Category: General

I think that in the last 10 years, the narrative that Marvel and DC have tried to sell, that “Women don’t read comics” has shifted to “Women don’t want to read the only kind of comics we want to produce,” which is a much less compelling narrative. More believable though.

Their lack of diversity, and DC’s recent moves especially, are really damning in the big picture, but even on a personal level, a one-to-one sort of a thing, I can’t even get Actual Gay People in comics to stop giving money to gay-hating hotel operator Doug Manchester (The Hyatt) at San Diego every year… I’m not holding my breath waiting for the superhero pubs or fandom to come around on this one. I would hope that, at some point, IDW or Image or whomever would see the obvious gap in the market and make a go, but as-of-yet they’ve shied away as well. It’s too bad.

On that note, here’s a great interview segment that I read with the creator of COMMUNITY, about how he was ‘forced’ to hire a half-female writing staff, and how that ended up being one of the best moves the show could’ve taken: http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2011/06/communitys_dan_harmon_talks_ab.html. The great pull-quote from that one?

“I think we have to stop thinking of it as a quota thing and think of it as a common-sense thing.”

Here’s to common sense.

– Christopher

“My schedule at TCAF is over. I met more people and had more conversations than I even thought possible (through an interpreter) these past two days. It was so much fun!” – Natsume Ono, on Twitter, translated from The Japanese

What’s everyone else been doing for the last 5 months?

Hah. Seriously though. If you wanna listen to something cool, there’s an MP3 of me interviewing Usamaru Furuya from last weekend at http://www.thecomicbooks.com/audio.html.

I haven’t listened to it yet, and I really want to transcribe it into English if at all possible. Maybe now that I’ve got some free time?

I missed blogging. Hopefully you’ll see more of me soon.

– Chris

Toronto Comic Arts Festival: Pencil it In from Toronto Comic Arts Festival on Vimeo.

Our sincere thanks to our good friend Chris Hutsul and the entire crew for putting this together, it’s phenomenal.

– Chris @ The Beguiling

Hello! I’m going to be in Boston this weekend (March 10th-13th) for PAXEast, the East-coast edition of the Penny Arcade Expo! I’ll be working for UDON Comics, Booth #124. PAXEast is put on by Penny Arcade (the webcomic) and ReedPop (the New York Comicon people) and I’m expecting it to be a lot of fun.

I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned it on the blog, but this September I headed out to Seattle for PAX “Prime”, as the employee of UDON Comics. It was a fun time and it went well–record sales and all that–so they invited me out to help them run their Boston appearance too. I’m happy to do it. I really like UDON’s output, it’s extremely high quality licensed comics and the industry needs more of that. And on a personal note, UDON Publisher Erik Ko is an exceptionally fair and generous guy (let alone for a comics publisher) and I’m happy to get behind their work. And hell, I just like going to conventions, seeing how they run… and what I can steal for my own event. 🙂

This weekend should be a hell of a lot of fun, as UDON’s got a couple of new convention exclusive books at the event and I hand-picked the selection of books we’ll be carrying. Lots of art books, lots of comics, and UDON peeps Jim Zubkavich (Street Fighter Legends: Ibuki) and Omar Dogan (Also SF Legends: Ibuki) are gonna be drawing and chatting with fans all weekend long. While I sell mad amounts of books to all y’all reading this (hopefully!). Also, I’ll be at a giant video game convention, and those tend to be pretty fun all on their own, even standing behind a booth for 12 hours a day.

Oh, and I should mention that the fine folks from Oni Press are going to be our booth-mates for the show, Booth #123/124. We’re directly across from the Show Store. All kinds of books and swag will be available!

As a final note, a very cool thing I discovered in getting ready for the show is called The Conventionist (http://conventionist.com). It’s an iphone/Android App that lets you plan convention attendances by downloading the maps, schedules, exhibitor lists, etc., for a whole whack of different shows. It is fantastically useful and highly recommended, and I sincerely hope I can work with them to put together a similar schedule for TCAF!

Alright! If you’re going to PAXEast speak up in the comments and tell me what you’re most looking forward to (especially if it is seeing me).

– Chris

Forgot I had a website for the last week. Lots of comments on my Tokyopop article (which, given the timing of Lillian leaving the company is kind of… ugh… now) which I just got to. Sorry if your comment was held in moderation for the past 7 days, I’ve had a lot going on.

– Christopher

“As evidence of this, I might point out that we have the highest sales in individual distribution. I don’t mean highest sales in comparison to comics of another type. I mean highest sales in comparison to other horror comics. The magazine is one of the few remaining ? the comic magazine is one of the few remaining pleasures that a person may buy for a dime today. Pleasure is what we sell, entertainment, reading enjoyment. Entertaining reading has never harmed anyone. Men of good will, free men should be very grateful for one sentence in the statement made by Federal Judge John M. Woolsey when he lifted the ban on Ulysses. Judge Woolsey said:

‘It is only with the normal person that the law is concerned.’

“May I repeat, he said, “It is only with the normal person that the law is concerned.” Our American children are for the most part normal children. They are bright children, but those who want to prohibit comic magazines seem to see dirty, sneaky, perverted monsters who use the comics as a blueprint for action.

“Perverted little monsters are few and far between. They don’t read comics. The chances are most of them are in schools for retarded children.

“What are we afraid of? Are we afraid of our own children? Do we forget that they are citizens, too, and entitled to select what to read or do? We think our children are so evil, simple minded, that it takes a story of murder to set them to murder, a story of robbery to set them to robbery?

“Jimmy Walker once remarked that he never knew a girl to be ruined by a book. Nobody has ever been ruined by a comic.”

– William Gaines, Testifying before the Senate on behalf of comic books.

I cannot believe I’ve never read this before. Wow.

– Chris

Torontoist.com, a very good Toronto-centric blogging site (part of the Gothamist network) has moved from a full RSS feed to a partial feed over the past few years, and from a partial feed to a tiny-imaged, short-excerpt RSS feed as of Christmas this year. I hate this, and did my part as a good and loyal reader to inform the editors of my displeasure. They said that they understood and it wasn’t under their control and thank you for reading. Nice, professional, I bear them no ill-will, but it doesn’t really solve my problem.

BlogTo.com, their close competitor, offers a full feed of many of their articles, full-sized photos, and excerpts feature articles after 2 or 3 paragraphs. Enough to get me reading, and deciding whether or not I’m enjoying the piece. Big enough pictures to make me notice. In short, it is well designed.

I don’t mean to bring this up to slam Torontoist, it’s a great site and I enjoy reading it, but I subscribe to a few hundred websites, about 600 new articles a day appear in my RSS feed, and I try to read and enjoy appreciate anything that looks interesting. And so when going through my RSS feed, the image to the right depicts a BlogTo article in my feed (top), followed by a Torontoist article in my feed (bottom).

Which one of those articles, as displayed, makes you want to keep reading? Which one of those articles would have you clicking over to the main site, which would then get the attendant ad-traffic, viewership, etc.?

Both sites have been very good to me and I hesitate to openly criticize one, but I think this is what parents call a “teachable moment.” If you are running a website, ask yourself if you’ve got a full or partial RSS feed, and how your site is displayed, and whether it’s inviting and open and promotes your message, promotes What You’re Trying To Communicate, or if it… doesn’t.

And if you don’t know? Find out!

– Christopher

Unfortunately I ran out of time last month to talk about some of the very good books in the Previews catalogue, available for pre-order, and coming our way in March.

One of those was the very first volume of my good friend Jim Zubkavich’s SKULLKICKERS trade paperback, entitled 1,000 Opas and a Dead Body, being published by the fine folks at Image Comics. It collects the first 5 issues and some short stories that ran in Image’s Popgun Anthology, and it’s quite a bit of fun.

Just today I’d noticed that Jim had posted up the cover of the printed book to his Facebook page, complete with little spot-varnish skulls, and I thought that was a very cool deal.

It reminded me of how excited I’d gotten, seeing my first work in print, and then finally (eventually) holding the first trade paperback to feature my work in hand. For me it was seeing that first issue of Jimmie Robinson’s Evil & Malice, which I coloured from start to stop– that was the book that really made me well-up with pride (although kudos to J. Torres for getting me my first job on Siren). My first piece of published comics writing was Put The Book Back On The Shelf, an anthology of comics adapting the music of Belle & Sebastian, a band I adore. That was a book-book, a graphic novel, and it was my writing and not my colouring seeing print and that was a different kind of pride. Funnily enough, all of those works were from Image Comics too.

I mostly work in other disciplines now, organizational creativity rather than strictly creative, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss it a little. Colouring, design, writing. I do use all of those skills in service to The Beguiling and TCAF and even occasionally the blog here. But yeah, seeing Jim talk about how happy he was to know there was a printed trade paperback of his work, a work he put a lot of effort into writing, designing, promoting, developing, even colouring and drawing a tiny a little of it, it reminded me of the thrill of seeing a new comic that I’d work on show up in the store. Kudos Jim, hope you’re enjoying it.

Skullkickers Volume 1: 1000 Opas and a Dead Body by Jim Zubkavich, Edwin Huang, and Misty Coats is 144 pages of over the top fantasy adventure retailing for the bargain-basement price of just $9.99. It will be on sale March 9th in better comic book stores everywhere.

– Christopher