(via) I’m a big old softee, and every now and then I’ll actually get choked up watching a commercial or music video. Here’s a perfect example. It’s a commercial created by Adam & Eve for the UK Retailer John Lewis, showing the life of a customer in a single minute.
It reminds me of the video for Elvis Costello’s Veronica for some reason. Maybe because both show a life from beginning to end, one linear and one nonlinear, or maybe it’s just because I watched that one drunken night a couple of weeks ago and it made me bawl like a baby.
The Vertigo blog Graphic Content has posted a series of questions & answers on a variety of topics with me and my partner in zombie crime, Mike Allred. Just so you know.
Saturday is Free Comic Book Day, and if you’re interested in getting any of your comics defaced by me, I can be easily found at Rogues Gallery in Round Rock, Texas.
Who else will be there? Well, just this lineup of heavy hitters:
*Paul Tobin (Writer: Marvel Adventures, including this year’s Iron Man: Supernova)
*Colleen Coover (Artist on numerous projects, including Marvel Adventures comics)
*Chris Roberson (Writer: Vertigo’s Cinderella: From Fabletown with Love and I, Zombie)
*Paul Benjamin (Writer: Monsters, Inc., Hit Point High & Marvel Adventures Hulk)
*Alan Porter (Writer: Boom! Studios’ Cars)
*Scott Kolins (Writer: Solomon Grundy, Artist: Solomon Grundy, Blackest Night Flash)
*Paul Maybury (Artist: Comic Book Tattoo, Aqua Leung, Popgun)
*Nick Derington (Artist: Popgun, Madman, Catwoman)
*Matt Sturges (Writer: House of Mystery, Jack of Fables)
*Bill Williams (Writer: Angel, Pantheon)
And if you want me to scribble on your piping fresh copies of iZombie #1 next week, I’ll be doing a signing at Austin Books on May 5th, about which more in a little while.
I’ve been rereading Grant Morrison’s recent DC work lately, for no reason other than the fact that I adore it, and I’ve gotten up to the Black Glove collection of his run on Batman, and in particular the “Club of Heroes” story illustrated by JH Williams III. Back when these issues were first coming out a few years ago, I raved a few times about how this was my Batman, the one that I preferred to the grim-and-gritty urban avenger we’d been getting for so many years. But in rereading them now, I realized that I never raved publically about how terrific the art was in these issues.
If you aren’t familiar with the Club of Heroes, it was a silver age concept originally introduced in Detective Comics #215 in a story entitled “The Batmen of All Nations.”
Published in 1955, in the story Batman got together with a bunch of heroes who were inspired by his example — each with an appropriate bit of localization — and formed “The Batmen of All Nations.”
Later the group was expanded to included Superman and renamed “The Club of Heroes.” (For more about the silver age appearances, and about the similarly-themed “Green Arrows of the World,” check out the rundown I did back in 2007.)
In any event, early in his run on Batman Grant Morrison revisited the concept, reuniting Batman with the former member of the Club of Heroes for a strange weekend.
But as fantastic as the script for the issue was, where the story really shined was in the art of JHW3. The genius of the approach was that each of the different “Batmen” were drawn in the style of a different comic artist. And the styles chosen for each immediately suggested a whole history for the character since we saw them last.
Morrison’s script included all sorts of references to the unseen adventures of the other heroes (including setting up Chekov’s Guns on the wall that wouldn’t be fired until the villains mentioned in those references turned up years later in the pages of Batman and later Batman and Robin). So it was easy to assume that the idea to present the heroes in different styles had been Morrison’s, as well. Not so. In a series of posts on Barbelith Underground a short while later, Williams revealed that the whole thing had been his idea. And more, he generously explained his thinking for the different styles he employed.
Most of the references I had caught, but I’ll confess that a few of them passed me by until Williams pointed them out.
cheif man of bats– sort of a steve rude influence. i wanted something clean and a little goofy retro in this idea and thats what came out first shot. rude’s stuff always has this sort of 50’s 60’s nostalgic feeling to me and i wanted that for this character. but he needed to feel like the feelings you get when you look at those old silver age comics. charming in ways but also a little silly.
raven red– a very loose influence of basic 70’s early 80’s superhro comics with an almost generic quality to the costume. cheesy amd redundent. been there done that sort of feeling when you look at him.
gaucho– chaykin. for that rough around the edges feel and machismo that all of his characters have. his outfit is definitely not based on traditional gaucho clothing. instead i went for the el mariachi desperado films look. again to enhance his macho attiude.
wingman– very loosely based on gibbons from watchmen era. i wanted the costume to look as if this character could’ve existed in the watchman reality. it fits well with his attitude and feelings of being original but not really. sort of an interesting comment since watchmen was a very groundbreaking and original concept but used characters that had existed in a different form previously. make sense?
musketeer– is influenced by mid to late 80’s superhero ideas. maybe a little bit alan davis in there too. hence the simple color techniques with smooth grads for a sense of rendering.
legionary– i wanted to convey the sort of humorous but cynical qualities of some of the comics of the early 90’s. with maybe a little hint of kelly jones exaggeration in the mix. particularly with his death scene.
knight and squire– mcguinness influence. just because i loved the way he handled them previously and i wanted them to sync up to that.
dark ranger– definitely sprouse. i think that influence came out of the early sketch because the character really needed to feel vastly updated and different from his past appearance. and so he needed to feel really modern.
batman and robin– no influence here just me.
How awesome is that? Can’t you just imagine all of those Chris Sprouse-drawn adventures of the Dark Ranger? Or the light-hearted Steve Rude adventures of Chief Man-of-Bats? Or the sexual antics of the Howard Chaykin-drawn Gaucho?
Or, as JHW3 put it:
the whole idea here was to convey characters that have had real history that we haven’t been privy to. they were seen a very long time ago and that was pretty much it really. and grant wrote them as if they’ve been having lives and adventures all along and i wanted to see if i could make them seem as if they had stepped out of their own comics and into this one. so i imagined what those comics might currently look like but none of us have seen or read them. comics from another world? these clubbers needed to have distinct character traits immediately understandable becasue of the way the story moves with them. so i thought it would be an intersting challenge to see what affect ’styles” would have on their personalities as i drew them. a nice experiment i think, which has produced interesting results. as i drew them i felt as if they were fully realized right away. they came alive.
Whole histories of the characters suggested simply by the choice of a particular artist’s style. Clever stuff.
Though it was solicited a while back, I haven’t really been able to talk before now about the other new comic project I’ve been working on. Entitled Dust To Dust, it is an original comic prequel to Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, fully-authorized by the PKD estate and published by the good people at Boom! Studios. Newsarama has posted an 8-page preview of the first issue, complete with variant covers. Check it out, won’t you?
UPDATED: And now Boom! Studios has posted their full press-release regarding the series, for a bit more detail.
Check out the latest print from the mighty, mighty Jason Chalker:
He explains it, thusly:
Here’s a pin-up I made of Yori from Tron. I guess I was in an 80’s zone last night. It definitely has that Patrick Nagel feel to it. The bit floating above her hand says “Yes!”.
If you like it, prints are available in my online store, The Manly Art Shop.
I will also have prints with me at the SciFi Expo in Richardson, TX this weekend. I have a table in the small press area. I’ll also have other swag available and will be taking commissions. I hope to see you there!
I’m working on two projects now that involve creating new stories featuring characters created by my personal literary heroes and biggest creative influences. One of them I won’t be able to talk about for a little while yet, but the other cat is out of the bag. The long-running Philip José Farmer fanzine, Farmerphile, is undergoing a metamorphosis into an annual series of anthologies, with the first scheduled to come out in June of this year. I’m one of the writers lucky enough to be invited to contribute a new story featuring one of PJF’s characters or concepts, and I asked and was given permission to use Greatheart Silver.
THE WORLDS OF PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER will be a series of books published annually for the foreseeable future. This year’s book will (most likely) contain:
A Foreword by Paul Malmont. An interview of Philip José Farmer from 1997 by Danny Adams.
Articles about Farmer by Randall Garrett, James Gunn, Laura Wilkes Carey, & Jack Mertes.
Farmer inspired fiction by David Bischoff, Chris Roberson, Rhys Hughes, Win Scott Eckert, Christopher Paul Carey, Edward Morris, Dennis E. Power, John Allen Small, Paul Spiteri, & Gabriel Weltstein.
And of course never-before-published material by Philip José Farmer himself! That’s right, the “Magic Filing Cabinet” continues to conjure up material by Phil for our reading pleasure.
And for you book collectors out there, THE WORLDS OF PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER will be a numbered limited edition trade paperback. The release date is June 26th, during Farmercon V. We will only be printing 50 to 100 copies more than are pre-ordered, so to be sure you get a copy of this book, send an email to mike @ pjfarmer.com and reserve your copy today. You don’t have to pay for the book when you pre-order and if you request, the book will be signed by those contributors who happen to be at FarmerCon V, which is also acting as a launch party for the book.
If you’re interested in getting a copy, I strongly recommend placing a preorder, as quantities will be limited. (I don’t actually know how one goes about preordering a copy yet, but I’ll be updating this post shortly with details. And of course it’s pointed out to me that the instructions for preordering are right there in that last paragraph. I blame public schools.)
The video for Butch Walker and the Black Widows’ “Synthesizers,” in which Matthew McConaughey reprises his role as David Wooderson from “Dazed and Confused.” I like it.
The backgrounds for Secret Saturdays are fantastic. Here’s Jay Stephens talking about the look they were going for:
I really wanted a lot of solid blacks and gritty texture to stay on the screen, which is fairly abnormal these days, and I sent the crew a bunch of old Roy Crane scans to emphasize the ‘spotted blacks’. I think we’ve achieved a really nice comic-booky, updated Jonny Quest vibe with these.
Some of Jay Stephens’s character designs for Secret Saturdays. One of the most appealing things about the show is the look of it. You can see the Alex Toth in its DNA, but Jay’s unique style is always apparent. (All images from Jay Stephens’s blog.)
In the end, Cartoon Network picked up the show, now called The Secret Saturdays (though for a while there was a bit of a kerfuffle where the network wanted to call the show The Secret Adventures of Zack Saturday, but thankfully saner heads prevailed). Here’s the text of the original press release:
“THE SECRET SATURDAYS: Jay Stephens has created a new comedy/action series, in which Doc, Drew and Zak Saturday are a family of world-saving adventure scientists called The Secret Saturdays. Living in a hidden base, they are part of a network of scientists who protect against all the hidden and terrifying things in this world. To The Saturdays, ordinary folktales aren’t just legends — they are real-life mysteries and adventures. Traveling from the hot Gobi Desert to the icy Marianas Trench, they explore ancient temples and bottomless caves and tangle with twisted villains like the masked madman V.V. Argost and his half-human/half-giant spider.”
The networks weren’t interested in the funny animal version of CRYPTIDS, but they did express an interest in a version of the idea featuring human characters. Here’s Jay Stephens describing the second version of the pitch.
Now, I love a good adventure cartoon as much as the next guy, and I told them I thought I might be able to rework the pitch. I immediately went for a kind of Hanna-Barbera action show look from the mid-‘60’s… like Mighty Mightor, Space Ghost, Galaxy Trio, and especially Jonny Quest and the Herculoids. I absolutely love the work of Doug Wildey and Alex Toth… great monster drawings! So I drew up a bunch of creature sketches, and reconceived the team as human adventurers. The basic story was the same… our stars were Cryptid-friendly heroes who, instead of solving mysteries like Scooby-Doo, wanted to keep them a secret.
