Author: Elayne Riggs

More comics couple photos

More comics couple photos

Spring is definitely in the air, as more and more "comics couple" photos hit the internets.  Youv’e already seen the one that Everybody’s Talking About.  Here’s one of my favorites, of soon-to-be-wed cartoonists Mikhaela Reid and Makesha Wood, from Mikhaela’s Boiling Point blog.  Lots more where this came from!

Got any Cute Comics Couple photos?  Drop the URLs into the comments section!  It may not be as utterly adorable as a cat getting vacuumed (and… loving it!) but love in bloom’s still a beautiful thing!

More Groo for you

More Groo for you

Ready that cheese dip, your favorite mendicant is about to return!  Groo writer Mark Evanier has just announced that on August 1st Dark Horse will release The Groo 25th Anniversary Special, to be followed in September by debut of the four-issue miniseries Groo: Hell on Earth.

Groo — it’s one of those books where, if you have to ask, don’t.

Only really, do.  According to the solicitation, the anniversary issue will feature our hero battling the menace of "The Plague," as well as presenting The Groo Alphabet, a primer of friends and foes (mostly foes), followed by a special illustrated text story on how this comic came to be and why it just won’t go away. Plus other silly features.

As if the features already listed weren’t silly enough.

(Artwork copyright Mark Evanier and Sergio Aragones. All Rights Reserved.)

A mother of a week

A mother of a week

Friday the 13th done fall on a Sunday this month, so we’re off to celebrate Mom’s Day with family members.  But first, here’s our round-up of regular weekly columns, now including our weekend regulars:

Don’t forget to check out the debut column from Ric Meyers, DVD Xtra #1: The Thai’s have it, and of course our regular weekly podcasts, courtesy of Mellifluous Mike Raub:

Happy Mother’s Day, everybody!

RSS feeds good, online comics better

RSS feeds good, online comics better

RSS feeds are funny things.  They let folks with newsreaders and busy lives know when you’ve posted something new, but they (either the feeds or newsreaders) can be spotty at times and you almost miss stuff.  Take Gene Yang’s terrific responses to MySpace making American Born Chinese a featured book, an essay he calls Does acknowledging a stereotype perpetuate it?.  It was posted on May 1 but didn’t show up on my newsreader until a few days ago.  I’m still shaking my head that Yang’s essay was even necessary, as it addresses people who haven’t even read his book but are complaining about a character deliberately portrayed as offensive.  (There’s actually a blog term for folks like this; we call them "concern trolls.")

Speaking of MySpace, all 22 pages of DC’s Countdown issue 51 are now up on the Comicbooks blog, as well as the first half of issue 50.  MySpace blogs do have site feeds (here’s the Comicbook blog’s feed) so you can read at least partial blog entries without joining the service.  The feeds are often tricky to find (you often need to be on the blog in the first place to see the "RSS" choice at the top right), but worth it if you want alerts on new posts.

I grabbed Vulture’s site feed from New York Magazine as soon as I saw they were featuring weekly graphic novel excerpts the same way many magazines feature prose novel excerpts.  This week it’s Nick Bertozzi’s The Salon.

Were it not for Becky Cloonan (who has a site feed) I wouldn’t have known at all about Amy Kim Ganter serializing the second issue of Sorcerers and Secretaries, because Amy’s site doesn’t seem to cater to RSS readers.

One of the best things about having an RSS reader is that you get to save posts to write about later.  Thanks to this site feed report, I’ve now closed four or five saved posts.

And yes, ComicMix has a site feed — stable but ever evolving, like the rest of this site.

(Artwork copyright 2007 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.)

Addicted to heroines

Addicted to heroines

Just in time for Mother’s Day, and as a nice counteraction to creepy sculptures and badly-drawn poses, here’s the latest podcast cartoon from Kyle Baker (alert: M4V file) all about a mother’s dilemma in trying to get her daughter interested in strong female comic book characters.  And just look at this gorgeous cover for Marvel’s Nova #5:

Wow.  I mean, wow.  This is what so many of us are talking about when we discuss wanting artists to depict women in strong, nonexploitive action poses.  Well done, Adi Granov!

Could it be… magic?

Could it be… magic?

Some of us are total suckers for magic. I mean, let’s be honest, all that super-science stuff that purports to explain how people have superpowers and everything — how different is that really than just saying "He flies? She shoots beams from her eyes? It’s magic!"

To some of us it’s all much of a muchness, but superhero comics universes are peculiar about that sort of thing, they seem to demand differing levels of disbelief-suspension depending on whether we’re talking about Batman or the Spectre, Spidey or Dr. Strange.

At both Marvel and DC, magic is a part of their fictional universes but, like religion, is usually distinguished from the mythmaking involving superscience. The DC Universe has had a number of recent stories dealing with a transformation of how magic works in that fictional milieu, and now Marvel’s about to undergo a similar shift in their interpretation of the fantastic.

For my money, even though I’m not paying for it, the best story currently dealing with DC’s attitude towards magic and superheroes is the Doctor Thirteen backup tale currently running in Tales of the Unexpected, wherein superscience and magic and nonsense and fourth-wall breaking all collide in a fun romp that proves DC is well schooled on how to puncture its own pomposity. Maybe it’s not Ambush Bug-level surreality, but you can’t go wrong with talking pirate gorillas, parodies of the 52 writers, and Infectious Lass.

Now Marvel’s gearing up for their own big magic event this summer, Mystic Arcana, leading off with, appropriately enough, a Magik one-shot written by one of my personal heroes, Louise Simonson.  Firm believers in not being able to tell the players without a scorecard, Marvel’s also bringing out a companion guide called Mystic Arcana: The Book of Marvel Magic, 64 pages of bios and character sketches and probably not storytelling.

Meanwhile, Scott at Polite Dissent decries the use of the "humans only use 10% of their brains" misinformation employed so often in comic book fiction as a way of introducing magical (or even superhuman) abilities.  Dang, there goes about 90% of the captioning for future origin stories!

Lucas: Spidey silly, more Star Wars not

Lucas: Spidey silly, more Star Wars not

Okay, let me get this straight — the Spider-Man movies are silly, but Jar-Jar Binks is a nifty idea?

Ohh-kay.  Glad we cleared that one up.

George Lucas tells Fox News‘ Roger Friedman, regarding Spidey, "It’s a silly movie. There just isn’t much there. Once you take it all apart, there’s not much story, is there? People thought Star Wars was silly, too. But it wasn’t." 

Oh, and he’s making two more live-action Star Wars films for TV, which he tells Friedman should be about an hour each, "but they won’t have members of the Skywalker family as characters. They will be other people of that milieu." 

Are Tag and Bink too much to hope for, or are they just too silly?

Today’s odd photos

Today’s odd photos

When every little bit of hope is gone, sad songs and photos say so much.

This is being advertised on lots of UK sites at the moment, and reportedly being used not only by people gearing up for the convention in Bristol but by Labour Party sources looking for a replacement for Tony Blair. And speaking of politics:

Don’t ask, do tell. From Feminists for Colbert.

Lastly, anyone following the lolcat phenomenon (more about that here ) doesn’t need to be told what this is.  I cannot believe there’s a whole subset of sites out there dedicated to Dr. Who lolcats. This one’s from the Blog of Boe. And as many of you doubtless know, there’s also a truncated and much-beloved Star Trek episode done in lolcat-speak. Could I make this stuff up? Not before my morning tea.

Your all-in-one convention report

Your all-in-one convention report

He’s been Gaiman’ed, Beat’en, and now he’s ComicMix‘ed. Your must-read for today is Lee "Budgie" Barnett’s pre-Bristol all-purpose con report boilerplate. Like MadLibs for those of us more exhausted than mad. Hope Budgie gets his energy up in time to co-host his popular annual Hypotheticals panel!

By the way, the Bristol International Comic Expo, being held this coming weekend, is a wonderful socializing convention, particularly in the hotel pub, and it’s a short and inexpensive bus ride from the train station to the shopping plaza — but be forewarned, bring sunscreen, that caught us unawares last year…

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