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[Thad]

Comments are fun for a change, too.

oh man the chinese finger trap MAKES IT

Obviously, the dog in the upper left must be Male. Jay-Z may have 99 problems, but a bitch ain't one.

You KNOW the best part of the actual comic would be Bob Haney writing Jay-Z's dialogue.

Bob Haney is famous, of course, for the phrase "Yes, the Batman digs this day."  It will probably come as a shock to no one that he went on to write for Thundercats.

[Thad]

Sonia Harris has a pretty good piece on why the Amazons-as-rapists-and-slavers thing doesn't work for Wonder Woman even if it IS consistent with their origins in Greek mythology.

I asked Tara about the current treatment of Wonder Woman, now that a version of the Amazon mythology is being incorporated into this current iteration of the comic book. I explained that while proponents of the rapist Amazon behavior have said it is true to the original mythos, detractors are disappointed by this rapey / slavey behavior from former feminist icons. As an anthropologist, Tara had another take on the subject. Apparently, back when stories of a race of Amazon warrior women was current, the idea that these warriors would be slavers or rapists wasn’t frowned upon because this was how all warriors behaved, it was part the job, i.e. “We won, we get to rape your women and sell your menfolk – wooohooo!” The reason the Amazon rapist / slavers was such a disturbing story at the time, wasn’t what they did, but that they were _women_ doing it to men, turning the tables on them, so to speak. The idea that warrior men could be raped and forced to experience the horrors they regularly inflicted on their female foes was the frightening part of the myth at that time. Therefore, if we follow this logic, the problem isn’t that we’re using the original mythology in the current stories, the problem is that we aren’t amending it to work with our current moral standards.

Interestingly, I think if you carry this argument to its logical conclusion, that's precisely what WMM was doing in the original Wonder Woman stories.

[Disposable Ninja]

Yeah, that's one of those things that throws a lot of people regarding the Amazons, that they were basically the ancient misogynist Greek version of the Planet of The Apes.

[Büge]

I believe that the myth was propagated after Greek armies clashed with the Scythians, who were proficient in bowmanship and allowed women to fight in war. They added the whole breast-cutting and male-baby-killing thing to make them seem scarier.

[Classic]

Warning: the wiki links may be not as safe-for-work as you might expect.

They also play a part in the seinen series Historie by Iwaaki.

It's a story about Alexander the Great being told by one of his senior hangers-on and it's nothing as batshit insane as Reign: the Conqueror.

The first couple of chapters shows the lead character having a chat with Aristotle and establishing the rough boundaries of human knowledge at the time.

[Thad]

Marvel would like to remind readers that no donkeys were punched in the making of this comic.

[Thad]

Welp, iZombie is canceled.  Was fun while it lasted.

Wow, and apparently it is not amicable:

    Having an afternoon cocktail to celebrate the end of my time at DC.

    Aside from the Fairest arc I already committed to doing, iZombie will be the last time I’ll ever write for DC.

[...]

    Sorry. In a better world, characters like the Legion would be owned by a more ethical company, but sadly not in this one.

    The short version is, I don’t agree with the way they treat other creators and their general business practices.

    I decided quite some time ago, but waited until after the cancellation of my book was announced to discuss it.

Good for him, and I look forward to reading whatever he comes up with next.

I can't bring myself to read the whole 14-pages-and-still-growing comments thread, but John Layman (writer of Chew) wrote some things on the first couple pages, so that's a thing.

[Thad]

Continuing with his current crusade, David Brothers OCR's the transcript of Frank Miller's 1994 speech on creators' rights.  (There's a fact-check at Funnybook Babylon; Miller stretches the truth a bit to make his point.)

It's probably the best-written thing by Frank Miller I have ever read.

[Thad]

Welp, Chris Roberson is fired.

Which at least makes a counterpoint to the people saying he cynically waited until after his series was cancelled to speak up.

Because really, if he were waiting until he didn't have any skin in the game, well, this couldn't have happened.

EDIT: Most of the comments aren't worth reading but there are a few good ones from Brian Wood -- notably, "My careers [sic] only gotten better since I stopped working for DC. Chris Roberson is DC's loss."

[Mongrel]

It's funny, but going from the Disney thread to here just really makes me feel like we're right on the cusp of something grand. All the pieces are in place for artists of all stripes to move away from the studio/label middleman distributor system and to go directly to the public.

The only thing missing was a way to collect cash for higher-budget projects, but Kickstarter and similar sites are getting closer to filling the gap there. Yes, to date the highest amount raised on such sites is just shy of 4 million, but costs are coming down all the time and with that much funding you can rope in more traditional investors because you've already demonstrated there's a proven demand.

And of course, movies are the highest-threshold for costs. Someone looking for support for a comic book or music album launch will have a much lower bar.

It's frustrating of course, because music fans have been awaiting the dismissal of the labels for a bit longer than comic or film fans and there's still very little movement here, but what I think will really do the trick is a truly world-famous artist really pushing to drop the middleman, walking the talk, and reaping a great critical and commercial success because of it. Young artists are still usually just dumb kids and the old saw about "The Label is not really your friend" is as old as music. They all still dream of "making it" in the sense of being signed/getting work published at Marvel/DC/being noticed by a film exec/etc.

The only thing that's really missing is that key "If [whoever] can do it, so can I!" moment to change the paradigm - once that happens, it's unstoppable, because "being recognized by the public" is always going to trump "being recognized by a suit" as a young artist's dream. But that is rapidly becoming inevitable, I think.

[Thad]

What I love about Kurt Busiek: he will drop into a comments section and repeatedly remind people that freelancers are not employees.

Chris still has his job. He’ll just be selling his work to other publishers.

Unemployed? Did DC become a monopoly when I wasn’t looking?

[Thad]

On the subject of a long-term departure from the Big Two: Well, we haven't seen anything like the Image Exodus of the 1990's.  Only two A-list creators have completely abandoned the Big Two in favor of creator-ownership: Robert Kirkman and Mark Millar.  Other than that, you've got some midlisters like Roberson (and Wood, though he acknowledges in that thread that he didn't leave DC so much as they showed him the door).

Now, it DOES bear noting that most of the A-listers working at Marvel right now are also working on creator-owned stuff with other publishers.  Now, it could be they'll get the kind of wild success doing it that convinced Kirkman and Millar to jump ship -- but I wouldn't bet on it.  Bendis and Loeb have become big wheels in Marvel's TV division, and they're not likely to see anything like that kind of money outside of Marvel.  Hickman -- well, Manhattan Projects is all right but there's no way he's making more money from it than Fantastic Four.  And Waid -- well, he's playing up his creator-owned stuff and his digital projects in a major way; he'll be the first to jump ship but I don't think it'll happen in 2012.

These guys are doing what Ellis has been doing for the past decade: playing in Marvel's sandbox, and using the money they make there to support their creator-owned stuff.

That and there's a bit of a loop at work here, a sort of progression: you start out doing creator-owned work; if you're successful, you get something at Vertigo.  From there you go to DC, and from there to Marvel.  And from there, you go back to creator-owned.

The Big Two aren't going to run out of guys who want to write or draw Batman or Spider-Man.  There's always going to be somebody waiting in the wings.  Once in awhile it'll be somebody pretty damn good.

I really do think we're on the verge of something of a creator-owned renaissance -- Dark Horse and Image are putting out their best books in 20 years, no lie.  And it's great news for people who want to wriggle out from under the Big Two -- from what I've heard, even Vertigo's "creator-owned" terms are actually pretty predatory.  And they're better than DC Proper, which in turn is better than Marvel.  (Which is better than Archie, which is pretty much pure evil, but is still better than Bluewater, which from what I've heard doesn't even pay its creators and instead hoodwinks them into thinking that churning out celebrity comics for Bluewater will get them exposure.)

But still, I think it's great news for everybody from Kate Beaton on up to Brian Bendis.  The future of comics IS wide open; I don't see DC and Marvel going anywhere or suffering any major brain drain, but more and more people in the industry are realizing they're not the only game in town.  And that's without getting into all the talented amateurs raising money on Kickstarter.

[Ted Belmont]

This Avengers review is basically a perfect encapsulation of "don't read the comments".

[Disposable Ninja]

Found this sketch on 4Chan:



Notice that it says "Part of her skin must always remain 'Earthed' for her powers to work. Hence bare feet".

I just want to point out that they created a character whose power actually necessitates having her bare skin exposed to the elements, and they have her wearing what appears to be a very thick leather bodysuit. Meanwhile, the woman who fell in a vat of acid runs around in short-shorts and a corset.

This is just something that's been bugging me about the DCNU: there seems to be a clear divide between sexualized and non-sexualized female characters, with an even number of characters on each side, but which side each character actually belongs to seems completely arbitrary. It's almost like they picked which women got skimpy outfits by throwing darts at a wall of names, character recognition be damned.

[Büge]

They couldn't have just gone with Atlee. Nope, gotta change it up because change is good. ESPECIALLY arbitrary changes. So instead of innocent, fun-loving fish out of water we get bland Toph-lite.

[Mongrel]

Deconstructing Batman: Odyssey

Now that is way too much text to read (on that subject anyway). Hell, it's probably too much text to even write on the subject.

But damned if those panels aren't drop-dead hilarious out of context. In fact, they're so good, I suspect they're still hilarious even in context.

[Shinra]

This reminds me of the Doom comic.

YOU'RE THE JOKER! THAT MUST MEAN YOU HAVE FUNNY GUTS!

HONK AND CLOWNCAR!

[Büge]

Neal Adams has gone plum loco in his old age. He even believes in the Expanding Earth "theory".

[Thad]

His CO series Blood is running in DHP and is pretty effin' crazy too.

He's still perfectly reasonable in most interviews I've read with him.  And still a big advocate for creators' rights.

[Ted Belmont]

Absolute best quote from that:

David: Reading this feels like waking up in a ballpit filled with every action figure of every Batman character ever made and then at the moment you open your eyes, they all start telling you their life stories.