This week on NPR’s Studio 360, you’ll be hearing a roundtable discussion between Farscape comic writer Keith R.A. DeCandido, Star Trek author David Mack, comic book historian Alan Kistler, ethicist Alexandra Honigsberg, editor Jeness Crawford, ComicMix contributor Kim Kindya, and yours truly, discussing Watchmen and its impact on pop culture. It’s wide ranging and a lot of fun. Take a listen:
"At midnight, all the agents
and their superhuman crew
go out and round up everyone
who know more than they do."
It’s finally midnight. The movie is now in the hands of the audience. So tell us what you like about it, what you didn’t like about it, link to any reviews, tell us if there were any cool trailers, is it worth seeing in IMAX, etc. Assume there be spoilers ahead.
And just to sweeten the pot, we’ll give one of these now-collector item tickets of the preview screening from the MoCCA exhibit "The Art of Watchmen" to the person who provides, in the opinion of ComicMix, the most thoughtful comment in the thread. The comment has to be in by March 15th, which should give you plenty of time for multiple viewings.
So go ahead. Show us that you know more than we do.
With all the hullaballo as to what happened to scans_daily, we decided that we should hear from as many of the players as possible, especially the ones who have been silent so far. We’re still waiting on an official statement from LiveJournal, but we have been in contact with two of the moderators from the former scans_daily group, "Stubbleupdate" and "Rabican", and they’ve graciously responded to our questions.
ComicMix: What do you know about the circumstances of the shutdown? Has LiveJournal told you what prompted the shutdown? Were you given any warning, or any ability to address the situation?
Stubbleupdate: I crawled out of bed on Saturday morning (which meant that the community would have been deleted late evening/night on Friday, America time) and saw that my inbox had a lot of LJ friends requests from people on the community. I get that sometimes, but four overnight is unusual. They all wanted to know where the community had gone, which is the first that I had heard of it. A lot can happen in six hours on the internet.
There was also an email from the LJabuse team telling me that the account had been permanently suspended. That was it. LJ tends to take a “Shoot first, ask questions later” approach to getting rid of communities that it’s been told are against its policies or laws, so that part shouldn’t be surprising.
As for correspondence from LJ, they didn’t say what had prompted it, just that it had happened. I don’t expect them to.
Rabican: The shutdown occurred overnight while the mod team was asleep, so we’ve had to pull together the story of the shutdown from multiple accounts. The most likely scenario we’ve surmised is that Peter David reported a group of X-Factor #40 scans to Marvel around the 24th; Marvel complained to Livejournal, and the Livejournal Abuse Team shut us down the night of the 28th (US time). We were given no warning whatsoever and told that the account was permanently suspended. The justification, given by form mail, was that our community existed "primarily to host copyrighted material without the permission fo the copyright holder" and this was against Livejournal’s TOS. We’re still looking into finding out the details of the abuse report made to the LJ Abuse Team.
It’s worth noting that both Livejournal and, I suspect, most of the major comics publishers have known about us for years, so it’s interesting to speculate what prompted them to move against us now. It’s possible Peter David making the report removed all possibility of plausible deniability. Or, Marvel wasn’t nearly as well-informed as we thought they were. We don’t know whether they thought the poster had uploaded most or all of X-Factor #40 rather than the half she did upload, although legally it doesn’t matter. The Peter David situation may have been a coincidence and it wasn’t Marvel at all, but Livejournal doesn’t move against copyright violations without a complaint from the copyright owner, so we know it was a comics publisher.
Comics come in all sizes. Some are big books, massive “ultimate” or “essential” or “indispensable” or “your friends will say you have a small penis if you don’t buy this” editions, with fancy foil and trim to make the stories of people punching each other seem that much more serious.
But there are also little books: ones that tell their own stories in a small compass, that don’t rely on bombast or hype. Ones that might actually be good.
Like these three books, the most recent entries in the fine Montreal publisher Drawn & Quarterly’s “[[[Petits Livres]]]” series – fine comics by fine creators in a small, affordable format.
Nicolas
By Pascal Girard
Drawn & Quarterly, February 2009, $9.95
In a series of short vignettes, Girard circles around the death of his brother, [[[Nicolas]]], of lactic acidosis at the age of five – when Girard himself was only a few years older. Girard grows through childhood into a young man as this short book goes on, but he never forgets his brother – he never “moves on,” and it never stops being painful.
The message on Live Journal is very simple:
Error
This journal has been suspended.
And with that, it’s gone and the comics community has changed.
And before anyone asks, no, Peter David isn’t responsible for drawing attention to the powers that be any more than Dirk Deppey is responsible for posting a link to it almost every day for years in a news publication. If you post enough stuff on there and you don’t own the copyright, your foot shall slide in due time; sooner or later you will get noticed and the hammer will fall.
Before you ask, yes, I posted stuff to scans_daily to promote The Original Johnson, because it’s a large community of readers. But ComicMix controls the rights to the book and used it for promotion.
I hope that scans_daily can reconstitute, but remember, to stay outside the law, you gotta be honest.
If any of the group administrators would like to contact us to comment or for an interview, please feel free.
DC Comics’ Suicide Squad is on its way to the most dangerous mission yet– to Hollywood. Warner Bros. has hired screenwriter Justin Marks to adapt the property for the movies. (Does that make the contract he signed a Suicide pact?)
The current version of the Squad was created by ComicMix contributors John Ostrander and editor Robert Greenberger, introduced in the 1986 Legends miniseries, edited by Mike Gold. The revolutionary concept was to mix super villains and fallen heroes, giving them one last shot at redemption by the government by undertaking missions that will most likely kill them. Spinning off from Legends, the series lasted for 66 issues, and spurred a 12-issue maxiseries in 2000 and Ostrander returned for an eight issue mini-series in 2007. The particular characters involved have yet to be determined, but strong candidates include Amanda Waller, Rick Flag, Bronze Tiger (who just appeared in an episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold) and Deadshot.
Marks, who is doing a rewrite of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea for Disney, also wrote the Green Arrow comic-book movie project Supermax, which could conceivably connect with Suicide Squad as they both take place at Belle Reve prison. John Ostrander is currently writing Star Wars: Legacy for Dark Horse and GrimJack and Munden’s Bar for ComicMix.
I just got off the phone with John Ostrander, who had just heard about the project this morning. He’s looking forward to seeing what happens next.
Me, I’m looking forward to DC reconsidering whether or not to put out those Suicide Squad reprint collections now. Hint hint.
Crogan’s Vengeance
By Chris Schweizer
Oni Press, October 2008, $14.95
The Crogan family – I’m reliably informed by this book’s end-papers – has a long and storied history of adventure, with private eyes, minutemen, ninjas, biplane pilots, old West gunfighters and French Foreign Legionnaires lurking around every bend of the family tree. (Though, apparently, no women have ever been spawned by the fecund Crogans, nor, possibly, deemed necessary to birth all of these generations. Perhaps that’s what drove all of these desperately lonely men to adventure.) This particular book, first in what could easily be a long series, focuses on “Catfoot” Crogan, patriarch of the clan (or at least the earliest figure on the endpapers – I wouldn’t lay odds against Schweizer turning up a Sir Lionheart Crogan, crusader, at some future point), a pirate at the turn of the seventeenth century.
But we don’t begin directly with Catfoot; instead we get a frame story of a modern doctor telling the story to his young son – which is slightly infantilizing for a book rated “Teen: Age 13+.” Even more damning to those over thirteen, it’s a story with a lesson. So there’s immediately a disconnect: Catfoot’s story is both (according to the publisher) restricted to readers over thirteen, and suitable for a boy of about eight (as depicted in the story). The frame story is short, and charming, so it doesn’t do any damage…except among teenage boys, a major audience for a story about pirates, since they will never admit to liking charm. I can see why Schweizer has the frame story – it’s his set-up for the whole series, all of which can be family histories told to this preternaturally history-savvy grade-schooler – but it flattens and domesticizes his story in a way I don’t think he wants.
I beg of you, gentle ComicMix readers… take a journey with me back in time. Step one? Dust off a pair of “wide leg” jeans. Don your favorite pair of Airwalk low-tops. Grow your hair out a little, and put a Pearl Jam Compact Disk into your brand new Diskman. Step Two? Power up your personal computer. You know the one, with that brand new Intel Pentium chip the kids all talk about. Fire up that 14.4 Baud Modem, and hop on that newfangled ‘Information Super-Highway’. Welcome to 1993 folks! Now that you’re here, you should check out a little known webcomic called “The Parking Lot Is Full”.
The brief history on said comic comes from it’s own tombstone, procured from their site instead of that wiki-pedia thing you “next-gen users” all like so much…
“From 1993 – 2002, The Parking Lot is Full was the comic strip love child of artist Jack McLaren and writer Pat Spacek. Starting as crude little strips published in their university newspaper, the comic quickly took on a life of its own, eventually becoming one of the most popular and infamous comic strips on the internet. After nine years of ups and downs, the creators decided that they’d said everything they wanted to say, so the comic was wrapped up and all the toys put away.”
What made ‘PLIF’ (get used to this folks, cause “The Parking Lot Is Full” takes a while to type) so enjoyable was it’s fascinating combination of Gary Larsen-esque illustrations combined with sharp writing and a touch of the macabre. Unlike several previous recommendations here on ComicMix, ‘PLIF’ had no continuity really to follow. Yes, there are a few reoccurring sock puppets in the later half of the series, but there’s no backstory to follow (well, anymore…). And to be honest, the really juicy strips are true non-sequiturs.
I’ll be frank, folks, this strip features some of the most laugh-out-loud-but-frankly-I-shouldn’t-be-laughing strips I’ve had the pleasure to read for free on the ‘inter-webs’. There’s no need for lengthy exposition on the progression of the art; It’s crude, in gray tones, and unpolished as my car in February. There’s no need to wax poetic about the subject matter; Generally ‘PLIF’ stuck to a cycle of topics including childhood, sex, religion, and conspiracy theories (sometimes in the same strip!). Simply put, if the ‘Far-Side’ was rolled through a plate of broken glass, you’d have “PLIF”. Suffice to say the content can disturb as much as it can inspire fits of laughter… and that’s what I appreciate about it. Now to the cream of the crop (…ahem. WARNING. These Strips Are Not Suitable For Children, and most adults now that I think of it):
• Well, this settles an age old debate.
• Safe Sex, by PLIF
• A Failed Experiment, by Ray Croc.
• "I fell out of my chair the first time I saw this"… said my roomate.
• You know it’d be true.
• A lesson from the Street… Sesame Street.
• If this Pre-Dates Animal Man, Grant Morrison should be worried.
So there you have it folks. Kick off the Airwalks, swap that Diskman for an iPod, and plug back into a nice cable modem. This trip back in time is over. Sadly, there is no more strips to be had after you’ve been through their archive. Do yourself a favor though… buy a collection of them in printed form from the ‘PLIF’ store, and show your support for those who dared release this evil into the world.
The Breakdown:
Drama: Well, this is kinda’ dramatic…
Humor: If you don’t find this funny, maybe you’ll find this funny.
Continuity: There’s some Sock Puppets that show up from time to time.
Art: It’s grey, it’s crude, and it’s wonderfully morbid when it needs to be.
Archive: From 1993-2002, you’re looking at quite a few strips. It looks like they didn’t update but several times a month at best… never the less, if you troll through it all, it’s a solid hour or two of fun.
Updates: Unless you suffer from that condition where you still believe it’s 1993-2002… alas, there is no more ‘PLIF’ to be had.
Risk/Reward: As always… it’s free… so there’s little risk involved. Unless you consider reading a strip like this to be dangerous. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Two years ago today, on February 10, 2007, ComicMix went live to the world. In that short time, I’ve seen a lot, worked some very long hours, pulled many all-nighters, and would like to think I’ve come to some useful observations about the industry, which I now share with you.
1. The only think more disruptive to your regular work schedule and overall concentration than long-term hourly blogging would be posting the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42 every 108 minutes to a website. But we keep at it.
2. There are more of you out there than you think. There are more of us out there than we thought. Finding them all has been the challenging part. There’s always somebody who hasn’t gotten the word. The number of times someone has come up to me at a convention and said "GrimJack is back? I had no idea!" is still astounding to me.
3. Research and development, in comics and in technical matters, is not predictable. If it was, it wouldn’t be research and development, would it? But we continue to try and improve the website every day, and we keep pushing at the boundraries of comics. Lots of it may be invisible to you until it suddenly appears– but that’s the way the best magic works.
4. There is an almost staggering amount of creative work going on out there, so much so that it’s in danger of overwhelming Sturgeon’s Law. And happily, it’s a mix of styles and content, appealing to every niche– and every (you’ll pardon the phrase) mix. You want a story of zombies vs. vampires, you got it. You want pretty young girls meddling with mad science? No problem. And so on.
5. You never do a massive undertaking like this alone. I started to write up a list of all the people who have helped us out over the last two years plus and easily topped two hundred people– to all of them, who’ve helped us out in good times and bad, thank you all.
6. The Internet is still a big scary place to a lot of companies– and that’s really a shame, because that’s where all of their readers are hanging out nowadays, and it’s a lot cheaper than pushing paper around at a loss. But that’s a subject for a much longer post.
Again, thanks to everyone who’s contributed to ComicMix— writing, drawing, commenting, reading, or just having fun. Here’s to the future. See you in 108 minutes or so.
Well, today ComicMix turns two years old. It’s a tad bittersweet, as the advertising cutbacks that have decimated other media outlets have had their impact upon this young site as well. So – as you’ve no doubt noticed – we’ve hunkered down for the long haul. We ain’t going to give in to this economy; we’re up for the fight.I’m glad to report that, lately, we’ve made some truly significant progress. We’ll be making a major announcement soon, with a touch of luck – meaning the lawyers and number crunchers do what they do in a timely fashion. Most of the folks who’s been working with us and hanging in there are aware of the broad strokes, and there’s been some Twittering and blogging and such, but you’ll get the full story right here as soon as it’s finished.
I’m told we’re getting significantly closer to the launch of the long-awaited Phase Three improvements and additions. This, too, is exciting stuff and has taken an enormous amount of energy from our Tech Team. We all want to get it right the first time, to the extent that’s technically possible.
So hang in there. You’ll be seeing the fruits of these labors very soon. As always, we want to thank all the writers and artists and tech folks who have been part of ComicMix, and we thank you, our worldwide audience, for your continued interest and support.
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
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