The boys, Ed Piskor, Jim Rugg, and Tom Scioli got hold of a couple animation cels from the classic anime and couldn't help but show them off. A fun glimpse into the analogue way of producing animation. Come for the cels, stay for the Katsuhiro Otomo storyboard books.
Also, in case you missed the Cartoonist Kayfabe coverage of the Akira manga:
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Ed Piskor and Jim Rugg continue to dissect the turbulent comic book speculator boom on the 1990s while looking through antique copies of Wizard Magazine.
Some of this issues contents:
* Jack Kirby comes back to comics via his line of Topps Comics * Palmer's Picks. Rick Veitch *Jae Lee's Youngblood Strikefile is on the horizon! * Larry Hama's origin story * Mike Mignola talks about drawing the Topps adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula * Dave Sim writes an issue of Spawn
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Ed Piskor and Jim Rugg unpack the tale of Human Torch creator, Carl Burgos's, bitter attempt to agitate the mainstream comics publishers of the 1960s with his very own Captain Marvel character (and Plastic man, Dr Doom, Dr. Fate, and The Bat).
For further reading: Marvel, The Untold Story, By Sean Howe.
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The main event begins! The boys, Ed Piskor, Jim Rugg, and Tom Scioli give their kayfabe commentary on the first volume of Katsuhiro Otomo's Magnum Opus, Akira!
Get your hands on the newish 35 year anniversary box set and read along!
Two earlier episodes tracked Otomo's previous works leading up to Akira:
Part 1, Fireball
Part 2: Domu: A Child's Dream
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What's an outlaw comic? Ed Piskor and Jim Rugg attempt to answer that question as they examine this misunderstood comic book subgenre. Outlaws comics are a strain of offensive, ink-drenched, violence-soaked indie comics began to spread through the direct market in the 80s and 90s. These comics featured nightmarish visions of graphic torment far beyond the vanilla, Comics-Code-approved 4-color fantasies. Welcome to comic book hell!
SUPPLEMENTAL LINKS:
Ed and Jim highlight Bootleg Comics
Tim Vigil Faust 1 Faust Love of the Damned movie trailer
Benjamin Marra Terror Assaulter American Blood Traditional Comics ad
Lawrence Hubbard Real Deal Comix
Jason Karns Fukitor
Hart D. Fisher
Boneyard Press ad:
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Ed Piskor and Jim Rugg continue down the 1990s comic book speculation bubble:
• ANIA - the Association of Black Publishers is born! • Image and Malibu breakup • Palmer's Picks: Ted McKeever, Eddy Current, Metropol, and more! • Elfquest's influence on a young Eddie P • Spawn 9 and its legacy: Todd McFarlane v Neil Gaiman
Supplemental Links:
Todd McFarlane 2002 deposition
ANIA - Unsung Heroes of the Black Comics Movement,
1992 CBS Evening News Feature on Omega 7 Comics
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The title says it all, Ed Piskor, Jim Rugg, and Tom Scioli got their grubby hands on some Jack Kirby artwork (inked by Mike Royer) from his 1970s period at Marvel. No ink-line or artistic decision goes unnoticed once this classic page gets put under the microscope.
--------------------- SUPPLEMENTAL LINKS:
Jack Kirby Pencils and Inks (Note: any comic book store or book store can order this book for you)
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Ed Piskor and Jim Rugg continue down the 1990s comic book speculation rabbit hole to discuss Wizard 17 from January 1993. In this issue:
• Brutes and Babes: Bart Sears on Cover design including Hip Hop Family Tree, Street Angel, and X-Men: Grand Design • Valiant gets the spotlight • Fabian Nicieza writing and editing a lot of books • Tom Palmer's X-mas recommendations • Dave Sim passes the halfway point of Cerebus and reflects on Image, Wizard, self-publishing, the direct market, and Jack Kirby's revolutionary work at the dawn of the Marvel Universe • Roy Thomas adapts Francis Ford Copolla's Bram Stoker's Dracula for Topps and Mike Mignola • Batman is sad • Wizard puts out a call for homemade fanzines!!!
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A comic book can go through many stages before it reaches its final form. This Show and Tell episode with your hosts Ed and Jim tracks Piskor's comic, Wizzywig, from its humble beginnings as a xeroxed zine shipped from his mama's basement to the more familiar hardcover graphic novel that's easily found in your local comic shop.
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Ed and Jim's investigation into the 1990's comic book speculation boom and bust continues! In this issue:
*The second wave of Image Comics creators is officially upon us with the release of Darker Image issue 1.
*Cartoonist Lea Hernandez drops some knowledge about the trials and tribulations of the comic book business.
*Palmer's Picks: Hepcats, and the first announcement of Peter Laird's monumental Xeric Grant for self publishers.
* Kevin Eastman creates the Words and Pictures museum!
*A Dale Keown interview talking about his soon to be published Image title, Pitt!
* Fan Favorite artist, Kelley Jones speaks to Wizard about his drawing career, from Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics to an Alien series published by Dark Horse comics
* Speaking of Neil Gaiman's Sandman, Wizard investigates the comic to see how it compares and contrasts with previous iterations of the DC Sandman character, dating back to the 1940s.
* All this and tons more.
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Controversial subject matter in this week's episode. Ed Piskor and Jim Rugg showcase a small sample of their favorite unauthorized comics.
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Supplemental Links of comics from the video:
Comics Journal review of Ron Rege Diana (Wonder Woman)
Josh Simmons' Twilight of the Bat
David Enos' Batman Lost In the Woods
Ed Piskor's offering an annotated page-by-page look at the first part of X-Men: Grand Design, his epic retelling of how Marvel comics' pantheon of heroes came to be. Catch up here. — Eds.
Director’s commentary…This post concludes our director’s commentary feature for X-Men: Grand Design. Putting actual words to many of the creative choices that went into making these strips has proven really valuable to my process personally, and it’s inspired an artillery of questions that I have in regards to the way my favorite cartoonists operate.
Lots of seemingly random cartooning influences have affected me while putting this page together but I realize that a common thread they all share is that they were covered in the ‘80s documentary, Comic Book Confidential. I’ve gone on at length about the effect this film had on me but I’ll leave it up to you to google that if you’re curious. I guess another common thread these cartoonists possess is that they’re just some of the best the medium has to offer.
The mud on Xavier’s boots is a detail that Jack Davis would incorporate in his EC war books. The third panel is a riff on a Jaime Hernandez back cover to a fairly recent issue of Love and rockets. The stark red and black panel 4 is inspired by an iconic Jaime Hernandez front cover to an older issue of Love and Rockets. In panel 5 the first image of the helmeted Cain Mariko looks like a Harvey Kurtzman soldier from his Two-Fisted Tales series from EC comics in the 1950s. Read the rest
Ed Piskor's offering an annotated page-by-page look at the first part of X-Men: Grand Design, his epic retelling of how Marvel comics' pantheon of heroes came to be. Catch up here. — Eds.
Director’s commentary…This is one of the few strips that carries directly over from the previous page. One of the loose guidelines I put upon myself was to try and make each page work as it’s own bit. Early on, I floated the possibility of serializing the entire comic online for free so I wanted the pages to feel like the substantial Sunday funnies of yore. Marvel and I came to a compromise and here we are today.
One of the things I never thought possible in my younger life was that I’d ever get much opportunity to work in color as a cartoonist. It was so prohibitively expensive for so long that entire careers of many of my favorite cartoonists were built almost solely on black and white comics. It was a rare treat to see a couple color Dan Clowes pages here and there and usually those were made possible by some trickery of the publisher who would splurge and add a single signature of pages into a book making it possible for say, the first 4 and the last 4 pages of an issue to get the color treatment, with the rest of the book’s guts in stark black and white.
All that was to say, that it’s only been a few years since I’ve been really able to use color and I’m learning things in leaps and bounds, while taking small chances along the way. Read the rest
Ed Piskor's offering an annotated page-by-page look at the first part of X-Men: Grand Design, his epic retelling of how Marvel comics' pantheon of heroes came to be. Catch up here. — Eds.
Director’s commentary…I can’t explain why exactly, but for some reason this strip is one of my favorites from this early part in the series. It’s fairly pedestrian. It’s not the sequence that I was dying to tell when I began the project. I think it simply has a nice flow and reads pretty well. The entire unit works.
This is the kind of trial-by-fire project that forces a cartoonist to stretch their comfort zone. One day I’m drawing WWII Germany, the next day I’m drawing a Carpathian village. All I knew about Carpathian-anything I learned from Ghostbusters 2. Bless the internet for making the accumulation of visual reference much easier. When I was a boy I literally kept a file cabinet full of folders with clipped images from magazines of all sorts of things I thought I might need to draw in the future.
Panel 3: Back to the trial-by-fire aspect to the illustration. Not only have I never drawn hay and/or straw before, but I can’t think of a single good example where I’ve seen the stuff illustrated. Maybe Bernie Wrightson’s Frankenstein? I opted to go iconic rather than realistic for the hay here. It works fine, I guess. Bless the opportunity to use color so that I can use it as a crutch to convey that those wonky lines are hay/straw/whatever. Read the rest
Ed Piskor's offering an annotated page-by-page look at the first part of X-Men: Grand Design, his epic retelling of how Marvel comics' pantheon of heroes came to be. Catch up here. — Eds.
Director’s commentary…
Editing, especially the subtle art of reduction, is probably one of the most important skills for good storytelling. A silent page or sequence is rarely a bad thing in my POV. Less is more and it’s something I’m slowly adopting as practice. It takes confidence to rely solely on images to get one’s story across.
So here we have a psychic battle sequence between Charles Xavier and Amahl Farouk. For those of you who didn’t see last week’s commentary, I strongly urge you to give issue 117 of Uncanny X-Men a read as it supplies the source material for this strip and is probably the finest comic that came out that month in December of ‘77.
It should go without saying that I want to capture the spirit of my source material but I also have other influences at play. For this page, Cronenberg came to mind. I also had Katsuhiro Otomo in mind, not because of Akira really, but because of Domu, an earlier manga where he gave a test-run to explore some similar themes, including psychic warfare. I drew this page about a month before season 1 of Stranger Things came out and when I saw the program I immediately thought, “These Duffer Brothers are sharing my exact wavelength at this given moment.”
Wisely and respectfully, Marvel has given me plenty of rope to do what I need to for this project. Read the rest
Ed Piskor's offering an annotated page-by-page look at the first part of X-Men: Grand Design, his epic retelling of how Marvel comics' pantheon of heroes came to be. Catch up here. — Eds.
Director’s commentary…The source material for this strip primarily comes from issue #117 of Uncanny X-Men and I absolutely recommend you check out this issue. It’s one of my favorites.
My ultimate goal for X-Men: Grand Design is to make a complete 240 page chronicle using the first 280 issues, or so, of the classic X-Men comics as my source material. Consider my series to be a remix or adaptation rather than a strict retelling. Usually there’s an abundance of great source material to draw from that the translation into my comic leaves a lot on the cutting room floor (the reason why you should read or reread issue 117). The hope is to capture as much of the spirit of the original work in as few panels as possible, but also to add my own freshness to it. It’s an exercise in editing. It’s an exercise in summarization. It’s an exercise in picking my spots when it comes to adding to, or changing, the lore.
The broad strokes are all here. Xavier nomadically ends up in Cairo. Baby Storm picks his pockets. It’s revealed that an outside force is manipulating our future weather queen into performing petty larceny. Enter Amahl Farouk.
The structure of my pages here in X-Men: Grand Design is largely inspired by a mix of European comic albums and broadsheet Sunday funnies from the golden age of comic strips. Read the rest
Welcome Ed Piskor back to Boing Boing (previously), where he'll be offering an annotated page-by-page look at the first part of X-Men: Grand Design, his epic retelling of how Marvel comics' pantheon of heroes came to be. Here's page 7 — Eds.
Director’s commentary…
I wanted to cover lots of ground on this page, for better or worse, in an effort to get to the good stuff ASAP. I estimate several years of Charles’s early academic life transpire in the first three panels. The incessant dialogue in the background was probably something I cribbed from an old issue of Daredevil by Frank Miller when DD’s sense of hearing gets reactivated and becomes even more sensitive than before. For my use here I imagined that Chuck’s mutant senses kicked-in with the fury of the hormonal surges we all felt when going through puberty.
Panel 4: I actually stole this line from a guy I know who said it so casually when fondly recalling his shady past. He’s dead now.
Panel 7: Mimicking the old style of comics coloring places limits on my palette. I often like to work with as few colors as possible. I’m not always clever enough to keep the palette to just a couple colors, but it sure works fine in this panel.
Panel 8: The way my art on X-Men has grown lately I would never use black lines around fire anymore, but something about this blaze at the X-Mansion really conveys a sense of licking-movement to me. Read the rest
