Month: September 2006

Lynn Johnston opens up her studio to the public and shows how her award-winning strip, For Better or For Worse, gets made. Here’s the link, courtesy (again) of Blog@Newsarama.

No reviews tonight again, but I’ll catch up this weekend.

Amazing what you can learn on the intarwub these days…

Reviews should be back tonight; I’m nearly finished a few books, but I was wiped last night.

Found this on Neilalien: Alex Toth wrote a scathing, brutally honest critique of a Johnny Quest story Steve Rude had drawn. It’s a real piece of tough love. Toth points out every flaw in Rude’s story to try to inspire him to draw better. Take a look.

One thing that I’ve always loved about comics is that pros tend to want to help other pros (and fledgling pros) get better. Go to a convention, and you’ll see pro artists and editors poring over amateur portfolios, giving advice on how to improve to crack the comics market. Imagine Alfred Hitchcock reviewing student films and giving pointers, or Quentin Tarantino sitting at a convention offering to read scripts of up-and-coming screenwriters. Yet, at every comics convention, this sort of thing goes on all the time.

Scott Kurtz is best known for his work on the webcomic PvP, one of the longest running and most successful in the field. PvP started mostly as a strip focused on video games and gaming, but has evolved into a very entertaining situational comedy.

But before PvP (and this book), Kurtz was struggling to find himself as an artist. Engaged but working at a sign company schlepping Plexiglass around, Kurtz was at a crossroads. His friend and fellow cartoonist, Chris Jackson, offered him a deal- rent an apartment with him and create a comic book, with Kurtz as artist and Jackson as co-writer/editor/drill sergeant. Kurtz and Jackson took seven months and created Captain Amazing, and actually got to pitch the book to Larry Marder, then Executive Director of Image Comics. The book didn’t get picked up, but Kurtz stuck at cartooning, and eventually built PvP into a viable platform for his skills.

I’m left with two thoughts:

1. More young cartoonists should try this. Talent alone does not make a successful cartoonist. You need drive and discipline, the ability to force yourself to draw every day even when you don’t feel like it.

2. Why the hell didn’t Image pick this up back then?

This is rather entertaining stuff- most of the jokes work, the linework is smooth, the composition of the panels is strong, and the story is rather cute. Kurtz talks about how he’s a bit ashamed about this stuff, but there’s no need to be. Captain Amazing is a no-power superhero trying to stop a crime spree, win a loser-leave-town competition against his superpowered rival (Strapling Man), keep his kid sidekick out of trouble, and capture the heart of his crush, Rachel Ryan. Anyone who’s ever chuckled over a Silver Age DC comic will enjoy this story.

But even if the story stunk, this book shows how important determination is for a career in comics. Drawing’s easy; drawing day after day after day is hard. Kurtz became a success only after he learned how to put his pencil to paper every day. Here’s hoping this book inspires others to do the same.

Captain Amazing
Capes don’t guarantee success;
Just draw every day.

Buy this book at Amazon.com!

The champion of the comics blogosphere, Heidi McDonald, has posted breaking news about Harlan Ellison’s lawsuit against Fantagraphics. There’s a PDF of the complaint at Journalista here. From reading the PDF, Harlan is suing over two issues: published excerpts from Fanta’s upcoming company biography, Comics As Art: We Told You So, and the cover attribution on The Comics Journal Library 6: The Writers, where he is credited as “Famous Comics Dilettante”.

I wish I had time to convert the text in the PDF to something readable here. It’s probably the funniest legal complaint I’ve read. I’m not saying it’s without merit. It’s just hilarious writing.

Here’s what’s bothering me: did Fantagraphics really “gratuitously insult” Harlan by calling him a “Famous Comics Dilettante”? Merrian-Webster defines “dilettante” as either “an admirer or lover of the arts” or “a person having a superficial interest in an art or a branch of knowledge: dabbler”. They list “amateur” as a synonym.

Harlan’s certainly no amateur: comics.org credits him with 115 writing credits in comics. But of those credits, 26 of them are for one comic, Harlan Ellison’s Chocolate Alphabet. Another 42 are for Harlan’s Dark Horse Dream Corridor series, and there were only 7 issues of those. Many of the credits for that series really reflect that the comic adapts original stories from other media that Harlan created. In addition, there are a few reprint credits in there. Given how prolific Harlan’s been in other media such as television and prose, it’s no insult to call him a “dabbler” in comics. I’d be surprised if his comics work made up more than a few percentage points of his total output.

Harlan is the only writer not credited with a work in comics on the cover. But the other writers named (Chris Claremont, Gerry Conway, Steve Englehart, Steve Gerber, Archie Goodwin, Alan Moore, Denny O’Neil, Len Wein, and Marv Wolfman) have done substantially more work in comics than Ellison. At the time of the book’s publication in February of this year, Harlan was doing very little work in comics- to the best of my knowledge, he had worked on the Julius Schwartz DC Comics Presents tributes, and had been involved with iBooks reprinting his Vic and Blood work. For Ellison, this is the sort of work he’d do before brunch.

Again, I’m not saying the whole of Ellison’s suit is without merit; I’m not a lawyer, and I’m not as familiar with the Comics Journal/Michael Fleischer lawsuit as others are. But I do think Ellison taking insult over being called a “Famous Comics Dilettante” is a bit of nonsense.

Oh, Harlan. Lawsuit?
How much money can you get?
Fanta’s worth Peanuts.