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It’s time again for the WIZARD ADVERTISER AWARDS!

albawizard.jpgHEY THERE, CITIZEN! It’s time for you to once again for you to participate in the democratic process: Which Of Wizard’s Advertisers do YOU like the best!? Marvel? DC? Uh… Marvel?

THE WIZARD ADVERTISER AWARDS! 

Do you like Marvel or DC? You’ve got lots of choices! Was Brian Michael Bendis the best writer of the year for New Avengers? Or maybe Geoff Johns for Infinite Crisis? Best books, and therefore best writers? Of the year. Clearly.

Do you like Invincible? Cool! Why not vote for Invincible‘s colorist or letterer as best of the year? What, you wanna vote for the writer or the artist or even the character? No deal, fanboy! IT’S THE WIZARD ADVERTISER AWARDS!

The Walking Dead is elligible for best series of the year, but none of the creative team is. Seriously, Kirkman isn’t even up for Marvel Zombies, which is also nominated.

No, seriously though. Who is your favorite publisher? Is it Marvel or DC? Or, you know, Image, or maybe Dark Horse? Those guys got a few nominations in other categories. Maybe your favorite publisher is Oni (not, say, Oni Press, like their name)? I mean sure, not one other nomination for Oni or any of their talent can be found on the ballot, but you can totally vote for them for best publisher… I dunno. I dunno WTF. Oni for best publisher for, apparently, no books. IT’S THE WIZARD ADVERTISER AWARDS!

Vote for your favorite Video Game, DVD, or TV Show! Maybe you’re a big fan of the “Sexy Slave Leia Statue (Kotobukiya)“? Well it’s your chance to vote! You can’t complain if you don’t vote, so get out the vote! ROCK THE VOTE! CRY INTO YOUR KEYBOARD WHILE CLICKING RADIO BUTTONS ON A WEBPAGE.
– Christopher
My Votes: Ed Brubaker, Steve McNiven, Dexter Vines, James Jean, Dave Stewart, Todd Klein, pass, pass, pass, The Governor, Foggy Nelson, The Walking Dead, pass, Goon 25-Cent issue, Oni, pass, pass, Superman Returns, Daniel Acuna, pass, pass, pass, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.

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THEREFORE, REPENT!: Not just an admonishment anymore.

My friends got a great publishing contract that lets them have their cake and eat it too.

trlogosmm1.gifHave you heard about the forthcoming graphic novel THEREFORE, REPENT? It’s from Canadians Jim Munroe (a noted author ’round these parts) and Salgood Sam (he was in the first COMICS FESTIVAL! book, amongst other places). If you haven’t heard of it, here’s a quick 45-page preview of the first book: http://www.comicspace.com/salgood_sam/comics.php?action=gallery&comic_id=1612.

Well Jim Munroe is an interesting guy. See, his first novel (that’s a words-only novel)got picked up by one of those great big publishing houses, and he decided that the whole thing? It wasn’t for him. He started self-publishing his novels, doing as well (or better) than he ever did with the big publisher, and even started helping other folks learn to do it for themselves. His publishing banner? No Media Kings.

So when it came time to create an original graphic novel (based on a section from his most recent novel, An Opening Act Of Unspeakable Evil) was he just supposed to ignore all that and sign with a major publisher? Throw his indie cred out the window or risk not having his work seen? Just Zuda the whole thing and call it a day? Hells no! He and Sam negotiated a contract that worked for all parties, meaning that No Media Kings will print and distribute THEREFORE, REPENT! inside Canada, and the international edition will be printed and distributed by… IDW PUBLISHING.

IDW is no stranger to negotiating potentially-sticky contracts; just recently they figured out a way to do comic book adaptations of six Cory Doctorow’s short stories, which are currently available for free under a creative commons license. It looks like they worked out a good deal too, because both Jim and Sam are really excited about it. I took a lunch or two with Mr. Munroe in the lead-up to his contract negotiations to help him try and navigate the minefield that is ‘independent’ comc book publishing right now. Aside from the fact that I hold them single-handedly responsible for an industry-wide price increase to $3.99 for 22 pages of comics (hiss), I couldn’t think of anything bad to say about IDW, and in fact, most of the creators I know who work with them are really happy with the experience. And now they’ve got Alan Payne (ex-Tokyopop) handling their marketting, so the books might even get placement in bookstores too, who knows! 🙂

Anyway, I’m really happy for all involved. The international edition of THEREFORE, REPENT! launches in January from IDW (tentatively), whereas the Canadian edition will be debuting… oh, look! At the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, August 18-19 in Toronto, Canada! How about THAT for a coincidence? Hope we see you there!

– Christopher

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Out with the jive, in with the Love: Chris in the Paper.

prism-cover.jpgWHOOPS! Got a bit negative for a second there, didn’t I? I forgot my promise not to engage all of this. Sorry about that, didn’t mean to harsh your mellow. Out with the jive, in with the love.

I am in the newspaper. The GAY newspaper. The fine folks at XTRA magazine (publishing in Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, and even on the internet) comissioned me to write a little overview of what’s hot in gay graphic novels, and I turned it into a sort of fun, on-its-ear SUMMER READING LIST. It saw print on my birthday (yay!), and it went online earlier this week when I wasn’t looking:

Porky #1 & Pornomicon #1 by Logan. Published by Class Comics. 32 pages; $9.95 each.

In the past year Class Comics has begun publishing gay comics from around the world and these two comics from France’s Logan (so hot he only needs one name) are downright dirty, in all the right ways. Featuring worlds seemingly comprised entirely of hot’n’hairy muscle bears with impossible proportions, anyone searching for something a little more hirsute in their smutty summer reading will have it made in the shade. A word of warning: If guys with PIG tattooed on their tummies and sex with the Octopus-faced baddie from Pirates Of The Caribbean (and all that entails) make you squeamish, Logan’s work is definitely not for you.
– Review by Me.

It includes everything on the spectrum from the suggestive to the smutty, and all points in between. It was a lot of fun to write too, and even more interesting? I WAS EDITED! Usually I just rail on and on here at the blog, but I got to work with an editor who actually made the piece stronger and tighter overall! Suck on that, Internet!

For those of you that need a reason to click through the link, here’s what I reviewed: Stripped: The Illustrated Male, Porky #1, The Pornomicon #1, Fun Home SC, Aya HC, All-Star Superman, Casanova: Luxuria, PRISM: Your Guide to LGBT Comics, Shirtlifter #2, and Young Bottoms In Love. There really wasn’t much point in picking stuff just to rag on it, so I’ll spoil the surprise and say that I generally liked all of the books in the review.

They even let me plug The Toronto Comic Arts Festival, which was really rather nice of them. I’ve got another article for them almost completed which has a decidedly Eastern bent. I’m sure you can figure it out…

I hope my friend at Fab doesn’t get mad that I wrote an article for Xtra. DRAMA. 😀

– Christopher
Image from this year’s PRISM Guide, which you should all go buy to support a worthwhile organisation.

 

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Thank you, Tom Spurgeon: “Creator Rights”

From Tom Spurgeon at The Engine, on the subject of DC’s new online initiative, quoted in its entirety:

“I’m sorry, but while I agree that everyone should rigorously examine their contracts, and that this takes care of a lot of problems, the notion being floated here that no one can possibly get screwed over if contracts are examined falls somewhere on the spectrum between childish and ignorant.

“It’s childish because when you stridently defend something or someone based primarily on your own personal experience with them, you’re re-casting a company’s wider conduct into your own world writ large. In actuality, the existence of ethical conduct in one area or in one relationship often has nothing to do with the ethical misconduct elsewhere. That’s why such arguments used as a defense depend on recasting the original criticism as a 100 percent attack that it probably wasn’t, or drift towards the most strident examples of rhetoric rather than the bulk or substance of what’s being said. “You say that company is always evil, but I had a good experience with them, so you’re clearly wrong.” That’s also why there’s always a huge element of 13-year-old defensiveness in all of these arguments — “How dare you suggest I’m a victim because this other guy might be. I know what I’m doing.”

“It’s ignorant because the construction of such arguments restrict ethical conduct to a wretched, deplorable minimum: following through on whatever contract they can get someone to sign that’s applicable to right now. When you restrict the argument that way, it knocks 98 percent of all potential hideous business conduct from the beginning of time right off the table. Apply that low of a standard to you and me, and most of us are Christs.

“That someone is satisfied by a contract in no way gives moral impetus to exploitation or profiting at the expense of creators’ work. Siegel and Shuster were reportedly delighted with their pensions, and everyone was happy they got them, and their situation was a lot more complicated than selling Superman for $200 or whatever the Urban Myth says, but there should be no doubt that they did not benefit from their creation as much as they should have.

“Similarly, Jack Kirby made a comfortable living, and had certain expectations about the way the business worked, and was generally fine with it, at least enough to continue working, but that doesn’t make it just or fair when Marvel executives get creators royalties for the creation of toys based on Jack Kirby designs and Kirby’s family gets nothing for actually creating those characters. Let alone that this is cool if the current writer of Devil Dinosaur thinks his contract rocks. Give me a break.

“If you don’t think elements of this stuff exist today, and if you don’t think that companies screw people as opposed to contracts screwing people, and that landscapes shift, and that screwing involves applying elements of a contract (sometimes in ways they were never intended) and pressing advantages rather than contracts existing as words on stone tablets with easy to discern rights and wrongs, I don’t know what to say to you except to assure you this stuff is out there.

“The notion that specific conclusions shouldn’t be drawn before we know something for sure is a sound one. I agree. The idea that DC should be given a grace period to publicize their latest publishing venture without people rightly targeting the ownership and money situations as keys? Fuck that. They’ve done nothing to earn a free trip around the campfire giving high-fives. Besides: they know what they’re doing; if they didn’t want a grace period driven by empty-headed blowjob articles and general boosterism, they would have made all the information they’re promising public from the start.

“I don’t believe there’s been a rush to judgment here; I believe there’s the usual Internet reaction and then the usual, depressing assertion of a rush to judgment in order to further a mindset designed to limit longterm creator reward to what the institutions are willing to give them.” – Tom Spurgeon

—

Thanks Tom, you know exactly what to say sometimes.

– Chris

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Trains Of Thought COLLIDE!

Here’s some things!

man-wearing-barrel.jpgITEM! So this Zuda thing, it’s just another way for a multinational corporation to separate you from your Intellectual Property without them paying you what that’s worth. Right? I mean, I’m not missing something? Other than the always-entertaining arguments that a) I can do whatever I want and you don’t know better than me, grandpa! or b) I KNOW WHAT I’M DOING AND I CAN ALWAYS COME UP WITH NEW IDEAS EVEN AFTER I GIVE THESE ONES AWAY. and my favourite c) You’re A Douche. I mean, sure, submit to the will of AOL/Time-Warner if you want to, I guess, but it’s not like the road to webcomics stardom is particularly hidden, or difficult to travel, or without lots of clear guideposts along the way.

sin-titulo.jpgITEM! Speaking of the road to webcomics stardom, a bunch of my friends and associates here in Toronto launched their own webcomics community a few weeks ago. One of their members, Cameron Stewart, finally got around to asking why I hadn’t mentioned that yet on the blog, which is fair, because I really should have as soon as they launched. Honestly, it’s because when I got the “WE’VE LAUNCHED” e-mail the site wasn’t ready yet… Nothing updated, some broken code, all that stuff. I figured I’d wait until they told me to talk about it. I’m every PR-man-or-woman’s dream! So let me introduce TRANSMISSION-X.

“Enjoy new comics every week with Ragni on Mondays and Karl Kerschl’s The Abominable Charles Christopher on Wednesdays, followed by Andy B’s Raising Hell on Fridays, along with Scott Hepburn’s The Port and Cameron Stewart’s Sin Titulo Rounding out the weekend on Saturdays and Sundays respectively.”

I can see why Cameron poked me today, the site’s looking great and all of the currently-updating features have at least a couple of pages ready to read, if not significantly more. Everything there is looking sharp, and, dare I say it? Commercial. I know that commerciality is the enemy of art and all that, but there’s no feeling reading the site that any of these guys–or these comics–aren’t ready for prime time. Let that be today’s lesson: Professional quality comics on the web don’t need to involve AOL/Time-Warner.

Oh, and as I’ve already mentioned a couple of ways in which I’m biased regarding this issue, I’ll add one more to the pile: The next two comics in the TRANSMISSION-X stable are going to launch at The Toronto Comic Arts Festival, August 18th and 19th. Get ready for Arthur Dela Cruz’s KISSING CHAOS and Ramon Perez’ KUKUBURI too. Yay TCAF! Yay Toronto cartoonists!

Comics Festival 2007 - Mal CoverITEM! Uh, speaking of The Toronto Comic Arts Festival, heh, uh, I’ve been doing a lot of work on that. It’s getting to be the exciting time, and we’ve been adding guests to the show left-right-and-centre. A great mix of locals and international guests, guys and gals, print comics, web-comix, and self-published work. Since the last time I mentioned it, check out some of the folks we’ve added:

From The Internet: Danielle “Girls With Slingshots” Corsetto, Chris “Dr. McNinja” Hastings, Jason “BlogTO” Kieffer, and Roxanne “Torontoist.com” Bielskis.
From Toronto: Clayton Hamner, Dave Lapp, Peter Thompson, Steve Wilson, and Tara Tallan.
From Art-Comix: Kevin Huizenga, Brian Chippendale, Frank Santoro, James Sturm, and Matthew Thurber.
From “The Mainstream”: Mike Huddleston and Adrian Alphona.
Publishers and Speakers too!: Peter (Little Nemo: So Many Splendid Sundays) Maresca, Dan (PictureBox) Nadel, and Jason (Shonen Jump, MANGA: THE COMPLETE GUIDE) Thompson.

I’m pretty excited about all of this, I think it’s gonna be a great show (but then you’ve heard me mention that already), and there are more… many more… plans on the way. You should book some plane tickets.

– Chris

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The Creative Underclass

Flight Volume 4 CoverIf you head over to The Comics Reporter today, you’ll see Tom Spurgeon list six problems facing the comics industry, at the moment. Not to steal his thunder or anything (it’s a good list), but except for the syndicated comics concern all of his points are cycling through my brain at least 2 or 3 times a week. The DM/Superhero Retail concerns more than the others, admittedly, but the future of the North American Manga Market and the “Loss of the Professional Class” are both high on my list of comics-related worries. Usually I treat those wories with comics-related Gin & Tonics.

Tom does a great job of summarising everything though, and I particularly wanted to talk about “The Loss of the Professional Class”. Take it away, Tom:

“I’m becoming more and more of the mind that the recent surge in business for many comics industries has for the first time in the medium’s history not had an identifiable, corresponding impact on the fortunes of comics creators. In previous decades comics rates went up when the business was booming… Now, despite the opening of new markets for new creators and the obvious relative health of the direct market when compared to five years ago, the stories about people receiving corresponding remuneration generally relate to opportunities seized outside of comics, not within it. In fact, there’s some initial evidence that a few of the new models even when they’re working full-bore may offer up rewards more of the struggling artist rather than the successful artist variety.”
– Tom Spurgeon, Comics Reporter

I just realised that’s a great tag to go after Tom’s name. Neat. As to Tom’s point… well… yes and no.

Steady Beat Volume 2 Cover, by RivkahI have a number of friends who are young comics professionals, and looking at their carreers now, as opposed to what might have faced them 5, 10, or even 15 years ago, it’s pretty easy to see that there has been a significant, quantifiable increase in the dollars going into comics creator pockets. It’s still about as much as getting a real job as opposed to Todd McFarlane Wealthy, but it is possible to earn (rather than eak-out) a living in the new world of graphic novel publishing. Of course, it all depends on the deal you sign. $10,000 for a Tokyopop GN that’s effectively work-for-hire with a few sales incentives thrown in? Seeing as I’ve lived on $10,000 a year I know it’s possible, I just don’t want to do it. But there are people and they are getting better, fairer deals, and in some cases a pretty stupendous advance (we’ve all heard those names floated around, no need to go into them here).

Let’s look at Jeff Smith and his series Bone. Jeff Smith built his massive success on his and his wife Vijaya’s backs. It was a pretty brutal slog, in retrospect, with Jeff not only illustrating 140 pages of comics a year for 10 years, but also running the company that published those comics and doing 10-15 conventions per year on top of that. When the Scholastic deal came around, and let’s not forget that both Bone and Cartoon Books were successful at this point, that money was a reward for 10 years of very hard work. But could anyone, at this point, go the Bone route? My money’s on ‘no’.

But we’re also at a point where no one has to. The Mouse Guard guy is hitting a bunch of conventions, but he’s not the one lugging cases of his books (I hope), he’s got a publisher for that. Kean Soo’s Jellaby will be coming out from Hyperion Books next year, a young-readers graphic novel aimed squarely at the Bone-reading audience, and while mainstream authors are always encouraged to do promotions and press for their work (and I will be roping Keaner into a number of “personal appearances”) he’s got a team of people out there getting Jellaby in front of reviewers, into bookstores, onto book clubs, and into the hands of its intended audience. Which is gonna be hell for him, he’s so hands on. 🙂

Making Comics, by Scott McCloudThe real reason that I’m not entirely worried about “The Loss of the Professional Class”? It’s a secret I probably shouldn’t spill on my blog, but… Alright, here goes: Judy Hansen, of Hansen Literary Agency [Edit: I had the name of the agency wrong, earlier, apologies to all involved]. Judy Hansen is Scott McCloud’s agent, and got him out of the deal with DC and into Harper Collins’s warm embrace. Scott set Judy up with Flight, and moved them from Image’s money-on-the-back-end deal to Random House, where… I don’t know how private those details are. Let’s say everyone involved is currently much happier with that situation, except possibly Image? Anyway. Judy also represents a ton of individual Flight Anthology creators, including Kazu Kibuishi (Scholastic), Hope Larson (ginee soo books/S&S), and the afformentioned Kean Soo (Hyperion). Her name most recently came up when it was announced that Svetlana Chmakova has signed with Yen Press (a division of Hachette) for her post-Tokyopop graphic novel series, negotiated by Ms. Hansen. Judy Hansen is known as an extremely tough negotiator for her comics clients (coming out of the collapse of Kitchen Sink publishing and seeing too many artists treated like commodity), and it’s a matter of public record (scroll through the archives at Publisher’s Weekly) that her clients are generally happy with the deals she secures for them.

I can’t speak, from the creative side, to the artists not represented by Judy Hansen, but despite her gruff reputation (she once told someone to stop talking to me because they had somewhere more important to be, all the while never making eye contact with me) I have quite a bit of hope for the economic feasibility of being a graphic novelist thanks to her. My fears are still there, but assuaged.

I honestly think that as graphic novels (not even as a category (although that’s nice), but individual gn’s) continue to hit with solid sales and critical acclaim, more agents, editorial staff, and publishers will become educated enough to really understand the medium, its unique creative and fiscal concerns, and things will settle in (upwards) accordingly. I wouldn’t trust a publisher, entrenched in either the direct market or out in ‘the real world’, who tells you there’s no money to be made in the publishing side, that it’s all in getting the work optioned for other-media exploitation. If the work hits (and if the publisher does the work so that it has the potential to hit) then creators should get paid for the sales of the book, it’s that simple. On that count, Tom Spurgeon is 100% correct, and the deals have got to get a hell of a lot better for creator-owned material (and creators really have to get lawyers and/or agents to look over those contracts before they sign them…!). But there are good deals out there right now, contracts to pattern yours after and a value being placed on creative work that’s equivilent to a living wage. It’s really up to the people with the power–the creative people–to seize on it.

– Christopher

Moe, of the 3 Stooges. Not the Moe you were looking for.P.S.: The future of the U.S. manga market is that either the tastes of the audience will age and the material being imported will do the same (like JAPAN), or it won’t, and we’ll be stuck with a nation of hardcore fucking nerds, lusting after MOE 12 year olds and deeply enjoying material for children (like AMERICA). Either way, you know, there’ll be an absolute avalanche of material to choose from, and so the market will remain healthy. It’d take a new Pearl Harbor for North America to turn away from Japanese culture in the fashion necessary for the market to collapse.

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Afraid Of Cock 2: So I was afraid of cock this one time…

Earlier this year, I edited my second comic book (and third project) ever: Comics Festival! 2007. Fulfilling the dual duties of promoting the Toronto Comic Arts Festival and exposing the world to a wealth of talented Canadian Cartoonists, it featured over 20 comics strips from across the country and was quite well-received by all who managed to find a copy at a comic shop on free comic book day. But when the submissions started coming in earlier this year, I got cold feet on one of them, fearing the sort of insane and unreasonable reprisal that follows any comic store retailer being upset about things, let alone things that they are paying to give away for free. What was I so afraid of? Cock, or rather the reaction to cock. The cock of…

Jett Vector, by J. Bone.

It’s J. Bone’s Jett Vector, a sexy intergalactic policeman in a leather pouch and spacefaring go-go boots. Now, this was before the Citizen Steele cocktastrophe, let alone slutty statues and tentacle porn, and hindsight is 20/20 and all that, but here’s the story of my own personal fear of cock.

Darwyn Cooke's cover to Comics Festival 2005!J. Bone is an amazingly talented gay comics artist who’s worked on series including Jingle Belle, DC The New Frontier, and The Spirit. He contributed an awesome one page strip to our first Comics Festival in 2005 (and if you click here you can read it!), and so when 2007 rolled around, I knew I wanted him in the book and he was invited (albeit through his buddy and co-artist on The Spirit Darwyn Cooke) to participate. He turned around a two-page strip in no-time flat, and it was… is… great. You can actually check it out at J.’s blog, Bonesmen. He submitted it to me with a bit of a caveat; having shown the strip to his friends they wondered if it was maybe a little racy for an all-ages book, and what did I think? So I looked at it, and liked it, and then sat and thought about it. Which was a mistake.

Some background: Free Comic Book Day? WROUGHT WITH CONTROVERSY. I’ve no idea why the act of giving comic books away for free has caused so much fucking turmoil, but it totally has, and as the editor of a book being distributed on FCBD, I was very much aware of that…

2004: A child is distributed a mature-readers comic at a Georgia comic book store. It features non-sexual nudity (an excerpt from the recently-released “The Salon” by Nick Bertozzi) and the child’s parent, who apparently has a history of this sort of behaviour, freaks out and calls the cops/the D.A./anyone who’ll listen. This is now known as “The Gordon Lee Case” and the CBLDF is fighting it in court right now. You can help out at http://cbldf.org.

2005: We release our first Comics Festival, and two weeks later get an angry phone call charging me, Peter, the store, and TCAF with being Anti-Semites. Seriously. The reasoning is that we printed Leslie Stein’s comic strip in Comics Festival, wherin the author (Jewish) discusses her physical appearance (see strip here). We thought we’d get flak for Darwyn Cooke having Superman knock-off a local television personality in that issue, not for an autobio comic. Nevertheless, we hold our ground defending Lauren’s right to comment on her apperance and heritage, and nothing major comes of it, but being shouted at and called an anti-semite on the phone? Stays with you.

2005: In a book marked all-ages, a charming “Paul” short story by Michel Rabagliati features a young boy’s first encounter with a naked-lady calendar in a restroom. He is depicted peeing and being embarrassed by the calendar. You really don’t see anything, but retailers screamed bloody murder at the ‘all ages’ tag on something that wasn’t all-ages in… well, Georgia I guess.

2006: There was some cocktastrophe last year too, I can’t remember what it was. I know that the “all-ages” book BLUFF featured an advertisement with bare-breasts in it (that made retailers v. unhappy)… But yeah. Sorry. Anyway.

jettvectorinset.jpgSo, going into publishing the book for 2007? I was a little cockshy about the strip. We’d solicited the book as 13+, made the contents as widely-known as possible, and generally tried to be honest about everything. But I honestly wasn’t sure if the strip skirted into mature-readers territory by virtue of the costume and context of the story… or not. So, and I’m not proud of this, I asked J. if he wanted to cover-up Jett a little more. Maybe a pair of bicycle shorts, or a less-prominent bulge? “If not, I understand, and we’ll run the strip as is and hope for the best,” said I. But I did ask him to change his work. J. said that he’d rather not run the strip if it meant altering it, and I started to feel shittier and shittier about the whole thing… until the book’s designer Chip Zdarsky had a brilliant idea.

“Let Diamond handle it.”

2007 is the first year that Diamond made participating Free Comic Book Day publishers submit their books, in PDF form, ahead of time. I’m honestly not sure why… they don’t seem to have done much with them. But Chip had a good idea. Submit the strip, and if Diamond didn’t say anything about it being ‘inappopriate’ in an ‘all ages’ book (really “Teen” but…) then we’re good to go! J. thought this was a good idea too, and I felt much better knowing that I wasn’t forced to censor or silence a gay creator out of fear of overreaction from the fan and retail community. Did I mention all of this made me sick to my stomach? It did. Anyway. We submitted the book. Heard nothing back. Sent it to press. Diamond got copies. Retailers got copies. No one said anything… until!

CONTROVERSY OVER PHALLUSES AND VAGINAS IN FREE COMIC BOOK DAY BOOKS!

Luckily though, it wasn’t our book. 🙂

Apparently, Image Comics’ Wolfman by Robert Kirkman featured a back-up story with another Kirkman character named “Brit” and the end of the story features a panel with a bunch of dildoes in it. And then? If you flip the back cover of the book upside-down, and squint, and think dirty thoughts, a picture of a vagina might appear. Seriously. This happened and it sent people into a rage. It was fucking stupid, but then so is the idea that seeing an illustration of a flacid penis might seriously damage a little boy forever, and that one’s in court. So yeah, there was tons and tons of controversy this year… Rich Johnston covered a bunch of it in his Lying in the Gutters column, go check it out.

But not our book. I mean, sure, Diamond sent out a warning to retailers that stated that Comics Festival! 2007 (among 20 other titles or so) had material some retailers might not want to distribute to kids, but they didn’t say why. Then, when Kevin Melrose at Blog @ Newsarama linked to the Jett Vector story at J. Bone’s blog, the first comment on the piece was from a “Christian Illustrator” who described the two page story as being inspired by “gay porn”. But he’s a prick, so who cares?

Darwyn and Mal's Covers for Comics Festival

In the end, we had one of the highest-selling “Silver” level free comic book day books, made tens of thousands of comic fans new and old happy, and everything went off without a hitch. It’s now just-about a month after the event, and no one said shit, apparently too distracted by the cocks, tits, and tentacles present elsewhere on the internet. Which means that my own fear of cock was ultimately unfounded.

If you go check the original “Afraid of Cock” post, you can see Darwyn Cooke in the comments section giving me shit about railing on Don MacPherson when I had come very close to censoring an artist for similar reasons. Why was I giving Don shit? Well, mostly for the yaoi comment actually, and for not knowing what an erect penis in spandex looks like… but I digress. I was giving all the “men” who were “creeped out” by the original image shit because I’d been there, if to a lesser degree. I had 20 other artists in Comics Festival, 1000 retailers who ordered the book, and 25,000 fans who might take objection, and under that pressure I strove for a compromise rather than standing 100% behind an artist who I had personally invited to participate. Put simply: I totally fucked up, and looking back, I see that. All I can say is I’m a convert… for cock. If people are gonna see it even when it isn’t there, then by fuck, lets put it out there in future.

I’ve already apologised to J. in private and we’re cool, more or less, but I did want to take the opportunity here to apologise again to J. for not standing up for a strip I enjoyed, by a fabulously talented artist. If anything, I’ve posted this here not only to air out the skeletons in my own closet, but also to try and draw some attention to J.’s work, to Jett Vector in particular, and maybe let prospective publishers know that there really isn’t anything wrong with this material. It’s sexy, yeah, but it ain’t slutty (see: Marvel Comics, DC Comics). It can be tough dealing with a property that skirts the line, particularly the scary male sexuality line, but it can be done and I’d hope that anyone reading there would trust J. Bone to be the guy to know the difference. I didn’t at first, but believe me, I’ve seen the light. Hopefully some smart editor out there will too, and we’ll all get more Jett Vector in future.
– Christopher

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Hey, look! It’s a post!

Hey folks, sorry for the recent dearth of material. I feel like I turned a corner, 12 minutes ago, when I updated this month’s PREVIEWS order. I’m not attending MoCCA this year, and aside from a brief sojourn to the Toronto Comicon in a few weeks, my plate is remarkably clear until San Diego. Of course, by ‘clear’ I mean ‘I can’t believe how much TCAF stuff there is to do’, but I should be able to get my life and blogging back in order, anyway.

Image from Casanova #3, from Image Comics.Speaking of blogging, thanks to the folks at “Fandom Wank” the “AFRAID OF COCK” post got another go-round on the internet, sparking more comments and snickering. I honestly had no idea that post would push as many buttons as it has… A friend didn’t believe me when I told him I had no idea anyone would read it or care (“Come on man” he said. “You’re Chris Butcher, that means something.” I was sitting on my couch in my underwear, eating cereal and an hour late for work at the time.), but I guess this stuff has legs. Ah well. I wish you were all reading CASANOVA, it’s got actual penises in it (and a great story, and lovely art…). That hard cover last week sure was pretty, wasn’t it? Damn.
Barring catastrophe, I should be updating daily for the next little while (and this post doesn’t count, real content later today, hopefully). Thanks for continuing to tune in here.

– Christopher

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Canadian Steve MacIsaac gets a Xeric Grant

shirtlifter-cover.gifCongratulations to Canadian Steve MacIsaac and his comic Shirtlifter, they managed to snag a Xeric Grant! Steve is, I believe, unofficially debuting the second issue at TCAF this summer, and I rather liked the first issue. You can check out my review of the first issue here. To find out more about Canada’s Steve MacIsaac (and read a bunch of his comics for free), check out his website at http://www.stevemacisaac.com/.

The rest of the Xeric Nominees for this year have been covered quite nicely by Heidi MacDonald at The Publishers Weekly Blog. Congrats to all of them too, but someone’s gotta give props to the Queer Canadian artists. 🙂

– Christopher