and Dead Tree Comics

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Büge
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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby Büge » Tue Sep 30, 2014 12:24 pm

Seems like every time DC does something good and progressive, they double down and produce stuff like this:

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Thad
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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby Thad » Tue Sep 30, 2014 5:44 pm

DC's backpedaling:

DC Comics is home to many of the greatest male and female Super Heroes in the world. All our fans are incredibly important to us, and we understand that the messages on certain t-shirts are offensive. We agree. Our company is committed to empowering boys and girls, men and women, through our characters and stories. Accordingly, we are taking a look at our licensing and product design process to ensure that all our consumer products reflect our core values and philosophy.


Via this piece from ComicsAlliance: Wifey Material: DC’s Sexist Superhero Shirts And How Licensing Works:

Janelle Asselin wrote:What I can tell you more specifically is how another multinational corporation specializing in protecting its characters behaves. From my time at Disney, I learned the company had very specific, clear processes for handling licensed products, including an online system for them to be submitted to the various approvers within the company. For instance: I worked on Marvel kids magazines that were made internally at Disney and then sold to licensees around the world. Not only did these magazines have to be approved by a person at Marvel before we could give them to our licensees, then the licensees had to submit any changes they made (whether it was a translation or inserting additional pages or adjusting content somehow) via Disney’s system for approval. At very least there was one person from Marvel and one person from Disney who needed to give the thumbs up.

When the Disney-produced and already Marvel-approved content was not changed at all, well, there were little to no approvals. New products created using existing, approved assets had to go through a more rigorous process. And of course new products created entirely by the licensee had to go through the most rigorous process with approvals at various steps along the way, not just for the final product. I once rejected a couple of Frozen magazine submissions where the licensee had changed the colors to options that were outside of the approved, official Frozen color scheme.

This might seem strict, but it’s important to understand that if the characters are used wrong or presented wrong, it comes back not to the licensee necessarily, but to the company that owns those characters. It’s for this reason that the fact that DC approved these tees, or trusted these licensees enough to let them create this content unsupervised, shines a bad light on DC as it makes moves to course correct and re-engage female fans.

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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby Thad » Fri Oct 10, 2014 5:23 pm


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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby MarsDragon » Fri Oct 10, 2014 5:54 pm

I do like the Dirk Gently novels, though even looking at the cover picture is making me go "but that's not how I pictured it!", as is always the problem with adaptions of novels.

Be interesting to see how it turns out.

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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby beatbandito » Fri Oct 10, 2014 6:25 pm

There could still be hope, but it super-duper worries me that they very clearly just tossed Dirk's character design aside and made him The Doctor.

I don't have my copy of either book on hand to check, but I specifically remember him being described as heavy-set.

Hell, that may not even be him on the cover. Though it would almost be weirder if it wasn't.
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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby Thad » Fri Oct 10, 2014 6:32 pm

beatbandito wrote:There could still be hope, but it super-duper worries me that they very clearly just tossed Dirk's character design aside and made him The Doctor.


He kind of already is, though. The first Dirk book is largely made up of repurposed material from Shada and City of Death.

beatbandito wrote:I don't have my copy of either book on hand to check, but I specifically remember him being described as heavy-set.


And Slavic, yeah. But this look bears a pretty close resemblance to Stephen Mangan, who played him on the TV series. Definitely a Doctor-style wardrobe, though.

We also don't know how close that is to how he'll look in the interiors, either. That cover is by Rob Guillory (of Chew), but the interior artist will be Tony Akins (of Fables).

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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby zaratustra » Thu Oct 23, 2014 8:45 am

Multiversity: The Just is a pretty good Grant Morrison comic.

If Cosmic Neighborhood Watch was Doom Patrol, this is basically a return to Bulleteer: the GenX/Millenial superhero as someone who assumes all problems have been solved (hard to say whether they have REALLY been solved as nobody looks very far from their own bellybuttons in the entire issue) and whose main enemy is boredom.

Yes, every one of these superheroes is a repellent self-oriented creature, but superheroes have -always- been that, and eliminating the few social issues they care about would just result on this. (Garth Ennis goes into the same thing with Kev or something.)

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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby Thad » Fri Oct 24, 2014 8:39 pm

It didn't remind me of Bulleteer so much as X-Statix. Or, more recently (probably too recently to have been an influence, and it's not like Morrison's interested in copying Millar anyway) Jupiter's Legacy. Maybe Brat Pack? I've never actually read it.

Of course, the difference between this and those is that Morrison actually gets to play in DC's sandbox, with its real A-list characters (or versions of them).

Just as importantly, it went back to the concept of legacies, which was central from the end of Crisis until the end of Flashpoint. (More or less. We'd already seen the slow reversion from legacy characters to...well, mostly EARLIER legacy characters with the Atom, the Flash, the Green Lantern, and, some years earlier, the Green Arrow, before Flashpoint. And say, speaking of the Atom, do you suppose Morrison wanted that caption to say "Ryan Choi" and DC made him change it to "Ray Palmer"? On the one hand, they seem to have let him do whatever he wanted everywhere else in the comic -- including using characters like Chris Kent who most decidely do not exist in the New 52 --; on the other, Ryan would have fit the theme a lot better.)

It may be the single most Morrison-y thing I have ever read. Characters in the comic talking about last month's comic, the upcoming cursed comic, comics published in other universes, viruses spread through comics. I've got a feeling it's only going to get more self-referential as it goes; I'm looking forward to the Question's inevitable conspiracy theory in the next issue.

And making Damian the focus of the story also raises another question -- between this and Morrison's OTHER future with Damian as Batman, which is really the more dystopian? The last time we saw Damian in a future, things had gone to hell -- pretty much literally, as is Morrison's wont -- but he had a purpose (and indeed in one version he even grew old and mentored Terry McGinnis -- though granted, in another version he died, IIRC). Here, the world's a lot shinier, but the heroes are a rudderless mess -- shallow at best, suffering from PTSD flashbacks like Kyle at worst.

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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby Thad » Thu Oct 30, 2014 12:54 pm

My LCS was initially shorted on its order of Q2: The Return of Quantum and Woody #1, so I just now got and read my copy.

It feels a little creaky, like Priest is settling back in. (Maybe a little bit of that from Bright, too, but I'd say the art's a lot more confident than the writing out the gate.) And it's also disjointed and decompressed -- but Quantum and Woody was always like that; that's kind of the point.

I'll grant that -- like the first issue of the Asmus/Fowler reboot -- the only part where I really laughed was a callback to the original series. But Priest doesn't really seem to be going for laughs on this one, at least not so far.

There's definitely a bit of Dark Knight Returns pastiche in there, for a nice bit of self-awareness. And there's a twist partway through that I didn't see coming.

On the whole, it hasn't quite brought the magic back just yet -- but I'm confident that it will. It's a slow burn. It always was.

Great to have the guys back.

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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby Mongrel » Thu Nov 06, 2014 12:08 am

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Büge
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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby Büge » Thu Nov 06, 2014 12:45 am

Please let this mean the 1992 X-Men will also be pulled into the present day and have to cope with a world that... isn't really that different from their own era.
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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby Mongrel » Thu Nov 06, 2014 1:01 am

I'm pretty sure I'd take 1992 over today, hands down.

EDIT: Oh hey, the Blue Jays would even be winning the World Series!

EDIT 2: Some background
Apparently, in Summer 2015, Marvel's big crossover event is all the old crossover events at the same time. Or...something.
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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby Thad » Thu Nov 06, 2014 12:27 pm

Mongrel wrote:I'm pretty sure I'd take 1992 over today, hands down.


I was there, and no. No I most certainly would not.

There's only one thing worse than '90's X-Men. And it's '90's Spider-Man.

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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby Mongrel » Thu Nov 06, 2014 12:38 pm

Thad wrote:
Mongrel wrote:I'm pretty sure I'd take 1992 over today, hands down.


I was there, and no. No I most certainly would not.

There's only one thing worse than '90's X-Men. And it's '90's Spider-Man.

I wasn't talking comics with that particular line.
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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby Mothra » Thu Nov 06, 2014 12:40 pm

Anyone remember the name of that short-lived by delightful Thor run, written by one of the guys who writes for the Muppets?

Wanted to check and see if he'd done anything decent since.

Also I looked up when the next volume of Rat Queens comes out and it's not going to be until fucking February.

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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby Thad » Thu Nov 06, 2014 1:37 pm

Mongrel wrote:
Thad wrote:
Mongrel wrote:I'm pretty sure I'd take 1992 over today, hands down.


I was there, and no. No I most certainly would not.

There's only one thing worse than '90's X-Men. And it's '90's Spider-Man.

I wasn't talking comics with that particular line.


I think it still holds.

(IS there an X-Men cartoon right now?)

Mothra wrote:Anyone remember the name of that short-lived by delightful Thor run, written by one of the guys who writes for the Muppets?

Wanted to check and see if he'd done anything decent since.


Langridge wrote and drew a delightful Lewis Carroll pastiche called Snarked!, wrote and occasionally drew a really fun run on Popeye, drew a Rocky and Bullwinkle comic written by Mark Evanier, and just released an adaptation of an unproduced Jim Henson special called The Musical Monsters of Turkey Hollow. I haven't read that last one yet but I can vouch that all the rest are really enjoyable.

His upcoming work includes Mandrake the Magician (as writer) and Abigail and the Snowman (writer and artist).

As for Chris Samnee, who was the artist on Thor: The Mighty Avenger, he's been drawing an award-winning Daredevil run and also did a solid Rocketeer mini (both written by Mark Waid).

As always, support your local comic shop if possible, but if you want to go with Amazon, those links are affiliate links and I get a small kickback.

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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby Mothra » Thu Nov 06, 2014 1:56 pm

Nah there's a small comic place within walking distance of my new apartment, so I've been going there for my trades. Finally picked up the next two issues of that City on the Edge of Forever comic series for my dad, this Christmas.

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Büge
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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby Büge » Thu Nov 06, 2014 9:08 pm

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Watterson's still got it.
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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby Thad » Sat Nov 15, 2014 2:43 pm

Thad wrote:My LCS was initially shorted on its order of Q2: The Return of Quantum and Woody #1, so I just now got and read my copy.

It feels a little creaky, like Priest is settling back in. (Maybe a little bit of that from Bright, too, but I'd say the art's a lot more confident than the writing out the gate.) And it's also disjointed and decompressed -- but Quantum and Woody was always like that; that's kind of the point.


The series starts to take shape with #2. #1 was mostly a series of plot twists and reveals; #2 has its share of those too but is a character piece more than anything. We find out Woody's motivations (and what he's been up to lately), and a taste of Eric's and the villain's, and we start to get some background on the younger heroes. Eric and Woody haven't really shared a scene together yet (outside of flashbacks), which is clearly deliberate.

There's also a pinup section at the back with covers of nonexistent Q&W comics from the last 15 years (like the gag they did after the first cancellation where they picked up with issue #32 as if they'd been publishing comics that whole time).

It's settling in and it's getting good. Priest has been blogging again recently and has hinted there might be some more comics work coming after this; I'd love to see it. And more from Bright too -- I know I tend to focus a lot on Priest when I talk Q&W, but Bright is really killing it too, from the action sequences to the more important, less exciting characters-talking-to-each-other stuff.

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Re: and Dead Tree Comics

Postby Thad » Thu Dec 04, 2014 12:27 pm

New Secret Six is out. I never read the original run but I like Simone so I gave this one a shot.

Good start. I mean, it's got the usual decompression that all modern Big Two comics suffer from; it takes the entire issue just to introduce the team, their powers, and the premise. (Say, how long did it take Kirby and Lee to tell the Fantastic Four's origin story? ...Five pages. Five. After an in media res opening.) But I like the tone, I like the characters, and I like the art. And hey, at least we get the complete team assembled in issue #1 (even if it looks like one of them may get killed off next month); when's the last time Justice League or Avengers got to the point that fast?

I liked it. It's a little early to see what all the fuss is about, but I think I'll stick around.

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