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[Büge]

May we have the highlight reel?

[Thad]

Go nuts.

Meanwhile: Finally caught up on the Walking Dead TV series, and it occurred to me to wonder: certainly Cerebus is the longest-running creator-owned comic in terms of number of issues...but what about other criteria?

What's the longest in number of years?  I'd guess Love and Rockets.

Second-longest in number of issues?  If I had to guess I'd say Savage Dragon or Usagi Yojimbo.  Both of which have been written and drawn by the creator for their entire run.

But past that things get murky.  How do you count Spawn, since McFarlane hasn't been writing or drawing it himself in years?

TMNT is an especially thorny one.  The Mirage volumes numbered, what, 62, 13, and 29 issues.  Plus the Tales series that ran for 7 and 50 issues or so.  Plus various one-offs.  But Eastman and Laird didn't write probably half of those or more.

And what about the Archie series?  The Image series?  Do those count?  Certainly the Bodycount mini should count since Eastman wrote it.  Archie and Image together would raise the count by another 100 issues or more (and put it past Savage Dragon and Usagi Yojimbo).

Does Futurama count?  I would say no -- it's owned by Groening and published by his company, but he doesn't write or draw the comic himself and never has.

Anyhow.  Walking Dead's getting close to 100.  I'd say it counts even though it switched artists a few issues in and neither artist owns any part of it.

An interesting subject, anyway.

[Büge]

Are... are you actually responding to those twits? Egad, Thad, I know you love a rousing debate, but that's like covering yourself in turkey gravy and diving into a den of tigers.

Except in this case, replace "tigers" with "fat asthmatic kids" and "turkey gravy" with "spiky riot gear."

[Thad]

...well, last time I tried to just paste my form post and it took like six posts.  Fucking character limit.

Also, they tricked me.  The first few commenters weren't morons.

[Thad]

...wow.  Wonder who linked it.  Because the comments section is now full of people ranting about how Disney are a bunch of cultists and Freemasons.

[Classic]

Man, who's not in a mystic fraternity or cult these days?

Anyway, it's not like Disney hasn't been earning this kind of ire and rage since forever. To say nothing of what they do to incur it recently.
Cross posting your own stuff at you.

Welp, HERE'S something completely fucking horrible: Marvel Demands $17,000 For Gary Friedrich’s Ghost Rider Prints

Recently, Marvel triumphed in court against Gary Friedrich, the creator of Ghost Rider, as to whether any moneys or rights were owed to him from the use of the characters in movies, with the second movie starring Nicolas Cage on its way.

And while the court decided that Marvel owe Gary nothing, they also decided on a counter claim from Marvel, that Gary Friedrich owes $17,000 for selling prints of the Ghost Rider character at conventions and the like.

This represents Gary’s earnings from selling such prints over several years – but now Gary is penniless. And Marvel are demanding payment now. Oh, and that he is not allowed to say he is the creator of Ghost Rider for financial gain, say by doing an interview, in the future.

Now, what the article doesn't mention, according to one of the commenters, is that Friedrich was selling unauthorized Ghost Rider prints -- which weren't even of his own art.  But even granting that he fucked up and they had every right to smack him down for that, this is wildly excessive and it's hard to see it as anything other than retaliation for his lawsuit.

I've never seen anything like this.  Marvel is not exactly known for treating its creators fairly, but I've never heard of them completely grinding somebody into the dirt like this before.  I've never even heard of ARCHIE being this vindictive.

The motivation is clear: it's a warning.  "Any more artists have any bright ideas?  This is what happens when you fuck with the Mouse."

The only reason I can think of not to resent Disney's brass is my creepy fetishizing of Lasseter.

[Thad]

...and now it's a bunch of guys all saying how Disney Corp is totally different from Walt Disney and how he would never have countenanced this, because Walt Disney totally respected creators' rights, yo.

It's just bizarre.  What site are they coming from?

It's dumber than last night, but it's not making me as angry, at least.  More like a traffic accident now, except the only person who's hurt is Noah Webster.

[Thad]

It's just bizarre.  What site are they coming from?

...oh.  I should have known.

[Thad]

DC Comics Survey Reports 'New 52' Readership 93% Male, Only 5% New Readers

Can we call it a failure yet?

[Büge]

DC Comics Survey Reports 'New 52' Readership 93% Male, Only 5% New Readers

Can we call it a failure yet?

So basically, My Little Pony has a more diverse audience than DC.

 

[Thad]

Travel Foreman's leaving Animal Man, which is a pity because he was wonderful on it and perfectly suited to the story Lemire's been telling.  That said, he explains that his mother died recently and drawing something this dark, twisted, and grotesque has begun to wear on him, and I can't fault him for that.

Don't know that I'll follow him to Birds of Prey, but I'll think about it.

[Büge]

WHY DOES THE NEW POWER GIRL LOOK LIKE OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN AND NOT A MUSCULAR CHRISTINA HENDRICKS? WHY IS SHE WEARING SUPREME'S COSTUME? WHYYYYY? WHYYYYYYYY? WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYY?

YTPMV - Robotnik demands an explanation

[Thad]

Eh.  Could be a lot worse.  I'm kinda with the commenters saying the Earth-2 costumes look a lot better than the Earth-1 ones.

Though the damn thing's still got piping all over it.

[Büge]

And now Tony Moore is suing Robert Kirkman. What's with all the lawsuits getting flung about these days?

[Thad]

Weeeeell, the reason there are a bunch of copyright termination transfer suits happening is because we're hitting the 56-year point on a bunch of different popular properties.

And the reason we're getting a lot of new suits over properties that have become successful as movies or TV shows (and, er, Ghost Rider) is that there are a whole lot more of those now than ever before.

The Gaiman/McFarlane litigation was pretty much entirely because Gaiman could afford to sue, expected to win, and wanted to set a legal precedent that other creators could follow.

[Thad]

Via Robot 6, Steve Niles has started a donation page for Gary Friedrich, and artists have begun selling original art to raise funds too.

EDIT: Evanier has a well-written, heartfelt rundown of the ills in the industry, how it hurts people, and how it just plain doesn't make good business sense ("Why spend a million bucks on lawyers to crush someone who’ll settle for a third of that?").  He's mainly speaking of Friedrich but there's a mention of the Avengers boycott at the top of the page; he doesn't specifically endorse it and adds that he can't speak much on the Kirby matter as he might be a witness in the appeal.

EDIT 2: Poplitiko talks to Bissette, Grell, and others about their feelings on it.  Bissette once again ponders how we could ever get out of this predatory mess, and the outlook's not good.

[Ted Belmont]

Paul Cornell is starting a campaign for gender parity on con panels.

[Thad]

So the new Wood/Cloonan Conan is pretty good, and as a bonus I get to use the phrase "Cloonan Conan".

It's a bit decompressed for my tastes, but I dig the approach.  Conan somewhere in his early twenties; he's not a neophyte but he's not a veteran either.  I really like Cloonan's model for him; people have pissed and moaned that he doesn't have the muscles they're used to from the Schwarzenegger movies or the art of guys like Vallejo, Frazetta, and Buscema.  But a lither, wirier Cimmerian works just fine, and is still distinctly recognizable as Conan.  (And anyone who was worried that a woman drawing Conan would result in fewer sexy, scantily-clad ladies can put their mind at ease.)

And a shoutout to Dave Stewart.  The colors popped out at me enough that I flipped back to the credits page to see who did them, and then I said, "Ah, of course."  Few colorists really stand out to me (I can identify Laura Allred without a second glance, even when she's not working in tandem with her husband); Stewart is one of the best.

And yes I'm mentioning the writer last, but yes he does a pretty great job too.  Wood's got the mood down, the "gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth".  The one false note that took me out of the story is when Conan refers to going to "the clink" -- it feels like a weird little anachronism.  (But it sounds like it'd be right at home in 1930's slang, so I won't rule out the possibility that the turn of phrase is Howard's, not Wood's.)  Other than that, it's solid; I love the characterization and get a great sense of who this Conan is in the first few pages -- and it just gets better from there.  I've been a Brian Wood fan for years and he hasn't disappointed; I never got around to reading Northlanders but this has me thinking maybe I should.

A very solid start -- even if the plot and pagecount are, like Conan himself, much leaner than in the 1970's Marvel era.

[Mongrel]

Is that the same ongoing Dark Horse Conan series or something new?

Conan was the ONLY serial book I was buying issue by issue when I lost my job a year and a half ago, so I stopped picking it up and even though I've been working again for over a year I have yet to resume buying any comics at all. I think I stopped somewhere when he was dying in the swamps of Stygia after losing his mercenary army.

I do plan on picking Conan up again in the trades. At some point.

[Büge]

DC Comics Survey Reports 'New 52' Readership 93% Male, Only 5% New Readers

Can we call it a failure yet?

It looks like the VP of sales is coming out of the dugout, folks!