§ Nice Art: Danny Earls’ Iron Giant done in ink, wash and pastel Via Twitter
This guy is pretty good with the Piranesi stuff…and apparently he’s a former professional football (soccer) player? Wild!
§ Slop and hope are battling it out this week, and while slop is winning, we won’t go down without a fight.
§ The Bad New: Sora is here – AI video’s empty new world – this new AI app allows you to create video slop featuring you, your favorite copyrighted characters and anything else a twisted mind can imagine. We’re doomed.
OpenAI’s new Sora app gives us a fast-forward view of a future in which AI video, social media and the attention economy fuse into one giant mucky, murky, reality-corroding pool of virality.
Why it matters: Feeds, memes and slop are the building blocks of a new media world where verification vanishes, unreality dominates, everything blurs into everything else and nothing carries any informational or emotional weight.
§ Good news: while we await doom, the ShortBox Comics Fair 2025 is happening. Honestly I wish I could buy one of each but I would have no money for food left.
This year’s ShortBox Comics Fair is the biggest yet, with over 140 exhibitors featured. Each cartoonist is handpicked by the online festival’s organiser Zainab Akhtar. Expect to see variety of stories on offer, ranging from personal memoirs, imaginative fantasy, creepy horror, LGBTQIA+ narratives, unorthodox comedies, and heaps more.
Many Short Box debuts end up as printed Ignatz nominees later so jump on early!
§ For good news there’s also the MCM Comic Con Scholarship:
Breaking into the creative industries can be challenging, and for many emerging writers, illustrators, and storytellers, access remains one of the most significant barriers. That’s where the MCM Comic Con Scholarship steps in. Now in its second year, the initiative offers aspiring creators an immersive three-day experience at one of the UK’s biggest pop-culture events, complete with travel, accommodation, a £500 grant, and a curated programme of workshops, networking sessions, and mentoring.
§ The Hall of Fame Nominees for this year’s Harvey Awards have been announced and they are: John Byrne, Peter David, Patrick McDonnell, Wendy and Richard Pini, and Barbara Shermund. Quite the eclectic list!
§ Last time out we told you anime was taking over the world, but the Entertainment Strategy Guy tells you it ain’t necessarily so. You have to pay to read the whole thing but even the free part has some debunking. The main point: surveys that say how popular anime is don’t have comparative data.
So the question for Polygon and Dentsu and Parrot Analytics is…what is the comparison here? None of those data points are wrong, per se, but they all strike me as “datecdotes”, a piece of data without any context.
This also applies to Netflix. Netflix told us that half of their subscribers had watched anime. But over what time period? Does that mean regularly watch anime or just one-off programs? While half of Netflix customers have watched anime, how does that compare to kids animation? Or horror films? Or romance TV series? Since we don’t have context, the number sounds big, but we don’t actually know what it means.
Is it worth $15 a month to find out more? I’m thinking about it.
§ Every celebrity must eventually come to comics: Now Axl Rose is taking his turn. The famously reclusive frontman of Gun ‘n Roses will make a comic in which he appears as a half-human, half-robot character living in a dystopian future. Making it different from every other comic only in that is stars Axl Rose, the famously reclusive frontman of Gun ‘n Roses. Sumerian Comics’ Nathan Yocum did the writing with Frank Mazzoli on the arts. The title: Axl Rose: Appetite for Destruction
“Axl and I built a world where rebellion isn’t just attitude, it’s survival,” Yocum said. “It’s Axl like you’ve never seen him before, on the front lines of a battle for humanity’s future.”
I have never seen Axl like that before. I saw him hanging out on the Sunset Strip, and I saw him playing Madison Square Garden with a really weird GnR line up that included Buckethead standing on a piano playing the guitar solo from “November Rain.” I will remember that sight and sound until my dying day.
§ Trung Le Nguyen has a new graphic novel out, Angelica and the Bear Prince! Hooray for hope! He got the Publishers Weekly treatment:
I kept coming back to this story because I love the sense of adventure. I love that the heroine gets to make a mistake and then figure out how to rectify it, and I love that she gets to have a lot of agency. I feel like a lot of fairy tales are told in a way where you don’t get a lot of the internal psychology of the characters. They occupy certain rules and do certain things because that’s what they’re meant to do in the story. But “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” was one of the very first ones I read where I could relate to the characters and their choices, so I wanted to explore that in a new way.
§ Writing for the DC Blog, Rosie Knight looks at The Most Devastating Hair-Do(n’t)s in the DCU – can you guess which of the above is singled out for DON’T?
Let’s be real, even though Superman might be known for his boyish curl, it’s impossible to forget his infamous mullet. Guy Gardner is so well-known for his trademark bowl cut that it even made its way to the new live action DCU. And then there are the Teen Titans, or rather their villains—many of whom are in a class of their own. So, after digging through the archives of awful looks, we’re here to reminisce about some of the most questionable. Consider yourself warned.
§ Mike Dawson! There’s a cartoonist I haven’t heard from in a while. He’s still making comics but now he is making something much, much more important: He’s Kickstarting a purpose-built zine storage box:
Self published ‘zines and minicomics are the perfect way to tell idiosyncratic, personal stories, and this ‘Zine Storage Box is the perfect way to store, track, and even display them.
Built to hold a sizable stack of digest-sized (5.5×8.5in) ‘zines and minicomics, the box I designed to be customized and decorated, and keeping track of its contents is made easy.
I’ve often pondered the best way to stores zines and minis here; the vast array of sizes makes one solution difficult. I use plastic crafting boxed from Michael’s, but the idea of a handsome cardboard case on the shelves is appealing.
Dawson’s design may be a little busy for some, but who can resist the idea of a sensible cardboard box?
§ Cartoonist Mollie Ray has been named the first UK Young Comics Laureate. Broken Frontier has details.
Congratulations to Mollie Ray (you can call them Ray), one of our 2021 Broken Frontier Six to Watch creators who was announced as the first UK Young Comics Laureate over the weekend at the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. Ray is the creator behind the Broken Frontier Award-winning graphic novel Giant. A book of which we said when we reviewed it last year “This often overwhelming, ever tender, and undeniably inspiring graphic novel is a stunning tale of healing and love that marks the arrival of a major new talent on the wider comics scene.”
§ Back in the day, the late, great Jane Goodall and Gary “The Far Side” Larsen feuded, a headline sure to make any Gen-Xer look back. Actually, it was more like an over zealous Goodall staffer and Larsen, but anyway here’s the story.
§ The Frank Frazetta Estates’ lawsuit against Vanguard’s J. David Spurlock is quite the story, and Brigid Alverson has all the details, including alleged forgery and that time one of the Frazetta children tried to break into the Frazetta Museum with a backhoe.
Frazetta v. Spurlock is over. The lawsuit, which started with the heirs of Frank Frazetta suing writer and publisher J. David Spurlock over his use of two copyrighted images — and took a startling turn when the court stated that Spurlock had forged a document (an assertion he denies) — ended with a judgment in favor of the plaintiffs. On Aug. 29, U.S. District Court Judge William F. Jung ordered Spurlock to stop using the two images without authorization, destroy his remaining inventory of the book, and pay statutory damages of $20,000 as well as court costs and attorney’s fees.
§ A panel on Anime’s Global Growth, reported by Cartoon Brew.
But even as streaming brings films to wider audiences, it poses new hurdles. “Netflix is an excellent partner. No buts. Absolutely an excellent partner,” Wexler said of his studio’s exclusive streaming partner since January 2024. “But they don’t promote my brand. How am I going to grow the Studio Ponoc brand? They have no incentive to, and I don’t expect them to.”
Shuzo John Shiota, president of Polygon Pictures, struck a similarly pragmatic tone. His Tokyo-based CG studio has worked with Marvel, Star Wars, and Netflix, but he emphasized survival in a volatile market. “The industry in America has been terrible, terrible, terrible in the past three years,” he said bluntly. “Many studios have actually crashed.” Polygon endured thanks to steady Japanese projects, even if budgets were lower.
Shiota also highlighted experiments in interactivity, citing Hypnosis Mic, a rap-battle anime film where audiences vote via app to determine outcomes. “There’s been talk about interactive storytelling, it never really actually works. But this works because it’s not interactive storytelling, it’s more interacting with the storyline to promote your team,” he said.
§ More on the manga exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco:
Walking through the exhibit with Coolidge Rousmaniere, she stops to point out an exquisite jawline that precisely captures a character’s air of disappointment.
“You start to see the incredible quality and skill of these artists in the drawing, and the fluidity of the line and the beauty of each work and the compositions,” she said.
It’s an oddly satisfying feeling to see these raw, finished panels freed from storage cabinet bondage. The drawings and a few preliminary sketches were only meant to be seen by the publishers. Now they’re up on the de Young walls revealing the cycle from inception to finished product for the public to enjoy.
§ Author Samira Ahmed in conversation with Alan Moore! Transcribed by ALAN MOORE WORLD
Samira Ahmed: You know reading the prose of this book from the very first paragraph it feels like you’re revelling in painting vivid pictures in words. Is it liberating not writing for comics or did comics liberate you to write this freely?
AM: I think that comics probably certainly affected my writing. Certainly in my later books, in books like Jerusalem, I was very aware that I am known mostly as a comics writer – which is something which I am probably not that happy about and which I’m trying to rectify – but I was aware that I might be seen as a comics writer who suddenly hadn’t got an artist.
So I think that I wanted to compensate to make the pictures inside the reader’s head and I’ve come to realise recently that probably the major influence upon all of my prose work would probably be Mervyn Peake.
That explains a lot!
§ SKTCHD is always worth checking out. Several recent pieces caught my eye, including an interview with our own Zack Quaintance:
Zack: Almost all of it. It all kind of starts like that, joking around with my wife or friends about, “You know what would be ridiculous? This.” And then I start thinking about it and it becomes less ridiculous as I build pieces into it. But it takes me a long time to write these scripts. I’m a slow writer and it takes me time to develop these ideas. I need a spark to the initial idea that I can go back to over and over again so I can remember what I was excited about initially.
That’s why these like joke ideas stick with me. Turning what starts as a joke idea into something serious is how I tend to work on my comics more than if I set out to do something serious. I get a little bored with it, and I don’t have that initial joy to it that some of these ideas have.
§ And a look at why Hoopla is the Best Digital Comics App. This library app is indeed popular, but it isn’t available in NYC libraries so I can’t test it myself!
My long-standing theory is that more people would read comics if three things were true. None of those are “people actually being interested in them.” I don’t think it’s a lack of interest that restricts people from reading comics at all. But I would argue that hoopla resolves all three of these major restricting factors, at least to some degree.
We’ll start with the obvious one I’ve already highlighted in the section head before moving onto the other two. The average person is perpetually having to make decisions based on their finances. Every purchase or acquisition comes with opportunity cost. If you buy this, you can’t buy that. That kind of thing. That’s why hoopla’s price point is so appealing. Do you know how much it costs to read a comic on the app?
Nothing.
§ In the gala return of Kibbles ‘n’ Bits I made a passing reference to the death of the inetrent beginning when Google killed Google Readers. I mentioned I’m not the only person who feels that way, and here’s a piece from The Ringer in 2021 by Katie Baker that has more: The Day the Good Internet Died.
That I continue to dwell on this so many years later makes me a total cliché, an online version of the person who insists that all the best music, greatest sports dynasties, and funniest episodes of Saturday Night Live were the ones that just so happened to come out or take place when they were in high school. “You Don’t Miss Google Reader,” wrote Tom Fish on his Substack last fall, after reports that the hip email-newsletter service was going to test out a centralized feed-style hub drew numerous nostalgic comparisons to the late website, “You Miss College.” Buddy, I had already graduated, thankyouverymuch!
He does make a good point, though, one that dovetails with an email to me from Brett Keller, that once-upon-a-time grad student who started the Save Google Reader petition. The end of Google Reader “looks more like a symptom than a cause of the decline,” Keller says. “There was definitely this slow shift away from blogging on open platforms and linking back and forth.” Services like Digg Reader were hastily fast-tracked in the post–Google Reader vacuum, and other RSS programs had existed for years. But they didn’t achieve the same sort of mainstream attention, in part because a great deal of the content that they were designed to handle best had already started to change.
§ If you got this far, not too much in Diamond this week. Except the creditors have finally objected to one of the payments to the lawyers, not in principle, but on the timing, because paying all these lawyers and bankers out first means there will be no money left for the creditors, as what is left of Diamond is very, very insolvent.
There exists a substantial risk of administrative insolvency in the Debtors’ cases. No payment to an administrative claimant should be made on a final basis to the potential detriment of other administrative claimants simply due to the timing of approval. The final award should not be immediately payable at this time or without adequate protections in place to ensure a ratable distribution among all similarly situated administrative claimants in the event of administrative insolvency.
§ The final digital issue of Diamond Previews dropped this week. The cover is rather fitting.
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