Back in 2007, Adam "Apelad" Koford created a marvellous, funny, weird alternate history for the then-viral phenomenon of LOLcats, running-gag memes of cats whose superimposed dialog had many odd grammatical quirks: the Laugh-Out-Loud Cats," a pair of comic-strip hobo cats straight out of the 1930s, who found obscure and clever ways to riff on our contemporary LOLcats. Read the rest
Got a 3D printer? Read the rest
Here's Stan Lee on a 1970 episode of To Tell The Truth, a fun game show where a panel of celebrities had to identify an individual with an unusual profession (in this case, comic book creator) among a group of impostors.
Excelsior!
The legendary comic-book author, publisher, and film producer Stan Lee has died. Read the rest
Grant Morrison's "The Invisibles," the groundbreaking magickal 1990s comic series about a secret society fighting for our freedom in a world of high weirdness, will come to the small screen as part of the artist/writer's deal with Universal Cable Productions. Read the rest
Warren Ellis's closing keynote from the Thought Bubble festival in Leeds is distilled Ellis: witty and wordsmithed, insightful and thoughtful, futuristic and deeply contemporary. Read the rest
French illustrator Linda Bouderbala did a fun exercise where she gathered some of her favorite characters from geek and pop culture and organized them by color. Read the rest
Since 1987, Doonesbury has been pricking Trump's bubble, and Trump hates it; Trump even instructed the ghost writer on "his" "book" Surviving at the Top to devote several pages to denouncing Trudeau as unfunny (you can read all of Trudeau's Trump strips in last year's Trump retrospective collection, Yuge!). Read the rest
On the 170th anniversary of the publication of Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’ The Communist Manifesto, British graphic novelist Martin Rowson has produced an illustrated adaptation. Apart from a few pages of prose, the whole work is presented in the style of a graphic novel.
The preface describes how the middle-aged Rowson became smitten by Marx and Engels' exciting prose when he was only 16. Aside from expressing his great admiration for Marx’s writing, as well as his own critical stance, he furnishes the reader with some historical backdrop to the completion of The Manifesto. Marx had been commissioned to write it by a socialist group in the summer of 1847, but, under pressure, succeeded in producing it at the beginning of 1848. Significantly, that was before the outbreak of revolutionary movements in Europe later on in 1848. Rowson goes on to explain that the initial publication failed to attract the attention of many people. Only after the events of the Paris Commune in 1871 did the pamphlet receive a wide audience and a publication renewal.
The illustrations create an atmospheric accompaniment to the Marx figures whose speaking balloons relay the text of The Manifesto. The graphics pair nicely with the text with dense images that impart the feeling of the clashes of historical forces (classes) or with the dramatic rendering of the first lines of The Manifesto in which a spectre appears, so Hamlet-like in two dark and foreboding images to haunt the reader’s mind. There is plenty of theatricality too: images of Marx interacting from a stage with a hostile audience (Rowson’s added flourishes added to enhance the exposition in a stimulating theatrical way). Read the rest
We must secure the existence of white people and a future for white ... comics?
Theodore "Vox Day" Beale, the Nazi-quoting nationalist most famous for gaming the Hugo Awards with bloc voting campaigns, has appropriated the "ComicsGate" name for a new comics publishing company. But adherents of the ComicsGate movement, though sharing his distate for diversity, are far from pleased.
Richard Meyer, who runs the "Diversity & Comics" YouTube channel, offered a one-word response: "NOPE."
"VOX DAY tried to steal #ComicsGate," wrote pro-ComicsGate artist Ethan Van Sciver. "ComicsGate destroyed him tonight, live."
ComicsGate's followers are notorious for online harassment, from abuse aimed at women Marvel employees to recent attacks on Marsha Cooke, who had debunked the movement's attempt to claim her late husband Darwyn as an adherent. In recent weeks, major comics industry figures denounced it as a hate group.
ComicsGate's leading lights have now drawn a line in the sand at overt affiliation with white supremacists. It's Beale's commercial grab at the word, though, that really threatens to upset the apple cart.
Meyer recently raised nearly $400,000 crowdfunding a graphic novel marketed explicitly as a ComicsGate response to "SJWs", but it's an open question as to whether it amounted to a media stunt or a sustainable market for reactionary comics.
Beale plans to answer it first, beating Meyer and co. to the market as a fully-fledged, operating imprint. Asked by an interviewer if he planned to launch a crowdfunding campaign, Beale replied "I expect we will do so, yes."
Also raising ire among ComicsGaters was Beale's use of the GamerGate green-and-purple color scheme in the company's logo. Read the rest
