This is a milestone: it was announced at San Diego Comic-Con that a live-action adaptation of Last Blood, a webcomic first published on Keenspot back in 2006, is in the works with Simon Hunter (The Mutant Chronicles) directing with an anticipated 2012 release. To our knowledge, this is the furthest any webcomic has gone towards being adapted into a feature film.
The premise is amazingly simple: After zombies take over the Earth, vampires must protect the last surviving humans so they can live off their blood. Wackiness, as they say, ensues.
Last Blood will be produced by Ironclad exec producer Christian Arnold-Beutel as well as Red Giant Media’s Aimee Schoof, Isen Robbins and Benny R. Powell, and Chris and Bobby Crosby. The Crosby siblings created the graphic novel with illustrator Owen Gieni, and Bobby Crosby wrote the script with Nick V. Sterling.
The world of fine arts is even more male-dominated than the world of popular arts. Although both trivialize the work of women, there are more respected women working in creative departments of film, television, even comics than there are in the better galleries and museums.
As if to prove the point, there is a new graphic novel from the Feminist Press, Who Is Ana Mendieta? Ana Mendieta was a Cuban-born artist best known for her earthworks, which combined her cultural heritage, her body, and specific sites. And, to the broader public, she is best known for her marriage to artist Carl Andre and her death under questionable circumstances.
This book is part of Blind Spot, a series of graphic novels from Feminist Press, which, according to their press release, “reconstruct these cultural biographies to tell a different story.”
Who Is Ana Mendiata? uses the graphic novel medium to full effect. The perspective jumps around from the persona – Ana’s life and relationships – to the professional – the upward trajectory of her career, and her developing themes as an artist – to the political – the art world environment and its attitude towards women. The word balloon placement guides the eye deftly, so that none of this is the least bit confusing. The slightly cartoony art style makes it easy to accept the contradictory opinions of the different characters, even as it encourages a healthy skepticism in the reader.
It makes me a little bit nostalgic to see the debates of the late 1970s to mid-1980s about the importance of women’s contribution to the arts. Critics like Lucy Lippard (who wrote the introduction to this book), artists like Barbara Kruger and Judy Chicago (just a small sample, read the book for more), and the Guerrilla Girls collective, made it an exciting time. Anger makes good graphics.
It’s interesting that now, more than 25 years later, we still have these arguments. It’s now accepted that women work “outside the home,” as we used to say. And we accept that women can be artists and managers and executives and airline pilots and ditch diggers.
And yet.
Women are still defined primarily as creatures who breed other humans. Our professional accomplishments are limited by our fertility, and the law considers us little more than incubators. Men can be fathers and successful, but women are still expected to choose one or the other area in which to excel.
Life is a good thing, and I’m in favor of continuing the human species. However, I think we limit ourselves when we concentrate on women’s wombs at the expense of their brains. Rosalyn Yalow‘s commitment to life was profound. If she couldn’t type, those people – and her genius – would have been lost to the rest of us.
Whether or not Ana Mendieta created work that appeals to your aesthetic, you owe it to yourself to check out this book … and her art.
[[[Who Is Ana Mendiata?]]]
Christine Redfern & Caro Caron
Introduction by Lucy Lippard
Hardcover: $18.95
ISBN: [[[978-155861703-2]]]
The Feminist Press
Bleeding Cool reports that comic book publishers have been told that Diamond Book Distributors will resume sending books to Borders this week. Before the bankruptcy announcements, Diamond had suspended all shipments to Borders.
However, Diamond has told publishers that Borders are still not sending back returns, so this is still a delicate situation. Borders still owes Diamond millions from before the bankruptcy, and it’s unclear how the bankruptcy judge will account for the existing merchandise.
Having just this week gone through a bunch of royalty statements from various publishers, all I can say is that if Borders numbers aren’t included in those returns, then we’ve somehow invented negative printing. Say what you will about direct sales contracting the market, but when books went out, they stayed out. There are a lot of publishers who if asked to take the last two years of returnable book sales and delete them entirely, might forgo that market entirely.
Atlanta, GA – Congressman John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Top Shelf Productions have signed a publishing agreement. Top Shelf Productions has agreed to publish the graphic novel March, coauthored by Rep. John Lewis and Andrew Aydin, tentatively scheduled for release in 2012.
“I am very pleased to be participating in this effort,” said Congressman John Lewis. “This is something I really wanted to do some years ago and there is no better time to do it than now. It is not just a story of struggle; it is a story of involvement. It shows the ups, the downs, the ins and the outs of a movement.
“It is my hope,” said Congressman Lewis, “that this work will be meaningful and helpful to future generations to give many people here in America and around the world the urge, the desire, to seek, to build, their own world, their own future.”
A meditation in the modern age on the distance traveled, both as a nation and as a people, since the days of Jim Crow and segregation, March tells the first hand account of John Lewis’ lifelong struggle for civil and human rights.
The publishing agreement is an historic first, both for the U.S. Congress and graphic novel publishing as a whole, marking the first time a sitting Member of Congress has authored a graphic novel. Top Shelf Productions is the first and only graphic novel publisher to be certified by the House Committee on Standards.
“As a proud resident of Georgia, and a long-time fan of the honorable Congressman,” adds publisher Chris Staros, “this is truly a deep honor. To bring, not only his life’s story, but that of the Civil Rights Movement to the comics medium is truly exciting. This will make this historical and timeless message accessible to an entirely new generation of readers.”
An artist has yet to be named for the project though candidates are being actively considered. (more…)
Dynamite Entertainment is offering up something new for readers of all genders come Valentine’s Day. Here’s the formal release:
December 13, 2010, Runnemede, NJ – Pulse of Power is going “E” on February 14, 2011. Catch the E-Book version of Anne Elizabeth’s debut graphic novel at your favorite online source. From iTunes to Graphic.ly, everything is more fun on the computer.
In a field dominated by men, Anne Elizabeth is one of only a handful of female series writer-creators and Pulse of Power is the first installment, which is drawn by Marcio Fiorito, in an eight-part series. Dynamite released the paperback version in the Fall 2010.
Having previously published both multi-cultural fiction and romance with Atria/Simon & Schuster and Highland Press, AE was thrilled to try something different. As a life-long fan of comic books – beginning with Archie and Superman – creating and writing a graphic novel was an extraordinarily exciting event.
Richly imagined and utterly engaging, Pulse of Power re-imagines the timeless battle between good and evil. Tia Stanton is a graduate from The Academy, a prestigious private school in Greenwich, Connecticut, but she’s anything but prim and proper since she spends her days working at a magic shop, located in New York City, and her nights prowling as a monster-hunting vigilante through Connecticut. Then through a mystical rite she is given extraordinary superpowers and must help a warrior-king from another world save the universe from total destruction.
With Pulse of Power Anne Elizabeth delivers an intriguing and fast-paced graphic novel that is sure to please fans of paranormal fiction and comic books alike. Empowerment comes in all shapes and sizes. Destiny is a choice. Power up!
“Anne Elizabeth weaves a wonderfully sexy, spellbinding tale of power, money, and magic!” – LA Banks, New York Times Best Seller
“Anne Elizabeth at her best! The characters are addictive, the storyline dynamic…a definite must read!” – Dianne Defonce, BORDERS – Event & Book Group Moderator and Winner of the 2008 RWA Bookseller of the Year
“PULSE paints a wonderful fantastical world that will entice and excite.” – International Bestseller Keith R.A. DeCandido
“…notable when an established author puts aside their familiar form for a foray into comics. That’s the journey being undertaken by Anne Elizabeth, known primarily for her romance novels and her comics-related columns at Romantic Times.” – Troy Brownfield & Russel Burlingame, Newsarama.com
My biggest problem with the term “graphic novel” is that it’s wrong.
Graphic, yes. Novel, not so much.
A novel is generally defined as a work of prose that is 50,000 words or more, and most novels are much more than that.
Yet the average item that is referred to as a “graphic novel” rarely has
a novel’s worth of story. Back in the 1990s, when I reviewed these
things for Publishers Weekly and Library Journal, we tried referring to them with the more accurate term “trade comics.” But it didn’t take for very long, and that fight has long since been given up.
Which is a pity, because the term is really misleading. And that affects the writing, because when you’re writing a so-called “graphic novel”—or just writing an issue of a monthly comic book—your ability to tell the story is somewhat more proscribed than it is in prose.
Indeed, while there are significant and important differences between screenwriting and comic book writing—as expertly outlined by my buddy David Alan Mack earlier this month—one thing they share is that there are limits.
Graphic novels and movies have more flexibility, but ultimately there’s only so far you can go. Each has a range of pages or minutes that it can legitimately run, with very rare exceptions.
With, say, a TV episode or a monthly comic book, that’s a much harder limit. A “one-hour” episode must be 42 minutes, no more, no less. A monthly comic book must be 22 pages, no more, no less. (And yes, I know some shows have more minutes, and some comics have fewer pages, but work with me here.)
That’s probably what you most need to take into account when you’re writing any kind of comic book. You only have a set number of pages (or a range, anyhow), and that means you need to boil your story down to what will fit in that range.
The lack of flexibility is perhaps the hardest adjustment to make when you go from writing a prose novel to a graphic novel. If you need a new subplot in a novel, you can just add the 10,000 words or whatever—with a graphic novel, that option isn’t there.
Keith R.A. DeCandido has written more than 40 novels, including more than a dozen Star Trek novels, as well as half the Supernatural novels that have been published, and tons more. He is currently the scripter of the monthly Farscape comic and wrote the first arc of the Cars: Adventures of Tow Mater comic and the recent Star Trek: Captain’s Log: Jellico one-shot. Look for his Dungeons & Dragons novel in 2011. You can read his inane ramblings at kradical.livejournal.com or cyberstalk him on either Facebook or Twitter under the handle KRADeC.
Remember: you can follow all the NaGraNoWriMo posts here!
Outlines are important, don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. They can keep you from making silly mistakes. Like having an article about outlining near the end of a writing month.
Seriously, an outline can keep you out of all kinds of trouble. If you have even a basic outline beforehand, you can get a clearer sense of your own pacing, and of the story’s overall flow. You can see where it’s going and how it will get there. And you can be sure you didn’t miss any steps along the way.
Do outlines work with graphic novels? Absolutely! If anything, they’re even more important for graphic prose than for regular prose, because you need to have an even clearer sense of how the story will break down. If you have the plot elements outlined, you can see where splash pages and close-ups and other visual features will fit without derailing the story or ruining the pacing. You can also get a sense of page breakdowns by going over the outline and seeing where action is fast and furious and where it’s slow and careful, which will give you a better idea of when to do a standard grid page and when to do quick cut-outs and burst images.
That means, of course, that you need to follow your outline once you’ve written it. Otherwise it won’t do you much good. I tend to keep my outline up in a separate window as I’m writing, so I can refer back to it as necessary. I also use a clean copy of the outline as my starting document, so I can go from point to point and flesh each one out in turn, transforming the outline itself into the full text.
This doesn’t mean you have to follow the outline slavishly, however. Things change as you write. Characters develop in ways you couldn’t have predicted. They do things you wouldn’t have expected—but that make perfect sense for them, given their personalities and situation. You could try to force them back to the details you already established, but that’s going to feel stiff and unnatural and it will show. Instead you need to let them change the story as they work their way through it. It’s their story, after all.
Day 21, and I’m in hell. Let me give you my particular problem and share my pain with you.
The story for my graphic novel hinges on a bunch of financial manipulations. I’m doomed.
Why? Comics is a visual medium. That means the writer has to find a way to make the story visually interesting. I have to make a story about high finance discernable in pictures.
Is there a way to do this? Yes, there is– you show the characters, and you show them doing things. Show the impact of what’s going on. And as a writer, this means that you have to describe what you want to see on the page so that the artist can draw it.
I was lucky enough to take art classes with John Buscema when I was a young lad, and he would use his book How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way
as his textbook. There was one section that stuck with me, showing how to tell a scene with just two people in it dramatically.
Day 20. Late at night. And I’m still working on today’s article for NaGraNoWriMo.
Why? I mean, isn’t it okay if I miss a day? It’s just funny books, after all. Can’t I just blow a deadline?
Are you crazy?
Yes, stuff happens. The kid has to go to the emergency room, the computer crashes, that person you had a crush on in high school is in town for the night following a painful divorce and they were thinking of you and…
I don’t want to hear it.
Do you know National Novel Writing Month got started? Because for most participants, they had an idea for a novel but never took the time to write it. And do you know why most of those novels never got written? No
deadline. No pressure.
Would be writers would think about the plot for years on end, twiddling
their thumbs. They’d come up with brilliant twists while showering, which they’d never get down on paper. They’d make
vague plans about renting a cabin at Yaddo someday to actually write the damn thing.
And it never happened. Because there was no deadline, and consequently, no pressure.
And understand, in comics, it’s not just you.
Your collaborators are waiting on you to finish. If you’re late, you’re cutting into the time they have to draw your book. Which means they’re going to rush to finish your masterpiece.
Editors aren’t going to want to hire you if you blow deadlines– they have lots of other people they can hire who won’t give them that trouble.
And finally, do you really want to deal with the people like me on the Internet complaining how the last issue of your miniseries is months late?
So get it done. Stop procrastinating. You’ve got pages to write.
And if you haven’t started writing your graphic novel yet, you now have the focus of a very condensed deadline. Ten days instead of a month. You don’t have the luxury of putting it off any more, you have to buckle down and write the dang thing. You’ve eaten up your slack time. So get to it.
Use that pressure! No more time to put it off, no more tweaking– just get it down and get it done.
If you need tips, remember: you can follow all the NaGraNoWriMo posts here!
Day ten, and also day three or four or ninety-seven of the New York Comic Con… and the sad truth of how they can wreck your schedules. So let’s pick up a few quickies:
For those who find they are having a little trouble there are a number of tips online that can be helpful. Below are a few tips that professionals in the industry have posted on blogs and news sites over the last couple of years.
Online at the Clockwork Storybook blog site is a nice in depth look at the writing process by Bill Willingham (writer of Fables). This takes a whole look at scripting keeping in mind that this must also be interpreted by the artist.
On his personal website Warren Ellis (writer of Transmetropolitan) posts an helpful answer to character motivation and action concerning “Want/Get/Do“.
And from our own site archives: two years ago John Ostrander (writer of Suicide Squad) posted an article with writing tips all writers can benefit from, covering the creative process and what being a writer means and does to you as a person.
Also: Dennis O’Neil did a more detailed write up on the differences between the full script method and the Marvel method which is much better than mine, and I should have lifted it directly. Here’s part one, and here’s part two.
Instead, I’ll lift his RECOMMENDED READING and suggest his book, The DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics, which somehow wasn’t included on our first list of writing books to look at. It’s truly excellent, and the only reason I can think of that it slipped my mind is that it’s constantly out on loan to other people who are using it to become better writers themselves.
Hat tip to Kyle Gnepper for the assist on tracking down articles. Remember: you can follow all the NaGraNoWriMo posts here!
This is a milestone: it was announced at San Diego Comic-Con that a live-action adaptation of Last Blood, a webcomic first published on Keenspot back in 2006, is in the works with Simon Hunter (The Mutant Chronicles) directing with an anticipated 2012 release. To our knowledge, this is the furthest any webcomic has gone towards being adapted into a feature film.
February 7, 2010
Dynamite Entertainment is offering up something new for readers of all genders come Valentine’s Day. Here’s the formal release:
Day 20. Late at night. And I’m still working on today’s article for NaGraNoWriMo.
