Category: News

Kyle Baker goes bananas

Kyle Baker goes bananas

From Cartoon Network’s Class of 3000, here’s some Kyle Baker work.

Did we mention Kyle will have a booth at the New York Comicon? Did we mention he’s doing caricatures? Did we mention the pretty women who will be at the booth? Go forth and find him and buy many copies of his books. Tell him ComicMix sent you.

Michael Davis: Nut jobs

Michael Davis: Nut jobs

I said in my first article that I was a pretty simple guy. I see clear distinctions between right and wrong, good and evil, love and hate, and Republican and Democrat. Blah, blah, blah. To that end, I think there are some things that people don’t talk about but should. Clearly in comics there is a subject or fifty that we don’t talk about. Well I’m going to talk about one right now. That subject is… nuts.

Not the nuts that come in a can, but rather people who are nuts… as in crazy.

No, I am NOT talking about people who have a real mental illness. I am talking about those people who have convinced themselves (sometimes with plenty of help from friends and family) that they are entitled to something that nobody else sees. Or their way of doing something is the only way something should be done regardless of any logical reasoning.

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Anime charity event turns into scam

Anime charity event turns into scam

Via Alan Kistler at Monitor Duty, an ugly convention story out on the west coast:

Anime Film Foundation (AnimeFF) was founded as a charity for breast cancer research, specifically the Susan G. Komen Foundation. The group launched the “Tour for the Cure” anime con and stated that all proceeds would be donated to breast cancer research. They recruited several people in the anime community, including those at TheOtaku.com and Richard Stott, founder of the Anime Vegas convention. MTV was ready to video tape part of the convention.

And then things went bad. It turned out that no one signed the contracts for the convention rooms. The convention had to become a single day thing when it had originally been intended to last three days. Several events were canceled. Guests were told that promised accomodations weren’t available.

At the end of the day, AnimeFF representative Jeff Borncamp told the convention center people that the show was over, at which point he allegedly left with all the registration money and dealer deposits. What was supposed to be a charity event appeared to observers to be a "hit and run" scam on not only the anime and gaming communities but on people who thought they were involved in donating money to breast cancer research.

TheOtaku.com has promised to dedicate their resources to bringing all the facts to light and ensuring that this kind of thing never happens again. As far as we know, the Susan G. Komen Foundation was merely having their name taken in vain, and they do good work.

Podcast #5 up and running

Podcast #5 up and running

Our second reviewer, longtime comics writer Tony Isabella, makes his debut as a ComicMix podcast critic and spells out his rules and regulations. Archie Comics takes on Marvel Comics in "Civil Chores." More previews of this weekend’s NYCC. 

Mike Raub delivers the news and the goods on ComicMix podcast #5 — which you can get right now by pressing play:

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Wizard appoints new wizard

Wizard appoints new wizard

Scott Gramling rejoins Wizard Entertainment as the new Editor-in-Chief of Wizard. Gramling will be responsible for continuing to build circulation and awareness of the Wizard brand and overseeing content for Wizard, InQuest Gamer, ToyFare and Anime Insider, in addition to the website and The Wizard World Tour.  This marks his’s return to Wizard, where 12 years ago he began as an associate editor.

Most recently Gramling served as Sections Editor, Deputy Editor and Editor-In-Chief at FHM.  Before that, he was the Associate Editor of Sports Illustrated For Kids‘ book division.

John Ostrander: Scattershot – Past / Present

Perhaps it’s a sign of aging when you’re more attuned to what came before than what’s going on now, especially in entertainment. Oh, I’m up on what’s going on with movies and TV (less so in music) and I certainly have my faves in those areas. Recently, however, I’ve been re-discovering some music I’d had before, some TV I had seen when I was a boy, and have found that some of my favorite movies were created before I was born. This column is a grab-bag (hence "scattershot" — it’ll be our code for columns that have a variety of topics) of some of those. Given the age of the material, these are probably less reviews than post-mortems.

• We Five came out of San Francisco about 1965 when I was still in high school. If you know this folk-rock group at all, it will be for their one big hit, "You Were On My Mind". I not only loved their big single, I bought their two albums, the first named for the hit single and the second was "Make Someone Happy". They broke up after the second album and later reformed with new members. I’ve discovered that the reformed We Five still plays venues today.

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The evolution of the comic book

The evolution of the comic book

Hard as it may be for some of us NYCC-centric folks to believe, comic book events are also happening outside of our little enclave.  Take Northridge, for instance, whose CSU branch’s Oviatt Library features a new exhibit starting this coming Monday mapping the evolution of the comic book.  The show’s curator, university archivist Tony Gardner, notes that comcs "have a very interesting history, and I’m trying to tell that history using our collection from the 1930s to the 1990s," with particular attention given to Senator Estes Kefauver, who led the public hearings on comic books in 1954. 

The exhibit runs through August 3, in case any San Diego Comic-Con attendees want to travel up the coast this summer…

Down home hospitality at NYCC

Down home hospitality at NYCC

We know New York can be a scary place for out-of-towners, many of whom are using today as a travel day to come in for the New York Comic Con starting tomorrow.  That’s one reason why some local comics folks will have all kinds of fun stuff for visitors to their booths during the weekend. 

For example, Kyle Baker will be drawing complimentary caricatures for children at Booth #953, where his 8-year-old daughter Lillian debut her book "The Dumb People Convention", as well as a few other funny mini-comics.  And Marion Vitus announces that she, hubby John Green, Raina Telgemeier and her hubby Dave Roman have given themselves the collective name The Comics Bakery (Dave’s idea), and will "be serving up minis, graphic novels, and T-Shirts among other delectable delights" in Artists Alley table A206 in the Galleria. 

Knowing the time these folks have put into staffing the Friends of Lulu booths in the past, we wouldn’t be surprised if some variation on the FoL booths’ ubiquitous Hershey’s Kisses winds up on the menu.

The twelve levels of fan agreement

The twelve levels of fan agreement

Via Dirk Deppey at ¡Journalista!, we have Ragnell the Foul’s 12 Levels of Comic Book Fan Agreement.

No, it’s not a twelve-step program to combat comic addiction. Rather, it’s a fan hierarchy, ranging from number 1: "Your favorite series is my favorite series" to number 12: "I think your favorite series would be better this way, I won’t even look at it until its changed to be that way, you’re a fucking idiot for disagreeing with me, and I write terrible fanfiction to demonstrate the rightness of my way with a thinly veiled self-insertion character, and a character from another series that I felt was fucked up unless written my way too. Oh, and if you think my fanfic is bad/un-entertaining/uninteresting/not as good as your favorite series, you must personally hate me and everyone who shares my interests."

It’s very good, and I’m tempted to write the 12 Levels of Comic Book Pro Agreement — except we’re going to have certain levels beyond 12 that will include things like "I think your favorite series would be better this way, and I’m going to write a 12 issue maxiseries that shows why I won the Wizard poll" and "I’m the editor, and I don’t care what you think; what I say goes."

Bring me the head of Garfield Cat!

Bring me the head of Garfield Cat!

Someone gave the Garfield statue near downtown Marion, IN’s Riverwalk a little too much love.

Seems 23-year-old Joseph P. Savarino didn’t know his own strength.  Savarino said he panicked when the cartoon character’s head came off when he hugged it, so he made off with it and left it alongside a road where it later was found.  Perfectly understandable, we all do silly things when we panic upon squeezing off a comic strip character’s statuesque head.

The cops noticed the head was missing last December 15. On the 18th an employee with the Army Corps of Engineers found the fiberglass head and retrieved it from the side of a road near the Mississinewa Reservoir. The statue’s base has since been moved to the Grant County Parks and Recreation maintenance building to protect it from further overly-enthusiastic fans who just can’t get enough of Mark Evanier ‘s television cartoons.  No word on whether base and head have since been reunited, but we like to think they joined again sometime around Valentine’s Day and went out for a nice lasagna dinner.