I have promised much, and delivered little. But I swear (sort of) that Monday will bring some good pix and fun facts on this here blog. In the meantime, here’s the best I can do.
Today on the site: Rob Clough reviews the latest Harvey Pekar book.
And if you haven’t already read Sean Rogers’ epic Walt Simonson interview, you should. On that note, IDW has just announced its next “Artist’s Edition”: Wally Wood. It’ll present the best of Wood’s EC stories at their original size, in full color. That’s good news, and those originals are truly spectacular. Which reminds me, if you haven’t already, head over to Heritage Auctions to get a gander at the stunning original art for one of my favorite Wood stories, the vicious, scathing and sad “My Word”, published in 1975. And on my final IDW tip, I greatly enjoyed Howard Chaykin’s review of Genius, Isolated: The Life and Art of Alex Toth over at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Chaykin draws a solid parallel to Phil Spector in his review:
To convey the irony and contradiction of the place that Alex Toth commands in popular culture in general and comics in particular, we might step away from the Orson Welles-Citizen Kane metaphor, and go instead to Phil Spector and the three-minute miracles of early rock ‘n’ roll that are his artistic and creative legacy. No one — at least no one I know — would ever mistake the lyrics of Spector’s best known material for anything but teenaged pap and drivel, while his orchestration, presentation, and arrangement of this junky doggerel never fails to elevate it to the level of unequivocal genius. I still get a goose pimpling shudder of delight at the first notes of the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” and The Crystals’s “Da Doo Ron Ron,” and it’s that same reflexive joy I experience at the sight of Alex Toth’s execution of the primitive, barely pulpy scripts that make up so huge a percentage of the work every cartoonist is asked to delineate.
The whole piece is worth reading, in the ever-worthwhile interest of reading one cartoonist on another.
And finally, I’d be remiss not to mention this, the latest from Frank Miller, now complete with an animated trailer. Should be interesting.
Miller never would have tried this if Jack Liebowitz was still around.
Something like Holy Terror along with The Incredibles, and The Watchmen are good examples of why I can’t figure out why movie studios pay big money for old heroes. It would seem all to simple to just stick a new name and redesigned costume (which the art director is going to do anyhow) on an old hero. Once that’s done you have a new bar of soap to sell to movie goers with your 100 million dollar advertising campaign.
Frank Miller draws comics?!?!
Wow. That looks truly wretched. And yet, it shames me to admit that I will probably read it anyway. . . .
Miller is good, still, but a bit of a one note creator. Sometimes he hits the right notes, sometimes he doesn’t. I’ll at least see if he succeeds on this one.
I honestly don’t remember the last time he hit the right notes for me. Certainly not All-Star Batman and Robin or the Dark Knight sequel. I couldn’t even get through 300. The commercieals were all I needed to see, for his Spirit movie. Maybe it was the last Sin City GN–Hell and Back–which was hardly great but at least had some interesting bits in it.
I wonder if Osama’s in it.
The Artist’s Editions are black and white.
Actually they are B&W art reproduced in colour. That means things like rubber cement stains show up as yellow. Blue pencil is visible, etc.
I know that, but “full color” in the case of comics, implies something else.
Well, the point is that the phrase “full color” suggests that they’ll be colored — and, of course, they won’t be.
As for the “Holy Terror” youtube clip, I thought it was a fun little preview. And though I haven’t even read most of his stuff for years now, I thought it at least looked like okay Late Miller work. “Wretched”? I thought it was fine.
No, actually, it’s “full color”. The artwork is reproduced as in life: a full spectrum of color. The art itself is not black and white — it contains cyan, magenta, and yellow. I’m not sure anymore what “full color” implies in one narrow part of comics. In my end of comics, it implies printing in CMYK, which this is.
You would think that given the “Artist’s Edition” context (price, format) it would be clear what these books present, and how they present it.
Looking at a couple of other mainstream oriented sites I notice a number of people bemoaning they really want these books, but in a size that will fit on their shelf, and in colour. Maybe Marvel and DC should consider calling their Archive and Masterworks books “Artist’s Editions” cutting the page count by two-thirds and charging $125 a pop for them,
Dan, if you find anyone else on the internet or in print using the exact phrase “full color” to describe any of these IDW Artist’s Editions and I’ll concede the point. Google away.
Dan, I see Fantagraphics will be publishing collections of EC material featuring the work of individual artists. This is great news.
Will the art be reproduced in B&W like the old Russ Cochran library volumes, or in full colour like the IDW Artist’s Editions?
Pat. They will be B&W.
Yes, I miss the edit function (very clunky above).
I have to admit that I agree that referring to artist’s editions reprinting the original black and white art in full-color process as “full color,” while technically entirely accurate, is also confusing. Since this is an increasingly popular format (did anyone else see that Woody Allen comic strip book, of all things, that used the technique?) perhaps we need to find a succinct way of describing this method of reproduction that we can agree on.
I’m always in favor of “technically entirely accurate.”
I’m always in favour of “not deceptive to the general consumer.”
Someone posted on another list that Fantagraphics is reprinting some Simon and Kirby romance comics. Are S & K getting even a token royalty out of this project? I mean, it’s public domain but even so the creators, or their estates, should make something even if it’s just a friendly gesture.