Adrienne Roy, whose colorful storytelling was a fixture throughout two decades of Batman and other best-selling DC comic books, lost a year-long battle with cancer on December 14th.
The premier DC Comics colorist during the “Bronze Age of Comics” provided dramatic coloring and storytelling for nearly all of the company’s top titles, but is best remembered for her 15-year, 189-issue run on Batman, her 16-year, 202-issue run on the company’s flagship Detective Comics, and a 14-year tenure on The New Teen Titans, plus many years coloring other Bat-titles including Brave and the Bold, Robin, Batman and the Outsiders, Gotham Knights and Shadow of the Bat.
Though her initial Bat assignments were for legendary editor Julius Schwartz, she was recruited to color the entire Batman line by editor (later DC president) Paul Levitz, who explains, “Adrienne combined the ability of a set designer to create beauty with the ability of a lighting designer to create drama and storytelling focus, and wrapped it in a sweet professionalism. No wonder we editors chose her again and again, keeping her on favorite titles like Batman literally for decades.”
Adrienne Roy’s coloring enhanced the artwork of comicdom’s top artists, from Golden and Silver Age legends like Jack Kirby, Irv Novick, Gene Colan and Superman’s Curt Swan to modern greats like George Peréz, Jim Aparo, Don Newton, Keith Giffen and Todd McFarlane.
The Verona, NJ native was a veteran of science fiction, comics, Star Trek and horror film conventions, and was one of the first female comics fans to break into the ranks of New York comics professionals. After marrying and moving to Manhattan, she briefly assisted her husband, DC Comics staffer Anthony Tollin, on his own freelance work before being recruited for solo assignments by vice president/production manager Jack Adler, who recognized by her third story that she would soon be “DC’s best colorist.” Under the tutelage of Adler and DC president Sol Harrison, Roy quickly moved into the ranks of DC’s top freelancers, with continuing assignments on a variety of titles including Superman, Green Lantern, All-Star Comics (featuring the Justice Society), G.I. Combat, House of Mystery and Batman Family. She was also the regular colorist on DC’s World’s Greatest Super-Heroes and Batman syndicated newspaper strips.
“For more than a decade, it seemed like Adrienne Roy was coloring virtually every DC comic,” recalls inker and comics historian Jim Amash, “but in truth she was only coloring most of the top sellers, the titles that everyone was reading!” Adrienne was the only DC freelancer with her own desk in the company’s Manhattan offices, and was the first colorist signed by DC to exclusive, multi-year employment contracts.
I’ve seen a lot of dissatisfaction online with Joe Straczynski’s Superman storyline, the one where he ambles across the nation. Well, that’s show business; I rather like it, at least thus far. I think if JMS were to have done this story as a
graphic novel, say around 120 pages, it would have gone over better with the
bloggers. The basic idea worked for Thornton Wilder in his play Our Town, and taking this energy into
the superhero myth is a clever idea. But watching it unfold in monthly
installments – with fill-ins – does not do this concept justice.
However, Joe’s story reveals the major, overwhelming problem with today’s mainstream comics. It simply takes too damn long to tell a story.
Whereas I enjoyed Brian Bendis and Mark Bagley’s Ultimate Spider-Man, it’s convenient for me to point out that the initial origin story only took Stan Lee and Steve Ditko 11 pages to pull off and Brian and Mark took five full issues. Different times, different storytelling techniques, but still we’re talking about a ten-fold increase in story length.
For me, this makes most “Big Event” stunts unreadable. I liked Marvel’s Shadowland, but my interest waned with each successive tie-in and mini-series. Same thing with Marvel’s Civil War / Dark Reign stunt, only multiplied by Warp Factor Four.
DC iced me with their Crisis on Infinite Final Crises event. What did they publish, about four thousand issues there? As for Brightest Day, I got burned out early on during Blackest Night so I never sampled the sequel. I don’t know who these characters are; DC keeps on changing its mind with each Big Event.
Yes, I understand – these Big Events do “quite well” in the marketplace. I respond, “Oh yeah? Compared to what?” Big-name comics publishers with big-name characters with big-time movie support are selling only to a small circle of friends in numbers so inadequate that 1960s Marvel publisher Martin Goodman and 1960s DC publisher Irwin Donenfeld would drop dead at the sales reports, if they weren’t dead already. Several years ago, I told Donenfeld – whose office was about a mile from my house – what Superman was selling, and he refused to believe it. “It’s Superman!” he said, shaking his head.
The sad fact is, the American comic book medium is no longer a mass medium. Nor is the rest of the publishing world. Readers are part of an ever-shrinking elite.
Will the Internet change that? Maybe. Will tablet computers with auto-subscriptions change that? I sure hope so. Otherwise, we’re in the buggy whip business.
There’s a lot of exciting stuff going on in comics today.
There’s a lot of solid writing from publishers both mainstream and otherwise.
Some great art, although with so many titles the great stuff is buried beneath
a ton of crap. There’s some wonderful concepts and some illuminating, even
inspirational stories. Sadly, very little of that is coming from the two
publishers who dominate what little market we’ve got left; the so-called
independent publishers (traditionally defined as “not Marvel or DC”) have
limited promotional resources, and direct sales comics shops can’t afford to
take much of a risk. They’ve got to order the Big Events, and as these stunts
get even bigger and segue directly into other Big Events, retailers have very
little money left over to take a chance on these independents.
That’s a shame. I go to conventions and I see more hopeful
wannabes than ever. I see more new kids with real talent, proportionately
speaking, than ever before. The interesting stuff that goes on at the larger
conventions isn’t at the major publishers’ showbooths, it’s in Artists Alley
and people you have never heard of are producing it.
So I gaze at the rapidly encroaching new year and I hope. I’d rather read good comic books, but at least I have hope.
AP: Ali, ALL PULP really appreciates you taking a few minutes downtime to answer a few questions. First, can you introduce yourself, some personal background and such?
Ali: I could go with the classic Dr. Evil line, “The details of my life are quite inconsequential”, but that’s a heck of a spot to leave an interviewer in so let’s see if I can cliff note it. By day I labor quietly at a wonderfully dead end job I’m going leave as soon as politicians quit playing football with the economy and people’s lives; by night I’m a working graphic designer who happily gets a chance to do what he loves. If I’m really lucky I occasionally get paid at one profession or the other. So far the dead end day job’s in the lead on stable payments, but I live in hope for the rest.
I’ve been fortunate to be a working designer for the better part of two decades, I’ve been involved in the print business for the better part of three and have a practical working knowledge of prepress and print related workflows. I’ve worn a few hats and if pressed can actually take a project from concept to design, to production and finishing before I have to turn it over to another set of hands. I’m basically a one man digital print shop and I’m also an illustrator to boot when I get a second to actually sit down at a drafting table and sketch. The only thing I don’t have any major experience to be effective on is web work, building sites and whatnot; I’d kill, okay maybe maim, alright seriously annoy someone to get versed on that stuff.
I’ve freelanced and spent a decade doing event and convention graphics where I worked for practically every type of client imaginable. In case you’re curious, worst convention/client/group? a tie between a convention of Christians and Catholics and the X Games; best convention/client/group? an international convention of Coroners. Coroners are some of the best people on the planet and given the nature of their jobs, they’re pretty fun to be around. They have a great sense of humor as a group, bar none.
But I digress…
I usually pull off miracles of design and prepress in the wilder side of the San Francisco Bay Area, known to locals as Oakland, California, which is generally a nicer place to live than our press clippings would lead you to believe. At least once a month, usually while waiting for a bus headed home for a quiet weekend, someone tosses a bag over my head, tosses me onto the bus I was waiting for and insures I’m locked up in my own home for roughly three days to produce whatever Pro Se magazine is due on the stands. My only companion during those periods is Miles, their mighty watch cat. Apparently he’s underpaid because Miles naps the bulk of the time and insists I feed him when he’s not asleep. I think he’s the waterboarding workaround. So during my captivity, they usually run DVDs to keep me from calling Amnesty International. I’m hoping for Inception this month, I missed that one at the movies…
…oh, and a note to my Pro Se abductors: could we get the Mint Milano cookies? I’d like some to dip in my milk, thanks.
Should I say that I tend to be pretty tongue in cheek, or is that obscured by my sparkling wit and obvious modesty?
Okay I’ll try to be more serious from here on out, next question!
AP: As far as pulp is concerned, let’s talk about you as a fan first. Are you a fan of the pulp genre and, if so, what are your interests pulpwise and some of the bigger influences on you, both character and author wise?
Ali: Well I sort walked into pulp at an early age and was a fan and didn’t know it. I was encouraged to read at an early age and books were generally given to me more than toys so while other kids were struggling to get to the “See Dick run” stage I was reading the Gold Bug, Murders in the Rue Morgue, the Three Musketeers and Robin Hood. I was basically that strange quiet kid you’d find on the Twilight Zone or the Outer Limits who has this spooky maturity thing going on who’s reading Conan Doyle and understanding world news situations at the age of three. I was also a fan of golden age comic book characters and a huge Batman fan. It was a good time, you got the Justice Society teaming up with their modern day counterparts in the Justice League, Denny O’Neil, Irv Novick, Neal Adams and others were doing some fine work over in the Batman books and it was there that I first encountered Maxwell Grant’s (or Walter Gibson’s if you prefer) signature character, the Shadow. That was my first encounter with the character and it was a DC Comics interpretation so there was some modification on the character, but it was good enough to follow the guy over to his own book by O’Neil and the amazing work of Mike Kaluta and I was hooked on the Shadow.
At that same time I was reading Conan and Doc Savage and the Avenger over in Justice, Inc. but didn’t even realize they were considered pulp fiction because they were all tied to comics I had been reading. I looked at Dash Hammett as mystery and crime fiction which is where the Shadow and the Avenger fell in my estimation. Doc and Conan were riding shotgun with the high adventure tales of guys like Jack London or Howard Pyle. For me, pulp was never really something that was concrete as a specific style of literature, it was just another form of fiction.
I can’t say if I’m really influenced as much as an appreciative fan of certain writers. The older I get, the less purple the prose gets. I have a healthy love for science fiction, espionage and crime fiction and a great respect for the works of Raymond Chandler, Dash Hammett, Rex Stout, Ray Bradbury, Poe, Oscar Wilde, Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, Isaac Asimov, Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, Matt Wagner, Robert B. Parker, Rod Serling and Harlan Ellison to name more than a few.
I think because my inclination is more visual and the artists from the comics I grew up with, and graphic novels and such I still follow, I’m a fan of great artists from back in the day like Wally Wood, Alex Raymond, Gil Kane Alex Toth, Mike Kaluta, Marshall Rogers, Mac Raboy, Carmine Infantino, Curt Swan, Steranko, Frank Robbins, Ditko, Frazetta, Brent Anderson, Dave Stevens, Neal Adams, Will Eisner, Don Newton and Kirby and some of the modern guys who are bringing back the pulp style with their work like Darwyn Cooke, Michael Lark, Mitch Breitweiser, Francesco Francavilla, Keiron Dwyer, Paul Smith and Athena Voltaire’s Steve Bryant.
I like the trend away from the whole anime/manga and fusion style. It’s nice to see people that look like people and not some Sailor Moon variation. It would be nice to see art trend back into what it was before the cookie cutter anime era or the all flash gimmick days of Image where you had illustrators delivering solid storytelling which works in concert with strong writing as opposed to serving as an eye candy distraction. I know I sound like one of those crabby old guys who complain about change, but that’s not it at all, I just want artists who strive to be unique in such a way that when you see their work you know the story’s going to be that much stronger because the artist isn’t riding their ego, they are practicing their craft and enjoying every minute of it. In an age where any bloke with a laptop and a drawing tablet can call themselves an artist, I’d like to see a person who really knows what they’re doing and makes it work without a ton of fanfare.
I’m also an avid fan of audio dramas which started, oddly enough, with the Shadow and Sherlock Holmes. There was a great radio station that ran the old time radio shows on Saturdays and around the age of eleven, I noticed them as something other than background noise. My dad would occasionally listen to CBS Radio Mystery Theater in the 1970s, but I got hooked directly on a Shadow and Sherlock Holmes broadcast. The Shadow show was “the House that Death Built”, involving a crazy hanging judge type who rigged his house with all these execution gimmicks and was killing people who either escaped him or turned against him. The Holmes show was probably one of the best of Conan Doyle’s stories, the Speckled Band. It began a love affair with audio dramas that I have to this day and I follow the BBC regularly when I’m not sitting through a Johnny Dollar marathon or something…
AP: As far as your current involvement in Pulp, you are the designer/formatter/guru for Pro Se Productions. How did that association come to be?
Ali: Bus Stop. Bag over the head. I guess that’s not enough? Okay, I guess I can expand my answer a bit.
There was a fad online sometime ago called fan fiction, it’s not as heavy as it once was but it allowed a lot of writers (good, bad and needs their hands chopped off) a forum to express themselves by writing adventures of their favorite characters that probably wouldn’t have seen the light of day any other way. Among these groups was a little band called DC Futures headed by Erik Burnham. It was sort of DC Comics, the Next Generation, without the annoying android guy. At any rate it was there that I found a piece written by Tommy Hancock that dealt with the new generation of my Golden Age heroes and it was some really great writing. Somehow we got together in a conversation, I think I sent him an email praising him as the next best thing to sliced bread or something and we traded emails back and forth and found we had quite a bit in common. When he started a fan fic group of his own dealing specifically with those great old heroes, I pitched a couple of ideas and eventually did some very forgettable (in my humble opinion) writing on a few pieces. One of them, Gotham Knights, featuring Batman and other guys that were working Gotham City in the 30s and 40s was basically my War & Peace, and put the two of us on a path that’s led to a great friendship and creative collaboration.
We trod through a few trenches creatively, mostly with Tommy starting with “I’ve got this idea…” or “Got a sec?” which usually means a few hours later we’ve hammered out points, brainstormed and refined things first thought he had and he runs off six to ten alternate thoughts in the process. Most guys get one, maybe two brilliant ideas a week, Tommy gets something like a dozen in about an hour, every hour, all day, every day. I’ve been pretty fortunate to watch the writer Tommy is develop from the writer Tommy was. He was exceptional then and he’s only gotten better since. So he and I have always had a venture on the backburner where he’d eventually get around to doing something where my contribution would be more in my field of design like a magazine or something. During the fan fic days, I made the mistake of doing an ebook for one thing and it led to a sort of one off set of ebooks which didn’t really go anywhere. That might have been a good thing at the time, neither one of us were exactly where we needed to be in our respective skill sets.
As time went on, I’d do the occasional logo or comp together a piece of art for Tommy, but one day he came online in usual Tommy mode with “I’ve got this idea AND I want you to be a part of it.” Since he altered the script, I asked what he needed and he laid out the concept for what is now Pro Se Productions. Initially I had a small part in the thing, he needed logos for what was to be a series of audio dramas so I said, “Sure, no problem.” Confident he had me hooked, our hero moved on to the next phase of his plan which was a damn sight more ambitious, he springs on me that Pro Se is going to also have a print/publishing branch. So of course he asks, yours truly to lend a hand.
So of course with no guarantee of payment any time in my immediate future, and the knowledge that every month was going to be a grinder of pulling together all the disparate elements that make up the layout of an anthology book, I asked myself what any sane man would say to such a prospect…
…then I said yes anyway.
I’m a horrible businessman where my friends are concerned, so Pro Se’s my pro bono gig. I don’t take a check for it so the talent gets paid for their work. To be honest, Pro Se is the kind of seat of the pants design on the fly project that makes life fun, so I just enjoy the ride and add the credit to the resume. In another life I’d be Scotty on the Enterprise, doing wild things at the last minute just to see if I can pull it off before the Klingons blow us out of space…
AP: What exactly do you do as a formatter and designer? Walk us through the process of putting together one of the Pro Se magazines, if you would.
Ali: Well to be honest and in all seriousness, there’s not really a good way to answer that one.
I could be lightly technical and tell you that I use the Adobe Creative Suite software programs to get my job done. I work in Photoshop to process and format the images properly for what we do. some need to be tweaked more than others, occasionally I add something to an image or take it away, but it’s basic image prep work and file conversion since my images show up in any form from a jpeg to multiple page pdfs I have to pull apart and make separate images. In Illustrator, I create logos, cover layouts, and set up most of the ads I create on the fly. The actual book layout is set up as a template in InDesign where I do all the typesetting for the stories sent to Tommy, add in the visual elements and plug up major white spaces with house ads if we don’t have other folks plugging their products. We stir, say a few kind words and pray as I set up proof copies in pdf form for Tommy to review and note corrections, and we go back and forth until he says it’s good.
I upload files to Tommy and voila it’s soup!
We’ve gotten the process down from the first nightmare month where we actually ran through a few print houses and had to reformat files from an image based workflow to a pdf workflow. and the first month we did all three books together and it took weeks as we went back and forth with one printer then another and then we’d go somewhere else and have to redo the whole thing for those guys. I think during that whole challenge, Tommy and I were trying not to hang ourselves in an unspoken suicide pact, but it was a learning experience and there are things we know we wouldn’t do the same way again.
Now it’s a fairly quick process. The templates are streamlined, I redesigned the book so image placement is not as essential to the text and it made what used to take almost a week into a two day process. If I have everything and no interruptions, I can knock out the entire book from unrelated elements to finished product in about 12 hours. I’m competing with myself though, so I’m always trying to beat my best time and make it look better than it did before.
AP: Is your design influenced by any particular style, either derived from pulp or outside of that genre?
Ali: Not intentionally. I like the art deco look and feel of things, probably more from watching Agatha Christie’s Poirot than anything else. That look sort of played into the current direction of the Pro Se books house style. So much of the Pro Se look is supported by the way text is displayed that I’m in a constant state of refining things, so I try not to be married to anything because I may need to drop it down the road for something that might work better. There are some great font foundries out there like Nick Curtis, his fonts capture the look and feel of a bygone era while being a little more polished. He’s got great work over at My Fonts and it’s pretty reasonable. Of course my other go to font house is Nate Piekos and the wonderful folks over at Blambot, and their free fonts are so great that it makes typesetting and text design work a breeze.
In other aspects of my work, I try not to work in any particular style, that’s usually dictated by the client or the job. The more freedom I get on a project, the more I throw myself into it. Pro Se was a blank check design wise, so a lot of me is on each page.
When I’m doing my own art, I try not to follow any particular style but I’m getting back to studying artists Ilove and I’m hoping their work will continue to guide my own.
AP: Pulp seems to be having a resurgence currently. What are your thoughts on the reason for that and what part do you think design/format of material plays in that?
Ali: Everything comes back in style eventually, you just have to wait for it. I think in a world of global terrorism, political polarization and financial uncertainty we find ourselves pretty much in the same shoes as the generation who ushered in the pulp era. We’re looking for a bit of escapism where problems are solved in relatively short order, or someone plays the hero, or we enter world of high adventure that removes us from the overwhelming concerns of the world we actually live in for just a little while. Not necessarily a world of snap brim fedoras, or over the top heavies, but just something that starts out quietly enough before it hits you in the gut and catapults you to a “wow” finish. You leave feeling entertained and you want to come back for more later.
So what some are seeing as a rebirth of pulp is really just a recognition of what’s been with us the whole time. Sometimes we renamed it because the vehicle it was delivered in changed like, film noir, but pulp’s influence is in a lot of our entertainment and literature. There was pulp before pulp in penny dreadfuls and boys’ own stories across the pond, Sherlock Holmes is basically Doc Savage with a drug habit and fewer friends, Dorian Gray preceded the weird tale with a built in object lesson and morality play, heck you could look at Shakespeare and make a serious argument that he wrote a number of murder stories that would lay the framework for everything this side of Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade and Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns. I realize that might offend pulp purists, but we are in a constant state of change and growth as we age, why should pulp be a static thing in a specific niche? In its heyday, pulp ran the gamut in its chosen subject matter and pretty much every category of fiction you look at in Borders or Barnes & Noble has been used in pulp magazines, so to look at it now and say “Pulp is…” and you push in your view then you eliminate the possibility of it evolving into something else. Cyberpunk? It’s pulp. Steampunk? It’s pulp.. Harry Potter? It’s pulp. Twilight? Okay, maybe there are a few limits we should set, but the point is pulp fiction was simply an avenue to deliver entertainment to the masses relatively cheap and it encompassed a lot more than guys like the Shadow and Doc Savage.
It’s a trend that’s starting to return in comics where heroes are actually heroic. It’s returning to film where we are starting to see more masked avengers, or wrong men who have to clear themselves, we’ve fantasy stuff like Avatar and sci-fi thrillers like Inception. Pulp’s not just on the rise so is the concept of the heroic ideal. Some of these are executed well and you get novels like “It’s Superman!” which is the closest we’ve ever gotten to a pulp Superman novel which is one part superhero, one part pulp novel with a healthy dose of John Steinbeck thrown in. Or it’s executed awkwardly and you find an off beat version of Doc Savage or the Shadow falling short of its potential because you lose sight of the heart of the character. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel, we need to put those babies on the car and see where the road takes us next.
AP: You are a writer as well with a background in fan fiction. Any plans to try your hand at published pulp fiction?
Ali: I’ve been away from writing for the better part of a decade. I’ll see what happens when I shake the rust off my writer’s cap and take a stab at a new tale or two. Writing’s something I enjoy, but it requires time and a certain amount of peace and quiet for me. My life has been on the move nonstop since the fan fic days, so fact I’m even considering authoring a new story much less actually executing same is extraordinary. I’m rusty and will probably give whoever edits me the biggest headache this side of California, but Tommy has this idea I should give it a shot and it’s hard not to listen to that kind of coaxing.
I live by the motto of “Everything’s possible”, so I rule nothing out.
AP: You are a renaissance man as well. Designer/formatter, writer…and artist. What pieces have you done for Pro Se’s magazines and has your art work appeared elsewhere?
Ali: I’m also a pretty decent tenor, no one ever brings up the singing, sigh…
What pieces have I done for Pro Se’s magazines? You mean besides the magazines? This is a tough room!
I’ve done the bulk of the house ads that are currently in the books. I pinch hit on a couple of art pieces Let’s see in Fantasy and Fear (FnF) #1 I was lucky enough to get Ron Fortier’s “Beast of the Mountains”. It was a rush sketch, all pencil, that I had to complete in 20 minutes because we were on the absolute last day in our first month and were short one sketch. It never got inked but I played with it in Photoshop so it was close to the more finished art work we had for the other stories. In Masked Gun Mystery (MGM) #1, I got a piece of Tommy Hancock’s “Murphy’s Wake”, which was fun because it was from an earlier idea Tommy had about a book where everything was presented as newspaper clippings and diary entries and such, so the story was laid out the reflect that using fonts that changed with the material being viewed. I think I did a photo of the burning house in a newspaper clipping and an idealized appearance of the hero that was supposed to invoke the imagery of a great series of comic book stories in the 1970s featuring a ghostly hero called the Spectre. Finally over in Peculiar Advenutres (PA) #2 I contributed a piece to a story by Sean Ellis, “The Sorceror’s Ghost” which featured a scene from the story where I tried to capture this awesomely huge zeppelin in the skies over London. That was another fast sketch where inking, filters and lighting effects were done in Photoshop to cover up just how rough a piece it was.
I’m hoping to do some actual art that isn’t required five minutes after I get a story on press day, y’know just for kicks…
AP: With the myriad of talents you have, does pulp appeal to you because it can utilize all of them or is there something more that draws you to throw yourself into this sort of work?
Ali: I’m an artist and designer, so I’m always up for a project where I can exhibit and refine my skills. Pro Se covers that need in me because it’s an evolving work even with everything in place, I look at a piece and say to myself something can always be tightened or improved. The writer in me has sort of awakened cranky and hungry so I’m the process of completing a story for the first time in years which is really exciting because it’s another way to be artistic. Pro Se is open to the ideas I have, so occasionally it’s good to do favors, it opens up doors you didn’t even realize were in the building of your life. I’m even getting back to sketching so Pro Se has sort of drawn me back to skills I’ve left dormant for too long. Creatively, it’s a great place to be.
But really the appeal, the draw, the kick is to take up the challenge and see if you’re going to pull it off. It’s a rush that can’t be beat by anything when I’m in the zone and everything is falling into place. Nothing is greater than just living in that moment where you’re unstoppable and know you’ve nailed it.
AP: What about the future? What do you have in the works that might appeal to the ALL PULP audience?
Ali: Well I am constantly badgering Tommy to get some of my favorites in his bag of tricks (GIVE ME MY JOHNNY CRIMSON!) on the page…
…Oh, you mean from me specifically?
I’ve pitched a concept for Masked Gun Mystery using the magazine’s title for the story which will hopefully spawn a series of stories under that umbrella. I won’t spoil it at all other than to say it allows me to play in my favorite sandbox writing wise: crime, noir, espionage and detective fiction. I’m hoping to get the first installment into MGM’s next issue in February.
That’s the only definite thing on the horizon, though Tommy and I are constantly talking about projects. It would be nice to pull off an adventure tale or two over in PA and I have a couple of guys from some old ideas that might fit well there. So after I get my first installment in the can I’m open to more writing on top of the design work I do for Pro Se at least.
AP: Ali, without those people like you, writers and artists today would be suffering. Thanks so much for what you do for pulp fiction!
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
Musing and Seeking in this Tally of Tiers: The Wold Newton Universe as Meta-Narrative
By Arthur C. Sippo 5 Dec 2010
Philip José Farmer was one of those astonishing authors whose imagination regularly generated ‘Big Concept’ ideas the way other people generated grocery lists. He did it frequently, relevantly, with just enough panache to and variation to continually surprise his readers. Within his eclectic oeuvre he graced us with many original and challenging storylines including The World of Tiers, Riverworld, Dayworld, the Fr. John Carmody stories, the Polytopical Paramyths, his pseudonymous “Venus on the Half-Shell” and his contributions to Pulp literature both pastiche and authorized. He also wrote mystery stories and contemporary narratives that dealt with critical social issues. But his most widely recognized gift to the literary world was the Wold Newton Family and interconnected Universe of literature that has inspired so many authors ever since.
It started simply enough with the postulate that the great literary adventure heroes of the 19th and 20th Centuries were biologically related to each other due to a chance encounter by their ancestors with a meteor that actually fell at Wold Newton, a small village in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England on December 13, 1795. Some type of ‘influence’ from the meteor altered the genes of these people so that their descendants possessed mental, physical and spiritual abilities greater than those of ordinary humans. More than anything else, the Wold Newton families were composed of heroes (and a few villains): men and women who harnessed their abilities to do great things. The heroes predominated in this lineage and so the legacy of Wold Newton was of beneficence and service to humanity as a whole. Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Doc Savage, Monk Mayfair, Bulldog Drummond, The Shadow, Allan Quartermain, the Scarlet Pimpernel, Phileas Fogg, and Arsene Lupin, were members of this clan as were Professor Moriarty, Captain Nemo, A. J. Raffles, and Hanoi Shan (aka Fu Manchu).
Finding relationships among the heroes and villains of adventure fiction is an appealing idea and many have followed in Phil Framer’s footsteps to extend the Wold Newton family to other protagonists in popular fiction. But Phil did much more.
He also extended the Wold Newton lineage to include characters from more legitimate literature. The Darcy family from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice are included. So is Leopold Bloom from James Joyce’s Ulysses, Queequeg from Moby Dick, and Wolf Larsen from The Sea Wolf. Other notable inclusions in the family were real people such as Count Caligostro the Theosophist, Lord Byron, and There are homages to famous persons such as Robert Blake (a character from H. P. Lovecraft’s The Haunter of the Dark who was thinly based on the author Robert Bloch) along with Paul J. Finnegan and Peter Jairus Frigate (characters from Farmer’s own fiction that were based upon himself. Phil even created a lineage for Edgar Rice Burroughs that went back to the Norse Father God Woden!
This is all very playful and imaginative, but I think there was something deeper going on. Phil Farmer was not merely taking all of his favorite literary characters and lining them up like toy soldiers. He was saying something about the very nature of the literary narratives of mankind. He was not merely looking at the narrative but looking behind them searching for points of unification between popular literature and more legitimate writings. He was wedding myth to fiction to history and ultimately to present day. He insisted that Tarzan was REAL not just fictional. He said the same thing about Doc Savage. When Phil looked out upon the human world he went searching for the order in things that underlies all of our stories fiction, mythical and historical. The Wold Newton family was his way of uniting the subtext in all literature into a grand theme of Good versus Evil; of the triumph of human courage and decency over the vicissitudes of our troubled world. He tried to do what Joseph Campbell tried to do in the book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. He looked behind the stories to the very ground bases of human life which is the real source of all literature.
The great Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote a long treatise on physics in which he described what he believed to be the laws by which the things that existed in this world worked. Sadly, he got most of this wrong by our modern standards. But then he wrote a work that tried to look beyond the particulars in the things that existed to the very idea of existence in general. These were the rules that underlie the rules of physics: “being qua being.” This work was appended to the end of his work on physics and so it was known as “After Physics” or more usually Metaphysics.
Philip José Farmer emulated Aristotle in moving beyond the mechanics of the narrative to the meaning of “narrative qua narrative.” There are multiple tiers of meaning that are revealed in these tales. Phil’s Wold Newton Family was intended to unite the protagonists of a thousand stories at the deepest level to show their interrelation to each other and unity in their meaning. He opined that every story ever told was one of human self discovery, the assertion of the hero as a responsible moral agent, values in conflict, and an ultimate end in which human consciousness is raised and the darkness of old fears and hatreds dissipates in the light of truth and human progress.
The Wold Newton Family gives us a Meta-Narrative which is essentially moral, optimistic, and activist. It sees humanity struggling inexorably from ignorance to enlightenment and from self-deception to self-actualization. This was Phil Farmer’s gift to us. He showed us that our popular entertainments were part of a much larger creative enterprise that cannot be separated into fact and fiction. Our stories as well as our lives reveal the endeavor of human progress and the struggle to be not merely ‘right’ but truly ‘good.’ The Wold Newton Family and the Meta-Narrative it reveals tells us that the values our heroes espouse, the sacrifices they make, their struggles against great odds, and the thrill that we get from reading about them are REAL and not merely imaginary.
The Meta-Narrative is what truly underlies the Human Condition. Doc Savage, Superman, Sydney Carton, Richard Francis Burton, Dietrich Bonhoffer, Martin Luther King, and Mother Teresa in their own ways embodied this Meta-Narrative. In that sense they are all real.
The Wold Newton Family and its extended Universe is an invitation for us to enter the Meta-Narrative not as spectators but as participants. It is our Meta-Narrative as well and we need the insight to see this and the courage to follow it through.
Phil Farmer has given us a much greater legacy than we can ever imagine. For this we give thanks to the master and wish him well on his journey beyond this life.
[[[Shazam! The Golden Age of the World’s Mightiest Mortal
]]]By Chip Kidd, with photographs by Geoff Spear
Abrams ComicArts, 246, pages, $35
With one magic word, Billy Batson turned from a 10-year old orphan into Captain Marvel. It was a form of wish fulfillment that beat [[[Superman]]] and may well explain why Fawcett’s comics were outselling DC Comics’ Man of Steel. Maybe it was CC Beck and company’s clean, slightly cartoony style. It was probably a combination of these factors, but for a time, comics featuring Captain Marvel and his extended family were outselling Superman in his own title or [[[Action Comics]]] and [[[World’s Finest Comics]]].
On the other hand, Superman beat the [[[Big Red Cheese]]] in one arena and that was in licensing. There was bread, a comic strip, a radio series, the amazing Fleischer cartoons, the serials, and so on. Captain Marvel, most know, had the Tom Tyler serial and that’s about it. Well, not quite. Thanks to über-fan Chip Kidd, we now know that there was plenty of licensed stuff for the kids. In the lavishly illustrated Shazam!, Kidd along with photographer Geoff Spear take us on a tour of the obscure and little-known product to carry images of the good Captain and his pals.
The prose is breezy and gives us a cursory history of the character and the company that brought him to light. There’s little in the way of analysis but there are many interesting anecdotes, some of which were new even to a vet like myself. It would have been interesting to gain a greater understanding of why Fawcett couldn’t parlay their sales success to a greater licensing presence, which may well have allowed them to outlast his competitor in the years that followed.
In a more or less chronological order, we see artifacts from the Captain Marvel fan club, toys, costumes, badges, contest prizes and the like. Most of it carried artwork produced by Beck’s New Jersey studio or taken from the comics themselves, so they maintained that great look and feel of the comics. There’s Beck’s powerful hero in flight alongside Mac Raboy’s graceful Captain Marvel, Jr. and the plucky Mary Marvel, first envision by Marc Swayze. The book expands its scope to include other Fawcett heroes who benefited from association, notably [[[Spy Smasher]]]] who Kidd equates as Fawcett’s Batman. While DC managed to license Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, Fawcett seemed to outperform them in terms of characters found on product although DC’s heroes were in higher profile venues such as comic strips and radio.
It is nice to be reminded that it was Fawcett that figured out how to grow the franchise with the teen sidekick additions long before Superboy or Supergirl found their way into print. Heck, we get pages of licensed product featuring Hoppy the Marvel Bunny who preceded Krypto by 13 years. I had never imagined the funny animal incarnation would merit any merchandising but there are miniature figures, temporary tattoos, and paint book.
There’s a charm to these products from the 1940s, small in size and easily affordable for mere dimes. We get to see some of the correspondence the good captain sent out to his fans, including news and contests. Most of these items are rare and fetch high prices and its terrific to see them more or less catalogued in this handsome volume.
Kidd and Spear also take the time to show us the illegal knockoffs from Cuba and having these here, truly makes this book fun to flip through.
This is a loving tribute to the character that goes a long way to highlight just how popular he truly was during comics’ golden age. It certainly belongs in your comics library, along with Kidd’s similar tributes to other characters from his youth.
DC Entertainment’s All-Star Superman was one of the better things to be released by the company during the past decade. It was universally acclaimed and awarded, recently being collected in an Absolute edition. Now, Warner Premiere is tackling Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s 12-part saga as their next animated feature. Here’s the formal press release:
BURBANK, CA, (November 29th, 2010) – Grant Morrison’s beloved, Eisner Award-winning vision of Superman’s heroic final days on Earth is brought to exquisite animated life in All-Star Superman, the latest entry in the popular, ongoing series of DC Universe Animated Original Movies coming February 22, 2011 from Warner Premiere, DC Entertainment and Warner Bros. Animation. The highly-anticipated, full-length film will be distributed by Warner Home Video as a Blu-Ray™ Combo Pack and 2-Disc Special Edition DVD for $24.98 (SRP), as well as single disc DVD for $19.98 (SRP). The film will also be available On Demand and for Download.
In All-Star Superman, the Man of Steel rescues an ill-fated mission to the Sun (sabotaged by Lex Luthor) and, in the process, is oversaturated by radiation – which accelerates his cell degeneration. Sensing even he will be unable to cheat death, Superman ventures into new realms – finally revealing his secret to Lois, confronting Lex Luthor’s perspective of humanity, and attempting to ensure Earth’s safety before his own impending end with one final, selfless act.
The celebrity-packed voice cast is headed by James Denton (Desperate Housewives) as Superman, Christina Hendricks (Mad Men) as Lois Lane, and Anthony LaPaglia (Without A Trace) as Lex Luthor. The stellar cast includes seven-time Emmy® Award winner Ed Asner (Up) as Perry White, Golden Globe® winner Frances Conroy (Six Feet Under) as Ma Kent, Matthew Gray Gubler (Criminal Minds) as Jimmy Olsen and Linda Cardellini (ER) as Nasty. Arnold Vosloo (The Mummy), Catherine Cavadini (The Powerpuff Girls), Finola Hughes (General Hospital), Alexis Denisof (Angel), Obba Babatunde (That Thing You Do!), Michael Gough (Batman) and John DiMaggio (Futurama) round out the voice cast.
Based on the Eisner Award-winning DC Comics series/graphic novel of the same name by Grant Morrison with illustration by Frank Quitely, All-Star Superman is executive produced by animation guru Bruce Timm and directed by Sam Liu (Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths) from a script by acclaimed comics writer Dwayne McDuffie (Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths). (more…)
The popular voiceover actor took time last week to speak about his days as the new Caped Crusader in preparation for this week’s release of Batman Beyond: The Complete Series, a nine-disc limited edition DVD set that presents nearly 20 hours of animated action spread over 52 episodes, as well as including all-new bonus featurettes and a 24-page, 8”x 12” collectible booklet.
Batman Beyond: The Complete Series centers on Terry McGinnis, an ordinary teenager … until his father is mysteriously murdered. Suspecting foul play at his father’s company, Wayne/Powers Corporation, Terry meets Bruce Wayne and learns of a secret identity hidden for decades. Now too old to don the cape and cowl as Batman, Wayne refuses to help – so Terry does what any brash young kid would do: steal the Bat-suit and take matters into his own hands! Vowing to avenge his father’s death, Terry dons the high-tech suit tricked out with jetpacks, a supersensitive microphone and even camouflage capabilities in search of his father’s assassin.
The all-star production team was headed by executive producer Jean MacCurdy and producers Bruce Timm, Alan Burnett, Glen Murakami and Paul Dini. Writers on the series included Burnett and Dini, as well as Stan Berkowitz, Bob Goodman, Rich Fogel, Hilary Bader and John McCann.
Friedle made his mark in live-action television and film from the time
he turned 10, starring in hit series like Boy Meets World and Don’t Just
Sit There. He gradually shifted his attention to voiceover work, taking
the lead in Batman Beyond and co-starring in Disney’s Kim Possible to
name but a few. Today, he primarily stays behind the microphone, voicing
such notable roles as Doyle on The Secret Saturdays and Blue Beetle on Batman: The Brave and the Bold.Will Friedle took a futuristic
Dark Knight in altogether new directions as the voice of Terry McGinnis
in Warner Bros. Animation’s breakthrough 1999 series Batman Beyond.
QUESTION: When you think back on all those Batman Beyond sessions, what are your favorite memories of recording the series?
WILL FRIEDLE: This sounds like a cheesy answer, but working with Andrea (Romano) is just the greatest experience. Every week you go in and it’s amazing and fun. You just never knew who the guest cast would be. My favorite was recording Return of the Joker. Sitting between Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill for five days was pretty incredible. I learned more about being a voiceover actor in those five days than I did in the five months before that. Just watching the two of them work – how Mark got so into the character, completely losing himself in that role. And then there’s Kevin with that deep, booming voice, always sitting with his back straight and working perfectly with the microphone. It was an education.
QUESTION: Do you have a favorite Batman Beyond episode?
WILL FRIEDLE: There was an episode called “Out of the Past” where it’s Bruce Wayne’s birthday and as a birthday present Terry takes Bruce to see a new play, “Batman: The Musical.” So there’s Bruce sitting in the audience, watching these people in costume jumping on stage, singing about the Dark Knight, and Terry’s right behind him humming the songs. And Bruce just hates it. Seeing Bruce Wayne watching “Batman: The Musical” was pretty funny.
Do you actually drink from those collectible glasses you’ve been hoarding all these years? You might want to give that another thought.
The Associated Press conducted a test on glasses featuring Superman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Batman, and characters from The Wizard of Oz and they discovered these collectibles exceed federal limits for lead in children’s products by up to
1,000 times.
To break it down, the Feds limit lead content in children’s products to 0.03 percent. These glasses have a lead content between 16 percent and 30.2 percent. Not good.
These glasses were also high cadmium, which is considered even more dangerous than lead but there are no federal limits at this time.
Just in time for all the movie hype, Warners’ Green Lantern glass proved to be the most toxic of those superhero products, exceeding the federal maximum by 677 times.
A spokesperson from Warner Bros. told the AP “It is generally understood that the primary consumer for these products is an adult, usually a collector.” Amusingly, Warner’s own website features these classes
alongside school lunch boxes and children’s t-shirts.
On the other hand, if you’re a collector with no children and no intention to use these glasses to quench your thirst, you better buy them right quick.
Yep, on the road again. PhilCon lasts for three days, I’ll be there tonight and Saturday. Here’s my schedule:
Fri 7:00 PM in Plaza V (Five) (1 hour) UNSTOPPABLE FORCE SUPERHEROES (455)
[Panelists: Glenn Hauman (mod), Jonathan Maberry, Alexis Gilliland, Andre Lieven]
The Silver Age Superman could juggle planets. Sufficiently enraged, the Hulk has no upper strength limit. How can such invincible characters be given sufficient challenges and obstacles to make satisfying stories without de-powering them? Is this merely an enlarged version of the eternal ‘how can there be tension if we know the main character will survive’ quandary?
Fri 9:00 PM in Plaza IV (Four) (1 hour) WEIRD SCIENCE COMICS! (512)
[Panelists: Bill Spangler (mod), Stephanie Burke, Glenn Hauman, J. Andrew World]
The Influence of EC Comics on Science Fiction
Sat 11:00 AM in Plaza II (Two) (1 hour) OFF THE SCREEN: MOVIE/TV TIE-IN COMIC (424)
[Panelists: Keith R.A. DeCandido (mod), Glenn Hauman, Bill Spangler]
For years, TV shows and movies have had comic-book adaptations, and sometimes even long-running titles. These days, however, it’s been taken to a whole other level, with comics like “Buffy” and “Firefly” actually being written or overseen by the show’s creator. Can comics act as way to tell stories that can’t be told on the screen
Sat 1:00 PM in Plaza III (Three) (1 hour) BUT THAT’S NOT SCIENCE FICTION (462)
[Panelists: Michael J. Walsh (mod), Diane Weinstein, Carl Fink, Glenn Hauman, Barbara Barnett]
Certain types of non-Science Fiction works such as the Sherlock Holmes series, the Regency Romances of Georgette Heyer, much of Kipling and the Hornblower series are widely read by many science fiction fans and writers. Is there something these works have in common with science Fiction? If so, what is it?
Sat 2:00 PM in Plaza III (Three) (1 hour) MARVEL/DISNEY: A MATCH MADE IN HOLLYWOOD (419)
[Panelists: Andre Lieven (mod), Phil Kahn, Glenn Hauman, J. Andrew World]
Earlier this year, The Walt Disney Company purchased Marvel Comics and Marvel Studios. What is this going to mean for some of Marvel’s popular characters, like Spiderman, the Xmen, or Capt. America? What about films based on some of Marvel characters? And what effect, if any, will this have on DC Comics and it’s corporate parent, Time-Warner?
Sat 4:00 PM in Plaza III (Three) (1 hour) HOW REAL WORLD INVENTIONS HAVE INFLUENCED SCIENCE FICTION (513)
[Panelists: Glenn Hauman (mod), Tom Purdom, Andre Lieven, Bernie Mojzes, Linda Bushyager]
Science fiction has not always had a great track record of anticipating technological advances. Sometimes an invention has to show up in the real world before science fiction writers begin to write about it. Then what happens?
Sat 6:00 PM in Plaza I (One) (1 hour) NOT JUST CAPES: THE BEST IN NON-SUPERHERO COMICS (427)
[Panelists: Tony DiGerolamo (mod), Glenn Hauman, Jared Axelrod, James Chambers]
Not every comic book features spandex and superpowers. Some of them are about everyday people. Some are about… other things. But what are the best comics out there without superhero characters? Come and find out!
Sat 8:00 PM in Plaza VII (Seven) (1 hour) WHY THE THEME ANTHOLOGY? (517)
[Panelists: Eric Kotani (mod), Lawrence M. Schoen, Mike McPhail, Glenn Hauman, Danielle Ackley-McPhail]
Why do we see so many anthologies on pre-chosen subjects?
Adrienne Roy, whose colorful storytelling was a fixture throughout two decades of Batman and other best-selling DC comic books, lost a year-long battle with cancer on December 14th.
Dynamite Entertainment is offering up something new for readers of all genders come Valentine’s Day. Here’s the formal release:
With one magic word, Billy Batson turned from a 10-year old orphan into Captain Marvel. It was a form of wish fulfillment that beat [[[Superman]]] and may well explain why Fawcett’s comics were outselling DC Comics’ Man of Steel. Maybe it was CC Beck and company’s clean, slightly cartoony style. It was probably a combination of these factors, but for a time, comics featuring Captain Marvel and his extended family were outselling Superman in his own title or [[[Action Comics]]] and [[[World’s Finest Comics]]].
DC Entertainment’s All-Star Superman was one of the better things to be released by the company during the past decade. It was universally acclaimed and awarded, recently being collected in an Absolute edition. Now, Warner Premiere is tackling Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s 12-part saga as their next animated feature. Here’s the formal press release:
The popular voiceover actor took time last week to speak about his days as the new Caped Crusader in preparation for this week’s release of Batman Beyond: The Complete Series, a nine-disc limited edition DVD set that presents nearly 20 hours of animated action spread over 52 episodes, as well as including all-new bonus featurettes and a 24-page, 8”x 12” collectible booklet. 
