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Comic Books Nominated for 22nd Annual GLAAD Media Awards

Image from Avengers: The Children's Crusade #1, by Allan Heinberg and Olivier Coipel. Stolen from http://blog.project76.tv/2010/07/13478/

GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Aliance Against Defamation, have announced the nominees for their 2010 Media Awards. The awards recognize positive portrayals of gays and lesbians in the media, and for 10+ years “In the media” has also meant “comic books,” which is nice. Their nominations for the top gay-positive comics of 2010?

Outstanding Comic Book
Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Scott Allie, Brad Meltzer, Joss Whedon (Dark Horse Comics)
Fogtown by Andersen Gabrych (Vertigo/DC Comics)
Veronica by Dan Parent (Archie Comics)
X-Factor by Peter David (Marvel Comics)
Young Avengers: Children’s Crusade by Allan Heinberg (Marvel)

Every year I agonize over these awards because they specifically reward the ‘straightest’ material that happens to be nice to gays, rather than doing anything to recognize the work of actual gay cartoonists. I’m trying hard not to do this, this year, because hey, at least they’ve nominated gay writers Allan Heinberg and Andersen Gabrych. And I don’t want to minimize the support or work of vocally queer-friendly creators like David, Meltzer, or Whedon.

I just look at this list every year and think “If they had just nominated Ed Luce for Wuvable Oaf the resulting interest and sales could pay that creator’s’ rent for three months,” and it’s a bit depressing to me. Comics aren’t quite the powerhouse that film or theatre are, but if they can do “Wide-Release” and “Limited Release” categories for film, and “Broadway/Off-Broadway” and “Off-Off-Broadway” categories for Theatre (and that’s just New York), is it too much to hope for an area to recognize independently published queer comics work?

Also is it weird that they don’t list the artists? No? And they got the title wrong and it’s just Avengers: The Children’s Crusade and not Young Avengers: Children’s Crusade? Anyway.

I do wish sincere congratulations to the nominees and I hope that the resulting attention from the queer community means good things for them and their work.

EDIT: So, somehow, I completely missed the fact that the film SCOTT PILGRIM was nominated for OUTSTANDING FILM: WIDE RELEASE, which is excellent. I’d like to congratulate Bryan, Edgar, and Kieran for a bang up job. I’d also like to be a total bitch and point out that the outstanding comic book series upon which this nominated film is based has never been similarly nominated in its category, this year included, and wonder why that is in a very leading way. Hmmm…!

– Christopher

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Japan 2010: A Short Walk Through Shinjuku

Not every outing in Japan was life-changing, or amazing, or revelatory. In fact, some of them were just nice little walks to explore the neighbourhood we were staying in… in the daylight, for a change.

Above you can see the view from our hotel window–SHINJUKU, the “capital’ of Tokyo, location of the municipal government buildings, and the big dirty red light district, and shopping and… well, what people think of when they think of “Tokyo” can usually be found within a 15 minute walk of Shinjuku station. We were staying a 2 minute walk from that station, a little bit south west, and since none of my plans or itineraries had be going any further south than I was at that moment, I decided to go for a walk one warm May morning before the day really got going.

The first stop, as always, is the local convenience store, or “conbini”. Lawson isn’t my conbini of choice, I’m a 7-11 guy at heart, but I was starving and wasn’t willing to wait. Also with me on this trip is Jim, who is tired, cuz its early and jetlag is never kind to him.

We arrived in Japan during the hysteria for the theatrical release of Evangelion 2.0, and the ‘ultimate’ edition DVD release of Evangelion 1.11, so Eva product was everywhere. Lawson had entered into a special agreement with the Evapeople (Gainax, I assume? I can’t tell who runs that merchandising anymore) and so they had tons of unique and ‘rare’ items. Shown above are cans of coffee, boxed with an action figure on a very full display. You might be giggling to yourself, but that same coffee and action figure was SOLD OUT all over Tokyo by the end of our trip.

Also shown: Evangelion-themed cup noodles.

There were also Evangelion give-aways if you bought specific kinds of snack breads, in specific amounts. Or maybe Evangelion-themed snack breads. It was difficult to tell. Jim helpfully points them out.

Click to keep reading:

Continue reading “Japan 2010: A Short Walk Through Shinjuku”

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So I run a comics festival…

Short Version: Hey, sign up for the TCAF mailing list in the upper right corner of every page at http://torontocomics.com.

Long Version: I wanted to post something because putting up Evan Dorkin’s FUN strips on the weekend makes it look like I post even less frequently than I actually do. I can’t really think of anything better to post about than what I’m working on right now, which is the 2011 Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF), because nothing I could post about is better than the work I’m doing on the Festival right now.

While a version of this post goes up every year, this one isn’t going to beg your forgiveness for lack of updates–I’m pretty determined to keep writing this year, and I’ve got a cool little Japan travelogue in the queue, about 3/4 finished. It’ll probably go up today or tomorrow.

No, I wanted to post this to remind everyone reading that TCAF IS AWESOME. I’m really proud of every TCAF we’ve thrown, but last year was really the first year it “clicked” for me, where the vast, vast majority of what I wanted to accomplish actually got done. The show ran more smoothly than it ever has, we had some amazing guests, amazing press, and we learned (more-or-less) everything it takes to put on this show. Which means that 2011 will be the year that just works. I’m already so, so happy with our guestlist, with phenomenal German cartoonist Mawil heading up a massive German Comics art show, Jillian Tamaki did our amazing Festival poster, Chester Brown is launching his first-ever original graphic novel and first new work in 8 or 9 years, and Chris Ware is Chris Ware… that’s an amazing line-up of featured guests, and doesn’t include the other 175+ confirmed exhibitors. Or the amazing featured guests who are confirmed, but not yet announced (gotta cross the t’s and dot the i’s). It’s a good, good year.

So yeah, I’m stoked about 2011, which is good, because I’m spending a lot of time on it, as I mentioned. I want to invite you to spend a little time with TCAF as well. We’re going to be sending out weekly-ish updates on the TCAF mailing list (it’s in the upper-right corner of every page at http://torontocomics.com), and whether you’re an exhibitor, potential attendee, or a member of the comics media, it’d be great if you could sign up. One of the things I’d really like to do this year is highlight some of our guests that are doing great, important work, but who might not otherwise make it into the spotlight with all of the big stuff happening. So every week, we’re going to try and talk about new guests and existing groups of interesting guests, giving a little bit of backstory to the people you see sitting behind those tables at the show, and maybe finding you a new favourite. It’s an extension of what we try to do with the Festival itself, drawing attention to great comics and the people making them, but it only works when people are reading our mailing list 🙂

So, yeah, sorry if you read all the way through this looking for hints about guests or the show or whatever. I just wanted you to know what I was up to, and give you an opportunity to keep up to date. I’ll try and keep the TCAF posts here to a minimum in case you cannot go this year, and therefore resent the hell out of the situation and/or me.

Thanks for reading,

– Chris

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A Small Comics Journalism Request

There will always be “news”, which is to say information that, by virtue of it’s newness and importance, can be stated directly with a only a minimum of information. For example, “Creator X has signed exclusive with DC! He’ll be working on Comic X!” That’s news, I get that. It’s important to site statistics, to the bottom line, to get that out there first.

But I would submit even 2 hours after that ‘news story’ has been posted, any other ‘news site/blog’ talking about that story has a responsibility to bring more to the story than “Here is the news that another site posted! I’m including all of the news they posted, but I’m not adding anything, thereby ensuring that you don’t need to visit their site.” It’s doubly problematic because, while you are linking them you’re creating no reason for your readership to follow that link back to where the news originated, so that’s kinda cheap, AND you’re also adding nothing, because as you yourself have pointed out: the news is already out there, what you’ve done is entirely superfluous. Entirely.

So if you feel like you need to have the information contained within the news item reposted to your site, in part or (sigh) in full, it would be nice if you could add something. An opinion, either yours or that of a colleague of the subject. Or Erik Larsen, he has something to say about everything. Further, if you’re reposting the content of someone else’s news item but it is no longer “new”, but you are doing things like saying “…and no one knows how signing this contract with DC will affect Creator X’s creator-owned work,” then you’re not just superfluous–you’re LAZY. Because let’s face it, if I (me) can call up DC Comics or the Creator in question and get an answer to the question you’re raising, and do it in under 5 minutes, then YOU could’ve done the same thing. You just didn’t want to. You decided the post was good enough, and really it wasn’t. It was weak and lame and you should’ve worked harder.

And here’s the kicker, rather than just reposting the content of someone else’s news, you could’ve generated content! You could’ve had exclusive information–NEWS–of your own, if you could’ve answered how this would affect Creator X’s creator-owned work, which means that everyone would link to You AND the site that broke the news. Cool beans!

Linkblogging is linkblogging, yes, but if you’re going to go to the trouble of pulling what is essentially a link out into its own post at LEAST make sure the 5 Ws of basic journalism are covered before you hit publish. It would ensure a much-better informed readership, and better site statistics for you. Win-Win.

Thanks,

– Chris