The Pro– Animated!
For your late-night comics related watching: “The Pro” by Garth Ennis, Amanda Conner, and Jimmy Palmiotti— now animated! (Dear lord, NSFW.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFS9n7_-5oo
Or read the book.
Author: Glenn Hauman
Kitty Pryde and Colossus getting married in X-Men Gold #30
It’s been over thirty years in the making, but it looks like it’s finally going to happen– Kitty Pryde and Peter Rasputin are finally getting married in X-Men Gold #30.
All we can say is this:
The important question, of course: will it be a Jewish wedding?
Teen Titans Go! To The Movies! Trailer!
Because… well, you’ll see.
Cinamon Hadley, The Girl Who Was Death, Has Died
Cinamon Hadley, whose appearance inspired the look of Death in the Sandman comic series, passed away today according to Sandman co-creator Neil Gaiman.
The body-piercer and goth icon whose portrait was immortalized as the second eldest in a family of anthropomorphized forces called the Endless, Hadley was described as extremely tall, extraordinarily thin, with bone-white skin, impeccable make-up and thin, black hair.
According to Gaiman in The Sandman Companion, he imagined the character as looking like ‘60s singer Nico as she appeared on the cover of Chelsea Girl. But the comic’s artist, Mike Dringenberg, had other ideas, and thought of a good friend in Salt Lake City. Gaiman writes, “He sent me a drawing based on a woman he knew named Cinamon—the drawing that was later printed in Sandman 11—and I looked at it and had the immediate reaction of, ‘Wow. That’s really cool.’”
Cinamon was diagnosed with the advanced stages of small cell neuroendocrine carcinoma of the colon in 2017. After a brief remission, the cancer returned and spread.
Our condolences to her family, friends, and fans. We hope she’s well met by someone who looks a lot like her.
Judge rules that an illustration style can’t be a trademark
Yesterday, Judge Janis Sammartino handed down a ruling in our ongoing case, Dr. Seuss Enterprises v. ComicMix, allowing the case to proceed to discovery while narrowing the allegations in significant ways. Buried in the order is a very important point that has implications for the entire comics industry, to wit (with footnotes and citations omitted):
Plaintiff claims Defendants misappropriated “the unique illustration style [of] the characters and backgrounds found throughout Dr. Seuss books, that have come to be instantly recognized by consumers as source identifiers for Dr. Seuss.” Defendant argues trademark law does not protect an artistic style. …
Most courts have held there is no trademark protection for the “style” of an artist. Style is a matter more properly protected by copyright law. …
Plaintiff cited no authority to support its assertion that its general “style” is a protectable trademark. Plaintiff only argues that the book can be subject to both trademark and copyright protection and that distinctive characters can qualify as trademarks. Plaintiff claims the Ninth Circuit has recognized Plaintiff owns trademark rights to “the character illustration of the Cat [in the Hat’s] ‘stove-pipe hat’.” But the illustration of the Cat’s hat is different than the general “illustration style” and non-specific “characters and backgrounds found throughout” Plaintiff’s books, in which Plaintiff asserts trademark rights now. And Plaintiff does not allege trademark rights in any specific character or background image in [Oh, The Places You’ll] Go! The Court is not holding illustrations of specific characters within Go! are precluded from trademark protection, but at this stage of the proceedings and based on the information in front of the Court, the Court finds that Plaintiff’s claimed general “illustration style” is not protectable.
What does this mean for comics? It puts plainly what many artists in the comics industry already knew: you can’t be legally dinged for drawing like Jack Kirby, or Neal Adams, or John Buscema, David Finch, Jim Lee or anybody else— not directly copying art, which might lead to a copyright infringement claim, but drawing in the style of a particular artist (or if you prefer, a particular school of art, like, say, the Bolognese or Kubert school) isn’t a trademark infringement. When we speak of an artist’s “trademark style” we’re not actually speaking of a legal trademark, and as such it’s not something that can be legally claimed.
And this means that if, say, Ty Templeton draws a portrait of me looking like I was drawn by Dr. Seuss, there’s not a thing Dr. Seuss Enterprises can do about it.
Of course, this is generally a good thing. This means that no artist can be charged with stealing someone else’s “trademark style” or the way they draw (or for that matter, how they shoot a photograph or a movie). We all learn from each other, we all influence each other— particularly in comics— and we all build on other works and artistic traditions and styles to create new works of art to tell stories.
If you’d like to read the ruling, click here.
Glenn Hauman: The Store Eater
I have a theory. See if this sounds plausible to you.
It’s the early 80s, and you’re a comic fan. You grew up with the medium, and now that you’re in your twenties or even early thirties, you seen the medium grow up with you. Stuff that was once considered just kiddie fare is now being treated with respect, even if the newspaper headlines read “Pow! Bam! Whap! Comic books aren’t just for kids anymore!” The industry has never seemed healthier with new comic book companies starting all over the place and some of them even healthy like First, Eclipse, Fantagraphics, Comico, Pacific, Aircel… and you’re looking for a career. And you decide, “Hey! I love comics! I know what comics are good! I even have a lot of back issues in my collection! I should open up a store!“
And so you do.
And you survive a lot of ups and downs in the industry. You made it through the black-and-white bust, you had to switch distributors when the great consolidation happened in the 90s, you’ve dealt with all the wacky cover enhancements. Hell, you even survived pogs.
But you’re in your sixties now, and lugging around long boxes to conventions isn’t as much fun as it used to be, if it ever was. Your back issues aren’t selling like they once did, and their overall value has dropped, taking out a large hunk of what you thought was going to be retirement nest egg. And even though comic book movies are bigger than you could’ve ever hoped for as a kid, the stuff that’s coming out today doesn’t thrill you like it once did, and the sales seem to be a bit weaker than in the past… which really sucks because you’re gonna have to keep working in your store selling this stuff, and why can’t they make books like they used to?
Well, it can’t be because of you; you’ve done the work, put in the hours, driven a lot of miles. And it can’t be just be bad luck — things don’t just happen, things happen for a reason.
Then you go home and look at news that’s targeted to your 60+ white male demographic (oh, don’t give me that look— if you opened up a comic store in the 80s, you were almost certainly a white male) and you see stories about PC culture run amok and then maybe, just maybe, a small voice pipes up in the back of your mind and says:
Hey, maybe the SJW‘s really are to blame for this.
And that’s when you’re in trouble.
You’ve diagnosed that you’re in pain, but you misdiagnosed what’s causing that pain. I promise you, SJWs are not causing all the problems in retail right now— and if Sears and K-Mart couldn’t figure out what was coming at them, you shouldn’t feel bad that you couldn’t either. But it’s entirely possible that your problem is this: your store clientele is too much like you.
They’re older. They’re probably male, probably white. And just like you, their priorities have changed with age. The habit of driving to the store on Wednesdays stopped when they changed jobs. If they’ve got kids, they’re older now and (if the parents are lucky) they’ve moved away. They’ve moved on a bit themselves, and the old stuff just isn’t doing it anymore.
Meanwhile, that other store? The one in the location that’s gotten hip? Ask yourself: is it that the store owner is trying to get hip people to show up there by pandering to them, or are the hip people going there because it’s cool on it’s own? And what are they doing to get people who aren’t like you into their store?
There are stores (I’m not going to embarrass them by name, but I’ll bet you know people who are visiting them) who are doing well by continuing to do what they always do: they find cool things and show them to appreciative customers. Sometimes, that means asking people who aren’t your customers yet what they would appreciate. And if you have other things that are cool to other people, great! Their money is as green, and they’ve got more to spend if you can show them something neat.
If you were opening your store for the first time today, what would you want to do? Would you try to reach the audience of today, or the audience of thirty-five years ago?
Choose with great care.
National Graphic Novel Writing Month: Pick Your Shots!
Your graphic novel writing exercise for the day:
Take a tracking shot from a movie or TV show– one long, unbroken take that runs for a minute or more. If nothing immediately comes to mind, we’re going to take the opening from the last James Bond film, Spectre:
Your mission, 007: select the single shots from this sequence that tells the story. All the important visual pieces that tell the story. You don’t have to draw them, you can just freeze frame from the clip. Keep the continuity from panel to panel, shot to shot. This clip is great because there’s a minimum of dialogue, so you can’t easily link panels by covering the action with words.
Beginner level: This shot’s a little over 4 minutes, so we’ll make it easy and give you five pages to do the sequence. Pick your shots. Then hand it to someone else and ask them if it makes sense.
Intermediate level: Describe the shots for your artist— what are the important things that are happening in each panel that the artist has to include, including continuity between panels? (Obviously, assume your artist has never seen this clip before.)
Advanced level: Cut two pages from your beginner level sequence.
Ready? Go.
Glenn Hauman: Do You Really Need To Say It?
Scènes à faire. Ever heard of it?
It’s an interesting concept that writers and artists encounter when they work, although they may not know what it’s called. It’s French for “scene to be made” or “scene that must be done”. In practical terms, it refers to a scene in a creative work that’s pretty much obligatory for the genre.
If you’re doing a story about a doctor, you will sooner or later have a dramatic shot of a patient on a cart pushed through swinging hospital doors. If you’re doing a story about a lawyer, sooner or later there will be an impassioned speech in front of a judge. If you’re doing a story about a little old lady in Maine who writes mysteries, sooner or later there will be a dead body. If there’s an evacuation, there will be a shot of a toy sadly left behind; if there’s a fruit cart during a car chase in an ethnic neighborhood, the fruit will become ingredients for a smoothie; if there’s a gun on the mantelpiece, it will be fired— on and on and on. ComicMix’s house metaphysician, Del Close, used to have a saying: “Never share a foxhole with a character who carries a photo of his sweetheart.”
And if there’s a superhero story…?
Sadly, you can probably come up with a lot of things in here that just seemed preordained to show up.
First off, it’s a one in a billion thing. A lightning bolt will hit a rack of chemicals that you’re near, a radioactive spider will bite you and not kill you, an alien will come down and give you a thingamabob of immense power, you’re the one in a generation prophecy made flesh, or a completely random mutation, or your billionaire parents were shot dead in an alley— you can list these as easily as I can.
At the same time or shortly thereafter, you get THE MOTIVATION. That’s the reason why they get dressed up and do what they do, and that is important, because that often reveals character. (It better reveal character, the person has suddenly decided to start wearing funny clothing outside and potentially be shot— “it seemed like a good idea at the time” just won’t do.)
Now: can you tell a superhero story without telling the origin?
Well, yes. Spider-Man: Homecoming avoided telling (or retelling) the more famous moments of Peter Parker’s backstory (although we do see how he gets various iterations of his suit) and instead focused on what he does now as a person. There was an early draft for a Green Arrow/Suicide Squad-ish movie called SuperMax where Oliver Queen was just tossed in prison with a bunch of supervillians and had to get out. No origin, no recap, just hit the ground running. The first X-Men movie doesn’t go into the backstory of all these mutants, just throws in the plot, the sides, the stakes, and go.
Some stories are even doing this now with fight scenes, because fight scenes rarely reveal character. The most extreme example that comes to mind was what Peter David did in Captain Marvel between issues #5 and #6, he had an entire cosmic crossover battle and destroyed the universe— and did it all off-panel.
The point? The point is: get to the point. We’ve seen the classic bits already, and many of us can pretty much take them as given. The point is not the origin itself— but how and why this changes the character.
We’ve seen the universe end before. Show me why your character wants to end it.
(Hat tip to Jim Valentino for Normalman #1.)
Len Wein: 1948-2017
Len Wein, the Eisner Hall Of Fame comics writer best known for creating the New X-Men, Wolverine, Colossus, Storm, Nightcrawler, Mockingbird, Swamp Thing, Human Target, Lucius Fox, and editor know for editing New Teen Titans, Batman, Flash, Who’s Who in the DC Universe, and Watchmen, died Saturday. He was 69.
Over his nearly fifty years in comics, he wrote thousands of comics stories and edited hundreds more for DC, Marvel, Dark Horse, IDW, and Disney Comics, where he served as Editor-In-Chief. He also wrote numerous animated episodes for Action Man, Avengers: United We Stand, ReBoot, ExoSquad, and Batman: The Animated Series, among many others.
I last saw Len at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con International, where we both represented the pros for the fan-pro Trivia Challenge.
He is survived by his wife, Christine Valada. My heart goes out to her, all his friends (he had hundreds), all his fans (he had tens of thousands), and the people his work touched (millions).
Glenn Hauman: Comics Adaptations Overload?
This past weekend, I was a guest at Shore Leave (had a blast) and as I’ve been doing for the last decade or so, I’ve been helping Robert Greenberger put together a bunch of trailers for upcoming movies, tv shows, and the like for what’s going to be coming out between now and February (which is when Farpoint takes place).
However, this week was the first time I could have filled the entire time allotted with nothing but previews from upcoming projects based on comics and graphic novels.
And this is less than two weeks before San Diego Comic-Con, where there will be lots of new stuff revealed for the first time – it’s a safe bet we’ll see sneak peeks from Avengers: Infinity War and Aquaman, maybe something from Runaways or New Mutants or Deadpool 2: Dead Harder, and that’s not even talking about any of the animated projects or anything from Valiant, not to mention the slew of returning TV series…
Are we hitting oversaturation?
I doubt it. Instead, we’re finally hitting a point of market segmentation and specialization.
First: we’ve got projects coming out that many people wouldn’t know were adaptations from comics unless you told them because they don’t have superheroes in costumes. Atomic Blonde is the current best example (based on The Coldest City by Antony Johnson and Sam Hart, published by Oni).
Second: we’re getting to a point where, just like in your local comic book shop, we’re seeing stories that aren’t just guys in capes beating each other up. We have mysteries, science fiction, high fantasy, horror, biographies, romance, thrillers, young adult, noir— in other words, the things you’d see in any bookstore except for computer manuals (and those don’t get adapted to movies).
And that diversity is a good thing, because not ever story is going to be for you. We’re long past the days when the only adaptations you had were Wonder Woman and The Incredible Hulk on television, and you watched them because that’s all that we had. (Maybe the Doctor Strange tv movie, if you could convince your parents not to watch Roots.) Now, we have a cornucopia of high quality shows to choose from, all appealing to different tastes and sensibilities. Even though Supergirl is a well-produced show, it’s not made with me in mind. And that’s okay, it has its audience and it’s doing fine.
This is healthy not just for adaptations, but for comics in general. It means that comic creators will tell other stories which have just as much chance as hitting the tie-in jackpot, which will compensate for the long hours at the drawing table.
However, having gone through the previews, I do see one trend that could feel repetitive: the bunch of outsiders grouping together to fight off evil, fear, and prejudice towards their kind. Between Cloak & Dagger, Inhumans, Gifted, Defenders, to an extent Justice League, and the non-comics Midnight, Texas… I have to wonder if this is a response to the politics of the day. (And for heaven’s sake, no more emo piano starting these trailers. You’re tortured. We get it.)
And since you’ve read through all of this, you should probably see the trailers I’m talking about.
Atomic Blonde:
Cloak & Dagger:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5hrFVQiGyk
