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French illustrator Stephanie Hans has been painting some of the most striking covers of late for Marvel’s version of Neil Gaiman’s character Angela and other titles. Hans first started making a splash at Marvel with some of her Journey Into Mystery covers, that featured famed Thor/Avengers nemesis Loki. You can see the range that Hans has an artist with her interior line-work on the new Marvel Secret Wars crossover, 1602 Witch Hunter Angela. Hans’ strong painting skills and obvious appreciation of classic art is a welcome addition to today’s mainstream comics scene!

You can follow Stephanie Hans on her tumblr site here. There’s a nice painting process post on there, if you scroll down.

For more comics related art, you can follow me on my website comicstavern.com – Andy Yates

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§ Norm Breyfogle suffered a stroke on December 17th, but he’s making great progress, as shown in this video; his fundraiser to help with his rehab is still underway and NOW he’s the poster child for medical bill crowdfunding, with this profile in the New York Times. It’s great to see Norm recovering and we send him all our best.

§ The New York Times also covered the Angouleme comics fest complete with a slideshow. Of course, the focus was on Charlie Hebdo, but…as someone who has been following comics media for more than a decade that is still pretty amazing.

§ Everyone was puzzled and angry about the new FF trailer, so they had to watch it over and over again to make sure of what was puzzling and angering them. And then it became Fox’s’ most watched trailer ever. Who’s laughing now, sucker?

§ Cartoonist Robyn Chapman is now employed as assistant editor at First Second, which is win win win for everyone. Congrats, Robyn!

§ Yam Rooks Rina Ayuyang has a very detailed run down of her 2014, with show reports and more. [Link via The Tiny Report]

§ And Zainab Akhtar runs down the 20 most anticipated comics and graphic novels for 2015; after a look it’s going to be a very good year.

§ I put together another list of Spring 2015 GNS for PW, but it’s still behind the paywall. I’ll alert the troops when it’s out.

§ SF book shop Borderlands Books is closing in March and the main cause is that California has raised the minimum wage to $12.25 an hour. That will increase the payroll 39% and operating costs 19%. It’s very sad that paying workers the very modest sum of $12.25 an hour will cause an unworkable business model, especially since SF is the second most expensive city to live in in the US, it seems to be a downward spiral. I wonder if this will also affect Californian comics shops?

§ FanX was held over the weekend in Salt Lake City, and it went fine, especially with capping tickets at 50,000—previous shows has some crowding, which was avoided this time:

Halfway through its third and final day, Salt Lake Comic Con announced it had sold out its FanX event and was closing on-site ticket sales.

Unlike previous comic con events, which drew as many as 120,000 attendees, ticket sales were capped at 50,000, with attendance measuring just above that, according to preliminary reports.

“I think we kept it just about the right size,” co-founder Bryan Brandenburg said. ” FanX officials ironed out logistical concerns from previous events, including the second Salt Lake Comic Con that was held just four months ago in September.

Wristbands with RFID chips kept lines flowing in and out of the Salt Palace while the limited ticket numbers ensured the previously crowded convention floor was comfortable to navigate. “I think we’ve learned a few lessons from last time,” Brandenburg said. “I think we kept it just the right size, and our customer support lines were more quiet than they’ve ever been, which is great.”

§ Joe Illidge looks at the history of Storm.

A strong Black woman who survived through poverty and the loss of her parents as a child, discovered her extraordinary gifts and used them to help her people, travelled to America to help on a global scale, lost her powers, refused to become a victim and emerged as a woman strong enough to wrest leadership of the X-Men from a superpowered comrade, became the leader of a band of underground mutants by defeating the band’s leader in battle, returned home for self-exploration, regained her powers, and married King T’Challa, thereby becoming the Queen of Wakanda, one of the most technologically advanced nations on Marvel’s Earth.

§ Stolen Sharpie has a list of fine fest and small press-y things, but it is far from complete and missing a bunch of CAFs, but clip and save and pencil in. [Link via Panel Patter]

§ Zak Sally has not only released one of the most challenging comics of the last 12 months, but he’s joining Anders Nilsen in doing an end around on Amazon.

§ While I was checking that last bit, I also noticed that Zally has lost the URL LaMano21 which is the site for his publishing company, due to missing a renewal and a squatter moved in and now he’s in a fight to get it back. Which is a good reminder. FOR GOD’S SAKE SET YOUR DOMAINS TO AUTORENEW. Or at least make sure your GoDaddy* emails don’t go to spam. It’s very difficult to get a lapsed domain back and a little attention and it will never happen.

* Yes I know GoDaddy is comprised of sexist pigs but they also make renewing very easy.

§ Finally, this Funnybook Babylon link has been making the rounds, but it is a sobering reminder of just how awful the 90s really were for comics, when Wizard Magazine was considered the hottest cool thing in the biz and ran things like panels of women and explained how hot and sexy they were. I mean yes, people didn’t have internets so they had to find wank material anywhere they could, but this was the best selling item in comics shops for several years.

Why Does Wizard Think This is Sexy? They’ve never seen a real porno magazine before, so the idea of one appearing in a comic book is mysterious and wonderful. This is a tangent, but it always bothers me when people in comic books act like their world actually looks like a comic book. People have distinguishing characteristics besides costumes and colors; if you put different people in (most) superhero outfits, no one would mistake Thor/Iron Man/Captain America/Bruce Banner for Hawkeye just because Mark Ruffalo or Chris Hemsworth put on Jeremy Renner’s costume. I think everyone could tell that it was Zoe Saldana as Gamora even though her skin color was altered, so color-corrected She-Hulk nudie photos would look like nudie photos of She-Hulk with caucasian skin. I haven’t seen anyone go “it’s cool if you post my leaked naked phone pics, so long as you Photoshop my skin to be green, that way no one will know it’s me.”

Thank god we’ve come so far since then.

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It’s happening, hurrah! Marvel have today announced the news that Greg Pak and Victor Ibanez will be the creative team for a Storm ongoing series. Starting this July, the series will see the character take off around the world on a one-woman peacekeeping mission. She’ll be toppling corrupt governments, stopping natural disasters – it sounds like she’ll be literally the greatest hero on the planet.

The series is set around the idea that the character – who has never had an ongoing series before, can you believe it – will be going proactive. Whereas for Cyclops and Wolverine this meant forming murder-teams and messing everything up, Storm’s mission is to help the planet in every way she can. By reaching her fullest potential and helping mankind, she’ll provide herself as a sort of mutant icon for everybody to look up to. And, when your idol is a mutant, it becomes a lot harder to be, y’know, anti-mutant.

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Every time it rains, it rains…… pennies from heaven.

Don’t you know each cloud contains…. pennies from heaven.

You’ll find your fortune falling all over town.Make sure that your umbrella is upside down!

 

Hmmmm…..She doesn’t look like she’s singing the same song as I am! Oh well, it’s still my favorite song!

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I am jumping out of my chair excited to share my latest project and soon-to-be-published novel with you… *drum roll*

Sixteen-year-old Storm enjoys skateboarding, fixing broken electronics, and building things with his hands. They distract him from the tormented thoughts surrounding the circumstances of his mother’s death. But his problems can’t be avoided forever…

Since his mother’s death, tensions are high at home, the girl of Storm’s dreams is dating someone else, and an argument with his father lands him in the school counselors’ office.

Will Storm overcome his fears, let go of the feelings that have been haunting him, and reveal his long-held secrets? Can his dad ever forgive him? Will the girl of his dreams ever see him as more than a friend?

A true-to-life young adult novel teeming with mystery, romance and intrigue.

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Colored Pencil ACEO on Bristol Board
ALMI Art :: La Chat
Submission for "Rain"
View blog by Clicking Here.

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by Craig Moodie, author of Into the Trap

Had a hurricane threatened Fog Island, where Into the Trap is set, Eddie and his family would have taken the same kind of precautions that we did when Hurricane Irene was heading our way. The cove below the house where Eddie’s dad kept his boat was well protected, but in a hurricane, you have to look for the safest harbor possible. They might have taken Marie A into a snug inlet in the marsh in Saltworks Cove or even out to Malabar Island, where Eddie’s dad knew where the find a cove protected on all sides by high dunes.

We did the same with Finn, our little catboat. Last year when another hurricane was taking aim at us, my son and I sailed Finn into Squeteague Harbor up a switchback channel from where we moor Finn in Megansett Harbor. Tucked behind the open water is an inlet that narrows into a marsh and a small guzzle or trickle of water. Higher ground on Amrita Island protects it from southerly winds. On the other side lies a disused campground in a pine grove.

When Irene was going to hit, my brother-in-law and I sailed the boat to the same spot and set her even farther up toward the head of the cove—what we call the hurricane hole. By the time we got the anchors set in the deep black stinky marsh muck (oysters abounded on rocks buried in the slurpy bottom around us), the tide had dropped so much Finn sat only in a thin puddle. We took the sail off and removed all the gear from below the foredeck and left her sitting pretty.

Not long after, the rains began coursing down,

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Filed under: flying, giraffe, journeys

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Continuing my string of autumn-themed paintings, here is yet another:

This illustration is another private commission and installment in the "Little Lost Squirrels" story. Here they are mid-journey taking shelter from the storm. We carried a couple details from previous "Lost Squirrels" illustrations over into this illustration to hint at the continuity - the little green beetle has been observing the unfolding events through several paintings as has the watchful owl. I always think it's fun to find these kinds of extras details in artists' work - kind of like you're in on a little secret!

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Here's a warm up sketch I did in pen and ink and Photoshop on Sunday.

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After taking SLEWS of photos (too, too many. It made it hard to choose!), I picked this one, taken from my iPhone (hence it’s kinda blury) as a storm blew through the area. We were leaving Loblaws after picking up watermelons and cherries. These cyclists were trying to outrun the storm. I doubt they made it.

Uhm…So much for not elaborating on  the photo!

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Filed under: love

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I foolishly put off blogging on Wednesday because I was finishing a manuscript and all I could think about was said manuscript. Hopefully, I'll think of something to blog about by tomorrow, I hoped.

I think I hoped too hard. Tomorrow has come and with it, a majorly intense blog theme--high winds and tornadoes!

The sirens went off at 5 a.m. this morning just as we lost power. For the first time in our lives, we grabbed the kids and headed for the storm shelter we had dug under our garage floor about seven years ago. That is an almost unreal feeling, huddling together, listening to the winds howl just outside the garage door (which suddenly seemed very flimsy), feeling the kids shake, hearing the dog pant, and seeing nothing but pitch blackness.

Fortunately, we came out unscathed and the house is still standing, but in a direct line with our house, only a street away, three huge, 150 year old trees were ripped out of the ground and laid crosswise across the road and front lawns of our neighbors. They missed the houses, by inches, but still, they missed.

And these were, theoretically, only high winds. I have a feeling someone at the weather station missed a rotation, but who knows. I'm just glad we're all still standing.

I have experienced a tornado once before in my life--right behind my car as I was driving home. I wouldn't suggest trying this at home. I had just returned from Houston and had spent the better part of an hour in a holding pattern over Tulsa until the storm moved out. The landing was super bumpy, but okay. I hopped in my car to head home. Minutes from my house, the storm, which had abated, revved back up. Hail pummeled down. The sky was pitch black. And behind me I heard the sound of a jet engine. I have never been so scared in all of my life. I was right next to the river, where tornadoes like to strike in this area. I could barely see anything, the rain was falling so hard. By the time I got home, I was shaking. I think I know how Dorothy felt now.  

If you're looking for a little weather excitement, look no further. Oklahoma is the place to be. Me? I'd settle for calm and sunny right now. I've had about all the excitement I'd can handle for a while, but oh the story ideas!

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Career Evaluations and Study of the Market

I rarely post personal things, but good news is made to be shared. This story begins a couple years ago when I was looking at what I was writing and realized I’d like to also write something about nature. I started looking for picture book ideas on nature and looking a possible publishers. I found an innovative company, Sylvan Dell Publishing.

Sylvan Dell is innovative in several ways. They developed an online ebook reader and have a grant program to make their entire bilingual catalog available to a school for a year. It’s a great public relations and marketing idea, which puts their science and math literature books in front of kids across the U.S.

Besides great marketing to the education market, they also market well to trade, especially the gift and specialty bookstores of parks and museums. Last year, I went to Sanibel Island, Florida and the local bookstore there stocked many of their ocean/beach related books. There is a wilderness area on the island to preserve the mangrove islands and various wildlife and the bookstore at the park also carried SD books.

So, I wrote a story for them and the editor, Donna German liked it. Here’s another place they are innovative. Instead of acquiring books throughout the year, they hold manuscripts until near the end of the year. German does regular culling of mss every month or so, but winds up with about 50 manuscripts she likes. Then, the company goes through a rigorous decision process before acquiring the ten manuscripts which will comprise their next list. This process allows them to balance a year’s list in many ways. Realizing that this is a different way of deciding on manuscripts, SD accommodates the author’s needs: if your mss is being held for the annual acquisition meeting, you are still free to submit elsewhere. If you are interested in submitting, you MUST read their guidelines, as they are also unique. Expect a fast reply.

I decided that I liked their innovations in marketing to both education and trade markets, in both English and Spanish, in both hardcover and paperback. I submitted!

New Picture Book: Prairie Storms, August, 2011

My picture book, PRAIRIE STORMS, has been accepted by Sylvan Dell for a August, 2011 release. It is the story of how animals survive a year of storms on the prairie.

The illustrator will be Kathleen Rietz. I LOVE this picture, “Symphony in a Pond,” and can’t wait to see how this talented artist does the various storms and animals in the book.

Picture Book = Adventure

This picture book is already an adventure. My research on the prairies ranged far and wide, and mostly it was about those places in Kansas and farther north. But SD asked for an author’s photo, preferably something related to the topic of the book. That’s easy for someone writing about a dog. But the prairie ecosystem has dwindled so much that authentic prairie is hard to find.

Still, I took a look around and found an option. In Arkansas, the eastern alluv

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Check out how The Storm in the Barn fared in the Anita Silvey-judged 1st round of the Battle of the Kids' Books...

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Got another break in the storm so I thought I'd post now, while the Internet is up and the power is [hopefully] plentiful. I know I promised these on Monday but I got distracted by the storm, and lack of power. No lie, yesterday, after I pressed "post" we lost power again. But the generator always kicks in just fine. Only thing is, if I'm working on my mms. I have to save constantly or risk losing tons of revision with the surprise outages. Learned the hard way, as usual, work on my laptop now in storms. When did I learn the hard way? During Nano, of course.

Here are today's magic words:

calabash: [1590–1600]–noun
1. any of various gourds, esp. the bottle gourd, Lagenaria siceraria.
2. a tropical American tree, Crescentia cujete, of the bignonia family, bearing large, gourdlike fruit.
3. any of several other plants having gourdlike fruit.
4. the fruit of any of these plants.
5. the dried, hollowed-out shell of any of these fruits, used as a container or utensil.
6. a bottle, kettle, ladle, etc., made from such a shell.
7. a tobacco pipe with a large bowl made from a calabash and usually having a curved stem.
8. a gourd used as a rattle, drum, etc.

zither: [1840–50]–noun
a musical instrument, consisting of a flat sounding box with numerous strings stretched over it, that is placed on a horizontal surface and played with a plectrum and the fingertips.

palliate: [1540–50]–verb (used with object), -at⋅ed, -at⋅ing.
1. to relieve or lessen without curing; mitigate; alleviate.
2. to try to mitigate or conceal the gravity of (an offense) by excuses, apologies, etc.; extenuate.

So, this morning lightening awakens me. I remember only a handful of lightening and thunderstorms in the close-to 24 years I've lived in California, 23 in LA. I get up, wrap the afghan around me and watch the show. Never seen a thunderstorm over the Pacific before. Mostly the flashes are so bright, I can't see a reflection on the waves. Too much fog, I think. But then a finger of lightening dives from the sky into the water and I see the sea churning in the bright white light. The surf so loud its hard to tell the thunder from the pounding waves. I think of what it must be like to be caught in a thunderstorm out at sea, far away from land. It must be breathtaking, and terrifying. I wasn't sure if lightening strikes over water so close to land. But, it does. Joe joins me on the sofa and we sit and watch the show until it passes to the north. When Joe leaves, Oso's inconsolable. Crying and pacing and wanting to lay his muddy, wet body [Oso took off in the storm last night and we couldn't find him until Joe corralled him inside before work] next to mine in bed. He jumps into bed a couple times, but I get him to settle down on the floor on some towels beside me. He has a beautiful view of the outside, the slamming rain the lightening. I pet him and tell him how safe we are in our "den." He calms and falls asleep. We both do and manage to get a couple more hours of sleep before we start our day. Beautiful blue sky and a turquoise indigo sea. Waves still pounding. Next storm up this afternoon, evening.

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Hey, New Yorkers! I'll be at the great Books of Wonder on Sunday 10/11 from 1-3 pm.

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You recognize the pale gray pink before a storm; you know the storm's coming. Even so, when the storm came in this morning, I was unprepared for its volume—thunder like a jet just off the tarmac, hail the size of rock salt, rain in straight white nails driving down.

It is a storm in the wake of a week of losses. The grandson of my mother's best friend, just 24. An ebullient former colleague of my husband's, only 49. A friend's beloved father. The first two taken as suddenly as the storm that just knocked in. They were there, and then they were vanished. They were whole, and then they were gone. The third a man who, his daughter writes, "was my hero and my best friend."

We are silenced by storm. We are made to listen.

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The first time I looked at the etymology of the word hurricane was in August of 2005.

At that time I don’t think I had really begun to consult Urbandictionary.  I do now, because I think it’s a good vehicle to show how slang usages are evolving.

I just checked now and I see that definition two and three tie the word hurricane to drugs and alcohol.

To some degree this shows that slang is slang is slang because according to The Oxford English Dictionary about the time of Samuel Johnson, 250 years ago, the word hurricane referred to a rip roaring house party.

Of course both the new and the older uses of hurricane in this way are pulled from the “blowout” meaning associated with the main meaning of the word.

That’s what the first entry at Urbandictionary refers to “A temporary alliance formed between the ocean and the sky…”

I posted a podictionary episode about the word hurricane on August 28th, 2005 and listened to news reports over the days and weeks following August 29th when Katrina hit New Orleans.

I look back now at the Google trends data for the use of the word hurricane and see regular blips of search activity every August-September hurricane season.

I guess it’s a reflection of human nature that the highest peak of hurricane searches was around the period of Hurricane Rita, the storm that came right after Katrina.

The word hurricane is a word that evolved from local languages in the Caribbean, was picked up by the Spanish before it made its way into English.

In other parts of the world such a storm is called a typhoon.

Neither the words typhoon, cyclone, or tornado have such a marked regular annual beat, or come anywhere close in frequency of use as hurricane on Google trends.

I suppose this reflects the dominant use of Google by Americans who care more about storms in their part of the world.

The word hurricane appeared in written English in 1555 and coincidentally the word tornado appeared only one year later.  For some decades these two words both applied to Caribbean storms, until hurricane came to dominate and tornado withdrew to a meaning of a more localized blowout by the early to mid 1600s.

The word cyclone was an invented word by a fellow named Henry Piddington in 1848.

Piddington took it upon himself to figure out what the heck was happening out there at sea when one of these big blowouts took place.  He became very respected and valuable in India and England because what he found out saved a bundle in shipping losses.

He named the storms cyclones and most etymologies give the Greek root of this as cyclos meaning “circle.” But he actually visualized the storms like a giant snake coiled up on itself and the appropriate Greek word for that was cycloma.

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Five days a week Charles Hodgson produces Podictionary – the podcast for word lovers, Thursday episodes here at OUPblog. He’s also the author of several books including his latest History of Wine Words - An Intoxicating Dictionary of Etymology from the Vineyard, Glass, and Bottle.

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