but from their point of view they kicked ass–from the general media perspective, they contributed to an exceptionally busy show.
Now obviously I’m aware that it is the PR person for a company’s job to talk up the accomplishments of that company, but realistically, I have a pretty good bullshit detector and even 5 years ago with all they’d accomplished they would have been the talk of the internets for weeks afterwards. It didn’t happen, which is too bad. Maybe there are other PR problems there, maybe their announcements weren’t touted loudly enough, or to the right people, or who knows? But if a publisher can have a massive, 100% successful show on every front and still just be a footnote, that speaks volumes about the sort of show that San Diego Comic Con has become.
That they can still be happy with that on a Monday morning following the big event shows that they know what the game we’re all playing is.
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I sat on the con bus headed back to my hotel. It is amazing that the con runs shuttle buses all weekend–super classy of them. I got on, and the seats were largely full, except for a family of 4 who had spread out into 4 rows of seats so that all of them could get a window seat. I sat amongst them, and over the course of the trip to the hotel watched with fascination and horror as they scanned faces in the crowd, desperate to see a famous person.
“Over there!” one shouted (shouted). “It’s Amy*! Amy from season 2!” and they all stood up and peered into the crowd of hundreds to see if they could see someone who was on season 2. Of what program, I have no idea. They leaned and stretched to watch, right over me in fact.
“Man, that was awesome! I can’t believe we saw her!”
I have never felt less like I belonged at Comic Con in my entire life.
*I cannot remember which name she said. It was a woman’s name that started with ‘A’.
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The following folks and friends contributed enormously to my having a lovely time at San Diego this year, and I would like to thank them.
Peter & Krystle. Erik, Stacy, Matt, Ash, Koi, and the whole UDON crew. Deb, Eva, David, and Carlos. Alvin and Leyla and Gina. Jeff, Terry, Lillian, Jeff & Holly, and everyone I am forgetting.
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Comic Con International: San Diego 2011 was the smoothest-run, easiest-to exhibit at and traverse, and busiest year of the show in 4 or 5 years. I feel like all involved truly figured out the show this year. My sincere thanks to all of the staff that made it happen, and I am looking forward to 2012.
“Again, it makes me think of TCAF and the effect that the show actually has on the community of Toronto. It’s educational, it promotes literacy and it’s free! It’s not about the money. It’s about creating a new audience and laying a foundation for the future.”
– Frank Santoro, The Comics Journal
Go read, it’s an interesting think-piece about where all of this comic-conning is actually taking the industry, and I’d think so even if it wasn’t incredibly complimentary of what we do at TCAF.
“Probably the single issue I’ve most enjoyed in the last little while though? I was fortunate enough to get an advance look at Casanova: Avarita #1 debuting this September from ICON. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Cass fan from before the first issue came out, so it won’t be any surprise to hear that I liked the new issue… but man, it’s great. ”
– Me, at Robot 6 / Comic Book Resources
I was the guest on this week’s “What Are You Reading” Column at Robot 6, and in addition to some much deserved love for Adachi’s CROSS GAME I talk about some recent floppies I read and enjoyed.
Malinky Robot by Sonny Liew is a very cool indie read, about two kids getting into trouble in a nominally sci-fi, ultra dense and condensed city. It’s really beautifully drawn, and these Malinky Robot shorts range from Xeric-funded, self-published work, to stories that have appeared in the FLIGHT anthologies.
Sonny Liew is probably better-known now for his work on SLG Publishing’s WONDERLAND comics and Marvel’s EMMA adaptation, or MY FAITH IN FRANKIE and REGIFTERS for Vertigo, but he got his comics start on these books and I’ve always thought they were great fun.
Image will be publishing a collection of all of the Malinky Robot stories to date this August, called MALINKY ROBOT: COLLECTED STORIES AND OTHER BITS. Full Colour, 128 pages, $17, I’ll definitely be buying one and if you like good comics with great art, might I recommend you do the same?
But Canada’s current law goes beyond pornography that causes harm to children. It also makes some works of the imagination – stories and drawings – illegal if they depict people under the age of 18 in sexual situations. Many classic works of art might meet that definition, and the law does allow for a defence on the grounds of artistic merit. This puts the courts in the bizarre position of determining what is a work of art. Citizens cannot hope to know in advance what the law really forbids, and whether the judge will share their opinion of what is art. Policing the way you express yourself on a piece of paper or on your laptop comes awfully close to policing your thoughts.
Very happy to see this strongly-worded editorial condemning the arrest of a U.S. Citizen for travelling into Canada with comics and manga on his laptop. Kudos to the Ottawa Citizen for taking an important stand.
According to a press release issued this morning and widely circulated across the social media, The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF) will be joining the fight against Canada’s ridiculous child pornography laws, and against Canada Customs’ search/seizure powers at the Canadian border. More specifically, the CBLDF ” is forming a coalition to support the legal defense of an American citizen who is facing criminal charges in Canada that could result in a mandatory minimum sentence of one year in prison for comics brought into the country on his laptop.”
I’ve been aware of this case since just before I gave my talk on comics and censorship this past February, and every aspect of it makes my blood boil. That ‘manga’ is targeted as a buzzword that encourages Customs agents to do more thorough searches, that an illustration of a person or act is the same thing as the person or act under Canadian law, that Art has no legal defense in Canada anymore. It’s all awful, and I am very, very glad that the CBLDF has stepped in to provide funding and support for this case, to ensure that at the very least this man is rigourously defended, and with any luck a precedent can be set under Canadian law.
If you are a fan of any manga or anime, if you are a fan of comics, if you have even one comics page, anime clip, or “dirty” picture on your computer, tablet, or phone, this is about you. This is about you being pulled aside, searched, your electronics confiscated to be sent away for weeks and months, all because you’ve got scans of Naruto on your desktop. This isn’t about “child porn” or any variation thereof, this is about legally equating a description of a thing–written or drawn–with the real thing.
“Freedom to write, freedom to read, freedom to own material that you believe is worth defending means you’re going to have to stand up for stuff you don’t believe is worth defending, even stuff you find actively distasteful, because laws are big blunt instruments that do not differentiate between what you like and what you don’t, because prosecutors are humans and bear grudges and fight for re-election, because one person’s obscenity is another person’s art.
“Because if you don’t stand up for the stuff you don’t like, when they come for the stuff youdo like, you’ve already lost.”
If you can afford anything, I urge you to donate to The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. You can do so at this page, they even take PayPal amongst other avenues of payment: http://cbldf.org/contribute/
A Canadian group called The Comic Legends Legal Defense Fund will also be starting a Fundraising drive over the coming weeks and months, and as soon as their contribution information comes together I’ll be happy to pass it along as well.
So again, and in closing, this is about the government deciding what is or isn’t art, about what you can or can’t read, and very deliberately confusing the thought of a crime with the crime itself. This is something worth taking a stand about. Please do so, and if you can, contribute.
