Alan Moore Wants to Build a Statue of Harvey Pekar in Cleveland (Video)
Photo: Davidkphoto (CC)
Seems like a good cause to me. If you’d like watch the full two-and-a-half hour chat and/or read about the highlights, check out Bleeding Cool:
A few months back Joyce Brabner, the widow of comics legend Harvey Pekar, started a Kickstarter Campaign in the hopes of raising enough money to help fund a Harvey Pekar Library Statue in Cleveland.
Towards the latter half of the campaign it was made known that one of the incentives would be “A Cup of Tea and a Long Winter’s Chat With Comics Giant Alan Moore,” in which Moore would, for the first time, host a live video conference in which he would answer “impertinent questions” …
… Moore was the epitome of congeniality, proving himself gracious, rational and quite funny while speaking to all those present — even in the face of some potentially ire-raising issues (such as BEFORE WATCHMEN or the constant jabs made at him by…
Do Not Mess With (Lego) Captain America (Video)
Man, what is the “real” (Captain) America like?
From Club Zero-G To A.D.D.
I wrote my first comic, Club Zero-G, as a monthly insert to the rave culture magazine BPM. When the magazine couldn’t afford to continue the series, disinformation came to my rescue, giving me the pages I needed to tell the whole story in a single volume graphic novel, drawn by Steph Dumais. The story was about kids who shared the same dreamspace at night – a giant rave that none of them remember the next day in waking consciousness, except one boy.
That was more than a decade ago, but on the release of my latest graphic novel, A.D.D., I’m coming to realize that I am telling a similar story – this time about a gamer who sees things in the games that others don’t. He’s part of a group of kids raised from birth, or maybe even earlier, to test various forms of media. If they develop special abilities like our hero’s, it is labeled as resistance and steps are taken to neutralize it.
A.D.D. stands for Adolescent Demo Division, but it’s also an obvious reference to the sensory disorder plaguing so many kids today. And while it’s still considered controversial or even dangerous to suggest, I’m hoping we start to consider the role that our “attention economy” may have in the massive increase of diagnoses.
In this short scene, we get a glimpse of our hero, Lionel, and his love…
The New Watchmen Comics
Whose side do you take with respect to the new Before Watchmen prequels: Alan Moore (against) or Dave Gibbons (for)? From Wired:
Everything old at DC Comics is new again, again. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ canonical miniseries about superheroes and power — and their horrific abuses — is being predictably rebooted as a prequel franchise.
Just don’t call it a reboot, said Before Watchmen series editor and Wolverine and Swamp Thing co-creator Len Wein, who also served as Moore and Gibbons’ original Watchmen editor in the 1980s.
“To me, a reboot is what DC is essentially doing with the New 52, which is changing costumes, origins, relationships, essentially looking at old characters through new eyes,” Wein said in an e-mail to Wired. “What we’re doing is filling in a lot of the blank spaces in a story that has already, to some degree, been told. There were still a lot of gaps in the histories of Watchmen‘s…
Marvel Comics Lawyers Argue That Mutants Are Not Human
Bullpen Bulletin! A “real world” conflict based on the bottom line has infringed on the civil liberties of our uncanny “fictional” heroes, who have lately made a ton of dough for their corporate creator. Grant Morrison has tread this ground in Animal Man to explore the dynamic between the creator and the creation, but sans the grand mega-corporate, economic drama. (Probably need to see Seaguy for that: I wonder if Mickey Eye is behind the actions of Marvel’s Law Defense Team!)
The folks at io9.com do a great job of explaining how the map is not the territory in this collision of “realities.” As Meredith Woerner explains (and check out the Radiolab Podcast):
Mark this up as one more blow to human-mutant equality. Marvel lawyers are putting up a fight to prove the mutants aren’t the same as humans after all. Unleash the Sentinels!
This strange piece of news comes via the Radiolab Podcast, which uncovered a weird saga of…
Life Would Suck If SOPA Passes
Comic creator David Rees, known for Get Your War On, has put forth Get Your Censor On, an attempt to convey what life may be like under the much-feared Stop Online Piracy Act. If we don’t band together to work to prevent SOPA from coming to fruition in Congress, you could find yourself having conversations such as these in the near future:
The Gospel Of Supply Side Jesus
Just in time for the holidays, Al Franken’s animated comic tells the biblical story of Supply Side Jesus — basically, a version of Christ the savior updated to be more palatable for the devout conservative Christians of today. Witness the tale of his radical free-market teachings:
The Beginning of the American Fall
By Stephanie McMillian via Cartoon Movement:
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86-Year-Old Veteran Chronicles His Life in Rage Comic
Not something you would expect from an 86-year-old. Andy Khouri writes on Comics Alliance:
“Rage comics” are a memetic phenomenon by which crude digital drawings of different facial expressions and physical gestures are remixed infinitely by countless individuals to convey the elation, despair, love and hatred of the Internet hive mind. We usually talk about these comics in ironically grandiose terms (like when a rage comic face appeared in a man’s testicular sonogram) but the truth is that many of them are genuinely hilarious reads (like the Rage Comics All Stars’ “performance” of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”), and some are even quite touching.
Because rage comics typically express primal responses to utterly mundane but often “scene”-specific experiences, it would seem unlikely that an 86-year-old man would be the author of what many Reddit users are calling the greatest rage comic ever made. Published earlier this week on the man’s birthday, the comic details…
How The Family Circus Confronted the Web
Tuesday cartoonist Bil Keane died at the age of 89 — and one webmaster fondly remembers how Keane gracefully confronted unauthorized parodies on the internet.
Keane was a good sport about fake Amazon reviews that gushed about supposedly hidden literary themes in collections of his newspaper comic strips, and he once even drew his own characters into a “guest appearance” in a Zippy the Pinhead strip. But in 1999, Keane’s syndicate threatened legal action against the “Dysfunctional Family Circus” site, which had been re-captioning Keane’s cartoons for over four years.
Heading off a “free speech” showdown, Keane resolved the situation with a friendly phone call to the webmaster, who ultimately decided to voluntarily remove the images just because “He’s actually a nice guy.”
The Radical 1930s Cartoons Of Syd Hoff
Cartooning legend Syd Hoff wrote comics for the New Yorker for 44 years and illustrated dozens of children’s books. However, under the alias A. Redfield, he also created work with a harder-hitting tone for the Daily Worker and New Masses. Via Phil Nel, a collection of Hoff’s political cartoons, which remain as poignant and relevant as ever, in light of the world we live in today:
Superman’s Biggest Fan Has Plastic Surgery To Resemble Superhero
When you already have the comics, the costumes, the movies and other paraphernalia, what’s left? Your body of course… the RealSelf blog has the details:
A man in the Philippines has had multiple cosmetic surgeries in order to look like Superman.
Reporter Marie Lozano of Bandila news Tweeted this picture earlier as a teaser to her upcoming story:
With the translating help of Maureen F. from our doctor advisory team, we’ve been able to suss out some of the details of this story. We’ll continue to update as we understand more.
According to the report, Superman wannabe Herbert Chavez, 35, has been going under the knife since 1995 to achieve his heroic appearance. So far…
Rick Veitch’s ‘The Big Lie’ 9/11 Truth Comic (Interview)
As we approach the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, there still exists an almost complete blackout in mainstream media of the voluminous forensic evidence that demands an immediate and independent new investigation of that fateful day.
Enter The Big Lie a new comic book dealing with the September 11th attacks from the vantage point of a time traveller who has returned on 9/11 to try to warn her husband and avert the catastrophe. We here at We Are Change Atlanta were fortunate enough to be granted an interview with one of the creators, Rick Veitch, who partnering with other concerned artivists at Truth Be Told Comics promise to continue to ask the big questions and tackle more of the ‘The Big Lies’ of our time with their graphic novels.
We Are Change Atlanta (WACA): First of all I would like to say having read The Big Lie that you have done…
Grant Morrison Sings a Song Given to Him by John Lennon in a Magick Ritual [Video]
Thanks to Comics Alliance for this magick moment from Grant Morrison:
Just what the headline says, people. Grant Morrison performed this song during a recent event at Meltdown Comics in Los Angeles, thanks to the urging of My Chemical Romance frontman (and Umbrella Academy writer) Gerard Way. As Way explained, Morrison was given this song by the spirit of John Lennon, which Morrison communed with in a magic ritual while writing The Invisibles…
Can A Man Still Fly? Happy Fourth of July (Video)
Superhero movies, should still be this good, for the world. And I am saying this against that craptastic Green Lantern movie produced. What the fuck happened … ?
Image Comics’ ‘The Big Lie’ Asks Some Big Questions
Brian Truitt writes in USA Today:
It has been nearly 10 years since 9/11, and the tragedy is still on the minds of many Americans. One of those, writer and artist Rick Veitch, is convinced we haven’t been told the complete truth about it.
The questions surrounding that fateful day power the themes and story of his new Image Comics series The Big Lie, which debuts Sept. 7 and reteams Veitch with fellow artist Gary Erskine.
Veitch structured the story similarly to the 1963 Twilight Zone episode “No Time Like the Past,” in which a man uses a time machine to try to “fix” three events: warning a Hiroshima policeman about the atomic bomb, assassinating Hitler before World War II and stopping the sinking of the Lusitania.
In The Big Lie, the heroine is a woman named Sandra, who lost her husband, Carl, during the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City.…
Student Creates LEGO Helmet So You Can Listen To Comics
Kirstin Butler writes on i09:
A student in product design at the University of Dundee in Scotland, Robson created the toy with his own memories as inspiration. He said:
When I was young I played with LEGO a lot and all I used to read was the comic stories in LEGO Club magazines, I’d like to give something back to them as they helped me learn to read… I’ve been looking at what I enjoyed in my childhood to apply to new ideas and solutions of today.
By inserting the LEGO-brick USB into a slot in the helmet, the lucky kid wearing it can follow along with the comics, games, and puzzles in the subscription-only magazine.
Our only question is, when can we order the adult-size version?
