See & Read: Comic Book Comics!

I know that the phrases “Indie Jones” and “Exclusive Content” go together about as well as “Balanced Diet” and “Processed Cheese,” but the very cool Fred Van Lente was kind enough to let us debut the cover to the second issue of he and artist Ryan Dunlevy’s Comic Book Comics. If you haven’t heard of the book yet, it’s a humorous telling of the history of the comics medium done in the same style as Van Lente and Dunlevy’s Action Philosophers!, and you can read all about it in my interview with Van Lente at the Big WU. My favorite part is this, where he talks about why the comic is both funny and informative:

VAN LENTE: Some of it—and I’m being totally up front about this—is to not get sued. One of the ways to refer to this stuff, because we’re using trademarked characters—one of the things people said when I told them this idea years ago was, “How are you gonna be able to do that and not be sued? Because you’re talking about Superman, you’re talking about Blue Beetle, you’re talking about all these trademarked characters, aren’t people going to come after you?” And the way you protect yourself from that is—there’s an educational component to this that’s covered under copyright law as fair use, but there’s ways to make fun of them. It’s parody, and it’s protected. Sometimes it becomes, I gotta tell some jokes here, or I’m gonna get sued! You’ll see when you get the comic, the entire inside front cover is taken up by legalese. Humorous legalese, of course, but all accurate nonetheless.

There’s plenty more cool stuff in the link, and you can read plenty of free pages from Comic Book Comics #1 at the Evil Twin website, so check it out!

- KP

LINKO! – March 27th

Oh my God, you guys! It’s crazy around these parts these days, but we’ve got a few really super cool features that Dave and I will be blogging all up in your faces over the next few days (Can you say “New Pancake Lover”?????). But for right now, how’s about you and I play some Linko for fabulous internet prizes?

In what is probably either old news or news that falls so strongly into the “well, of course they are” category that you probably all figured it was happening, the dudes at Penny Arcade are prepping their own video game. Now, I don’t play video games much if at all, and my interest in the online adventures of Tycho and Gabe is almost totally contingent on my wanting to sound really smart about the web comics business model at comics industry cocktail hour (that and I like it when I see a strip where they mention Deep Space 9). HOWEVER, even I think the idea of a straight up adventure game starring the pair and created with the guys who did The Secret of Monkey Island sounds awesome.

Won’t you please click on this link which contains an interview with the guys from Hothead Games who are bringing this cash cow to pixilated life?

In other weird cartoonist media crossover news, Jeffrey Brown was recently profiled for a Canadian television show call SexTV. I don’t get the title either, but the video looks cool. I found this on the Top Shelf newsletter, which probably means you’ve already seen it. But if you’re not on that list, the easiest ways to get signed up include going to the Top Shelf site, contacting anyone at Top Shelf for any reason or giving Chris Staros a high five on the floor of any convention.

Lastly, I went to the release party for the new issue of Comic Foundry last night thrown by the man pretty Tim Leong and the lovely Laura Hudson. Tim took photos of me looking pale and bloaty next to pretty girls which you can see here. The new issue of their mag looks really slick and is in stores April 9th.

– KP

GET TO KNOW A CARTOONIST: LIZ PRINCE

It’s hard not to love the endearingly funny, sketchbook journal-style autobiographical comics of Liz Prince. Holding a shameless magnifying glass up to her personal life, Prince highlights the sweet along with the uncomfortable with an added dash of quirky and nerdy (her cat’s name is SCIENCE!). Like asking her boyfriend to smell her armpit or obsessing over Saucony running shoes and Zelda on the Nintendo DS.

She made her first autobio comic, about meeting Evan Dorkin (Dork, Milk & Cheese), when she was 16 and later got her big break after sending Top Shelf a mini-comic of what they would go on to publish as Will You Still Love Me If I Wet The Bed?—which won the Ignatz Award at SPX for “Best Debut” in 2005. Since then, Liz has become an anthology Viking with most of the critically acclaimed volumes like Papercutter, Project: Romantic, You Ain’t No Dancer and even VICE Magazine’s Comics Issue.

Her upcoming Top Shelf collection, Delayed Replays, will print online material from her Livejournal. Will You Still Love Me If I Wet The Bed? gets a new printing from Top Shelf next week after being out of print for a while. She’s also continuing to work on a longer form autobiographical work called Two Headed Boy, so that’s something to look forward to in the future.

For some instant gratification go check out her Livejournal, which she updates pretty regularly. She’s currently in the middle of a “100 Themes” posting frenzy, which will eventually end in 100 strips, each focusing on a single theme. Fun!
If you don’t feel good about life (or comics) after reading Liz’s stuff your heart is a black hole weirdness.

Quotable:
“I do still have a certain level of personal embarrassment. Usually if I find something really mortifying it will take me a couple months to come to terms with it and be able to use it in a comic. As far as stuff that just involves me goes I tend to find a lot of humor in either the terrible things that happen to me or the terrible things that I do to other people. But when there’s someone else involved I try and give them a say on whether or not I divulge their personal secrets.”

-DP

Things to look forward to…

Michael Cera Gets It Together

I’m sure most of you already saw this by now, but Michael Cera (“Arrested Development,” “Juno”) has been cast as the lead in the film adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series. With “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz” director Edgar Wright behind the camera, I’m sure fans will be flipping out whenever this thing actually gets filmed.

The two most interesting responses to the casting news I’ve seen come from New York Magazine’s Vulture Blog – who wonder aloud whether or not the normally on-screen shy guy Cera can pull off Pilgrim’s mix of swagger and stupidity and whether it could save his career – and After Elton’s post on whether Wright will nail the relationship between Scott and his cool gay roommate Wallace. Both are valid points and interesting reading, but for my part I’m pretty hopeful that the movie will get it right on both fronts.

At the risk of sounding vague and douche baggy, I met one of the Apatow comedy crew actors a while ago at a party who’s into comics, and when he was asking for recommendations I mentioned Scott Pilgrim. “Oh, I’ve read that,” he says. “I’m friends with the guy who’s directing it, and Michael Cera’s going to be the lead. [Giant pause] Actually, those papers haven’t been signed yet, so don’t mention this to anyone, okay?”

He went on to explain how Wright and everyone involved are super into the original comic and they want to be as faithful as possible while still making it the movie version of the story. And if I had to put my money on what Wright film got made first between this and “Ant-Man” I’d totally bet on this.

In any event, the person whose take really matters is O’Malley, and by the look of his blog, he’s out in LA right now, so maybe he’ll be posting on all this later in the week. You should bookmark that page anyway, as he’s always posting cool art stuff, including the above pic which I have ruined with my horrible Photoshop “skills.”

And while we’re on the subject of an Oni Press book, I should definitely get off all of this Hollywood blather and mention that they just announced a new book from Matthew Loux (Sidescrollers) called Salt Water Taffy which looks like a blast and last week saw the release of Lars Brown’s first Northworld Graphic Novel, which I got a kick out of. Look for more on both those projects to hit this blog once I get off my lazy duff and call those dudes up.

– KP

LINKO! – March 20th

Hey gang! Let’s play a game of Linko!

Linko! is a game that’s a lot like that awesome game Plinko! from “The Price Is Right” except it involves me putting up a bunch of links. And there’s no disc that you slide down anything. And it’s heart and soul haven’t been replaced by Drew Carey.

Anyway, I’m still recovering somewhat from this weekend’s Wizard World LA show. I had a fun weekend of sitting in a room typing panel reports and looking out a window to an convention hall no one was using (they put us web guys way far away from the actual action), so there was very little floor shopping for me. However, I did get a chance to talk to a few of the indie creators on the floor, including:

The hilarious and friendly web cartoonist David Malki. If you’ve never experienced his Tuesday and Friday updating Wondermark you should check it out. The best way I can think to describe it is to ask if you remember those old Wendy’s countertops that featured Olde Timey ads for Cotton Gins and Almanacs and the like. If you do, just add some non-sequitur-containing, occasionally vulgar word balloons, and you’ve got the idea.

David was sharing table space with Dave Kellett whose strip Sheldon is something more akin to a newspaper strip but with loads more “Star Wars” references. Dave is also one of the masterminds behind Image’s How To Make Web Comics which hit stored last week and is worth a looksee.

On the more mainstreamy front of independent publishing, I talked to Lee Kohse at Bloodfire Studios who are probably best known for their Kindergoth series, but they’ve actually been publishing for ten years, which in this day and age is a pretty solid accomplishment. And in one of those “microcosm of the bigger comics world” developments, Bloodfire is putting out a prequel to an indie sci fi movie called “The Gene Generation” and had cast members on hand signing books all weekend. This is what it’s like in Los Angeles, folks.

Outside my LA adventures, I was came across a weird web comics connection in my personal life the other day when my buddy pointed me to TOBY, Robot Satan – an online strip by Corey Pandolph now published daily in the Metro paper. For anyone who doesn’t live in New York or other major cities, the Metro is a free paper homeless guys give you when you’re walking around in the morning. If I had to make a blind guess, I’d say the “serialized in alt weekly and freebie paper” route of getting paid is one of the elements of web comics which gets the least amount of coverage in the comics press. I got kind of a chuckle out of TOBY while searching its archives at Go Comics so I figured I’d share.

As a final “read it instead of doing work” contribution to your life, I thought I’d throw up this well-traveled link to a Village Voice review of David Hajdu’s history of comics’ Wertham era, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. I love books on comics history, and the review goes not only into the book (which sounds like a well-researched effort worthy of pick up) but challenges is with a few requests for additional material (although I’m not sure more about Crumb’s generation of underground cartoonists necessarily needs to be addressed in these kinds of things). Either way, good reading.

I’m looking to get an interview and/or review up tomorrow to make Dave look bad, so keep comin’ back!

– KP

Q+A: Vasilis Lolos

Greek native Vasilis Lolos broke into American comics working with Rick Spears (Teenagers From Mars) on Pirates Of Coney Island at Image. Along with various mini comics like his own Hats and 2007’s 5 with Becky Cloonan, Gabriel Ba, Fabio Moon and Rafael Grampa, Vasilis has started his own graphic novel series at Oni Press called The Last Call.

How did you get into comics and illustration?

I got to a late start when it came to drawing. I was reading a lot of comics as a kid but other then Mighty Mouse and K.I.T.T. I didn’t draw much until I was 16 or something when I was preparing for architecture school (I ended up in graphic design). I drew a lot of short stories in that time and went into self-publishing with groups of friends. I got my first publishing deal in a weekly magazine called “9″ and since then I’ve been drawing comics full-time.

How has your style of drawing evolved since you first started? Were there any comic artists that inspired you?

I started off with a very European style, but after taking some heat from a friend I dove headfirst into the depths of “manga,” that was around 1998. Since then I’ve been looking at more alternative artists including Taiyo Matsumoto, Max Anderson, Guy Davis, Mike Mignola and Frank Miller. Of course my style has changed a lot over the years, switching mediums and techniques, but that’s all a part of growing up. Katsuhiro Otomo is an everlasting influence to me, as well as Moebius, however the last few years I’ve been drawing inspiration more from outside of comics.

What kind of inspiration do you draw from outside of comics?

I really like the Art Deco period, and I’ve been into Dore’s engravings. I also draw a lot of inspiration from the German exspressionist film movement. I buy a lot of magazines that are related to Space exploration and mechanical design. Really I pick up things from here and there, trying to make sense of it in a sort of mental-to-visual Tetris fashion. Of course there are themes and visual styles that I’ve always liked, but sometimes something unexpected will capture my attention and I throw it into the mix.

What was it like going from the Greek/Euro comics scene/industry to the American? How would you say they differ?

I was working in Greece as a professional for five years, I published a graphic novel and was getting consistent work in various magazines and newspapers, and my friends and I had self published several anthologies, mini comics and cd-rom comic zines. Not to pat myself on the back but I thought my work was well recieved, so leaving that industry and starting work in the US was like going from Hero to Zero. Nobody knew who I was and it felt like the five years I’d already been working didn’t count for anything. But I’m working hard to regain my Hero status, and I’ve learned a lot and met so many great people in the US who have been nothing but encouraging. I mean, if you had told me five years ago that Geoff Darrow and I would trade comics at Comic Con I would never have believed it.

There is no real way to compare the Greek and American comic scene, there are a lot of comics that are translated into Greek but there aren’t many professional venues who publish Greek creators. The majority of Greek comic artists are independently published or political cartoonists, but the number of creators are on the rise and in the past few years the industry has grown a lot. There are a lot of cool people in the comic scene here, but I gotta be honest, there are a lot of haters too. But what can you do? Hate the game, not the playa.

Tell me about your latest book, The Last Call. How did you come up with the concept?

I’ve always wanted to do a coming-of-age story about friendship and what it means to grow up, and I’ve always wanted to draw a murder mystery (keeping in mind that I’m a fan of the paranormal), so when the opportunity arose to do a short graphic novel series with Oni Press The Last Call was born fairly painlessly. It’s an adventure story of two boys, Sam and Alec, who get caught up in a murder case on a ghost train. I’m working on the second book right now, I hope to have it out for New York Comic Con in April 08. The story is really inspired by the feeling I get from Miyazaki movies and Agatha Christie books.

What else in on the horizon in your immediate future – Last Call and Pirates of Coney Island?

When Pirates of Coney Island wraps up I’d like to tackle another monthly mini series in between Last Call GN’s. I have a few stories in mind that I’ve been toying with, we’ll see which one is the lucky winner. I’m also working on a comic with Becky Cloonan that she’ll be writing and I’ll be drawing, but I can’t say much about it yet. I’ve been keeping myself busy.

I love telling stories and making art, and comics combines both of these perfectly. I also love going to comic conventions, meeting other artists and creators. Actually, I love the whole comic industry: from the pencil to the page to the printer to the shelf.

-DP

Waste your Monday by listening to me!

I just got back to the Wizard offices after taking the Red Eye from our LA con, and now that I’ve filed my last story for the Big WU, I’m going to go home, watch “Lost,” sleep lots and then wake up and boil noodles.

So yeah, no real blogging today.

Dave and I will be back in full force tomorrow, but in the meantime, the fine boys at the Comic Book Club event I participated in last week have put up a podcast of the whole thing for all three of you who are interested. I haven’t listened to it yet, but a friend said my voice sounds really, really deep.

– KP

Check out Jeff Lemire’s THE HORSELESS RIDER

Jeff Lemire, award winning creator of the Essex County trilogy, posted a short, spooky western comic over at his blog. His style definitely works great with the genre. Hopefully he does more of this stuff some day!

R.I.P. DAVE STEVENS (1955 – 2008)

I just saw on Newsarama and followed the link over to Mark Evanier’s News From ME that Dave Stevens has passed away. While many comic fans may know Stevens as “the guy who created The Rocketeer,” his talent and creativity deserve much wider recognition than that Hollywood factoid affords.

In some ways, it’s a real shame that Stevens was such a perfectionist of an artist. His reputation for taking an incredibly long time to complete almost anything to his own personal standards meant that all comic fans ever got from the artist were a handful of issues, covers and pinups during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Then again, the fact that Stevens took so much time and care with every picture he ever drew makes finding his work a complete thrill and a joy.

Like most folks, I first came across Stevens’ comics thanks to the film version of The Rocketeer that Disney released in 1991. The general rap on the film starring Billy Campbell and Jennifer Connelly is that despite a big marketing push from Disney and good reviews, the film failed to connect with audiences and had no real franchise potential. While I’m sure the box office receipts backed that position up, little Kiel Phegley would beg to differ.

After seeing “The Rocketeer,” I was Cliff Secord crazy. I spent that summer trying to stuff my backpack until it fit the appropriate aerodynamic shape and trying to glue a fin to the back of my baseball cap. On the merchandising end, I snatched up every piece of Rocketeer paraphernalia I could convince my mother to buy me from issues of Disney Adventures featuring cast interviews to water-powered rocket toys. But the crown jewel in my collection were Stevens’ original comics, which even during the film’s release were hard to find.

Published across four different comic companies and landing finally at Dark Horse, The Rocketeer comics are one of those rare instances where the art and story are somehow equally idealized and authentic. I’m sure LA airfields of the ‘40s were never as exciting and spy-filled as Stevens drew them and its women weren’t quite as glamorous either, but Stevens made you believe that America’s Golden Age of comics was also its Golden Age of style.

It took me the better part of five years to track down every installment of the original Rocketeer serial and even longer to meet Stevens. I have to admit, the brief meeting we had wasn’t the shining pillar of awesomeness you expect when you meet your artistic hero. I was 18 and at San Diego for the first time. When I realized Stevens had a table, I went straight there to shake the man’s hand and let him know that I owned every issue of The Rocketeer ever published. “Well, there were only like seven of them,” Stevens replied before I bought my Bulldog Studios T-shirt and shuffled along. I’m pretty sure that was the exact moment I realized that I wasn’t going to be seeing any more issues of the comic. Like so many of his artistic heroes of the Golden Age, Stevens never got enough credit or money from his creation to sustain a long term career in the funny book biz, instead earning his keep with illustration and pin-up work. Still, I’ve always been happy to have the few Stevens comics I could find on hand, and on a pure entertainment level, they remain my very favorites.

I was also lucky enough to make the acquaintance of Stevens friend and the star of “The Rocketeer” film, Billy Campbell in perhaps the nerdiest encounter of my entire life. In the summer of 2002, I was an editorial intern at DC Comics, and on a July afternoon when I was out to lunch, I spotted Campbell eating lunch at a deli around the corner from the offices. In what was either the stupidest or balliest moment of my life, I approached my boyhood hero to tell him how much of a fan I was and asked if it was true that as a kid he’d wanted to draw comic books instead of act (I’d read that somewhere in a magazine).

Campbell was an extremely cool guy and a big comic nerd, so I flipped out when he took me up on my offer to show him around the DC offices, which earned more than a few turned heads from staffers saying “Did the intern just bring in The Rocketeer off the street?” He told Mike Carlin and I about Stevens’ current life as Bettie Page’s caretaker (the artist based Secord’s girlfriend “Betty” off of the famed pin-up girl), and Carlin told us about an aborted Rocketeer/Superman crossover that would have been written by Stevens and featured Cliff teaching a ‘40s Clark Kent how to fly (how cool would that have been?).

After wandering around a bit and pointing out a few of his favorite Golden Age Batman covers, Campbell was nice enough to sign an autograph for me: “To Kiel – Thanks for the tour, dude! – Billy Campbell” I keep it in the back of my first Rocketeer trade along with a photo I snapped of the Bulldog Café set on the Disney Studio tour I went on in 4th grade and a handful of other small scraps of paper that remind me of how good Dave Stevens was at what he did.

If you get the chance, buy some of his comics. You won’t regret it.

Above is the cover to The Rocketeer Adventure Magazine#2, the first Dave Stevens comic I ever bought as well as the front and back cover to Planet Comics #1, which hangs above my desk here at Wizard. For more on Stevens, be sure to check out a rememberance over at The Beat.