French born illustrator Marguerite Sauvage has been invading the comics world of late and she is wowing fans this week with her stunning interior art for the all-new DC Comics Bombshells series! Sauvage is a self-taught artist who actually decided to pursue a career in illustration after earning her degree in Law and Communication. Just some of her clients include such big names as Elle, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, Louis Vuitton, L’Oréal, PlayStation, and Apple!
In addition to the interior art on Bombshells and Sensation Comics featuring Wonder Woman #3, Sauvage has been very busy as a comic book cover specialist for such titles as Hinterkind, Wolf Moon, Secret Wars, Howard the Duck, Jem and the Holograms, Thor, and Wayward.
With so much great comics work completed in such a small amount of time(1-2 years..?), I’m excited to see what Marguerite Sauvage has in store for us the next couple of years!
If you’d like to see more of Sauvage’s work and get the latest updates, you can follow her on twitter here.
For more comics related art, you can follow me on my website comicstavern.com – Andy Yates
By Matthew Jent
Marc Andreyko has written comics for DC, Marvel, IDW and Image for more than 10 years. He spoke to the Beat at the DC booth on the floor of San Diego Comic Con about writing DC’s Batwoman, what makes a superhero interesting, and the current state of comics and conventions.
Andreyko’s latest issue of Batwoman.
Do you think of Batwoman as an extension of Batman, or is she a distinct character?
She’s definitely more distinct from Batman than Robin, or Nightwing. She’s sort of — Batman adjacent? The mantle of Batwoman made sense for her, because the bat is a powerful symbol in Gotham. But she has no idea that Batman is her cousin Bruce Wayne. And when given the opportunity to find out who Batman was, she was like, “I don’t want to know who you are. The less I know about you, the better. Keep the mask on.”
Which is in itself a nice distinction between the two characters.
Oh, absolutely.
Batman would want to know who Batman was.
He calls her out. He calls her Kate when she’s in costume. But she doesn’t know who he is, and she’s grateful not to know.
In any individual issue of Batwoman, there’s a nice balance between superhero stuff, relationship stuff, and crime stuff.
There has to be. I look at it this way — Spider-Man isn’t interesting because he’s fighting Doctor Octopus. Spider-Man is interesting because he’s 16, he’s got the flu, he’s late for school, he had to stand up his date, his aunt is sick and they’re gonna get evicted. All the fight stuff is video game stuff. It’s who’s behind the mask that resonates. As a kid, I identified with Peter Parker. We project ourselves into them. It’s the people behind the masks that are interesting.
Who would be your comic book BFF? Who would you hang out with?
Oh! It depends on which universe. In the DC Universe? Maybe Zatanna.
What would you guys do together?
I think we’d just hang out and talk shit. She seems fun! I’d love to hang out with the Henry Cavil Superman, but that’s a whole other story…
What’s your collaborative process like with the artists you work with?
I come up with the plot and talk to my editor to make sure characters are available. Then I write the script, and I give it to the artist — I write in a loose enough style to encourage them to be the director of photography. I write panel by panel, but I’m not Alan Moore. I always tell the artist, feel free to change the panel layout, play with it, you have that freedom. I’ve been lucky enough to work with artists who like that freedom.
But I’ve also had the misfortune of working with artists who, if you didn’t write it, it isn’t there. I had an artist who, in an 8-page of a fight scene, there were no backgrounds. They did the backgrounds in the first scene, because I wrote them in the first scene, assuming they would think — that I wouldn’t have to write them every time.
Those things from the first pages should still exist.
I come from a background in theater, so I like collaboration. I like happy accidents. On I Manhunter, the character Copperhead was being led out of the courtroom and he’s in a Hannibal Lecter mask. Jesus Saiz drew him looking at the main character with his snake tongue forking out at them. And I’m like, “Jesus, I’m taking credit for that!” Those sorts of things are great.
But I also like being able to cut dialogue. If an artist visually tells what I’ve written, I don’t need that dialogue there. There are some comic books, I look at them and they have like 600 words on a page. That obscures the art, it’s just these vomited bits of text. You don’t need to do that.
What comics or artists are you enjoying right now?
I love Terry Moore’s Rachel Rising, and I try to pimp it out as much as I can. I don’t know Terry personally, I have no horse in this race, I just love the book. It’s such a good, smart, horror book. It’s if David Lynch was a little bit more accessible. It’s a really elegant book.
I love anything Chris Samnee does. I got to work with him on Captain America & Bucky, and the stuff he does on Daredevil is spectacular. Chris’s storytelling sensibilities are insane. And he’s fast. It’s like, can we clone you and have you draw everything? He’s amazing.
There’s so much good stuff out there. It’s like saying, what’s your favorite kind of air?
What about Comic Con, how’s your show going?
It’s good. It’s a little quieter this year, which is nice. It’s Friday, and I still have a speaking voice. It’s become a trade show in a lot of ways, but this year it feels more fan-centered, and it feels like there’s a lot less of the douchey business side.
There’s been such exponential growth the past few years, so maybe it’s gotten to the new normal.
This is empty for Friday. I mean, it’s still crowded, but it’s empty for Friday. I’ve done some smaller cons, and I really like them. I did Phoenix Con in June, and that was glorious. It was like 80,000 people, but it was a real fan event. A nice mix of gay, straight, old, young, physically challenged, new fans, old fans. It felt like a safe, fun place, and it was so well organized. San Diego has become something of a behemoth, and I’m hoping we’re on a downward trend. I’m hoping it levels out. We could do about 20,000 people less.
Maybe take some of the movie booths out?
Well, there aren’t that many this year! Because the movie people realized, just because you’re popular at Con, maybe that’s all your audience. Of course everyone likes SuckerPunch at Con. But they were the only 12 people that went to see the movie. So why would you spend $20 million on Scott Pilgrim? They spent a fortune on that movie and thought, coming out of Con, that it was gonna be Avatar. But unfortunately most of their audience saw it here for free.
The TV stuff makes sense. TV storytelling is very similar to comics. It’s serial storytelling. But the more Hollywood studios get out of here, the better. In a lot of ways, comic books and creators are the bastard stepchildren at this event, and these executives wouldn’t be able to have their private planes if we didn’t create the Batmans and the X-Mens and the Spider-Mans and the Hellboys.
What’s this experience like? Being interviewed here at the DC booth, sitting in a director’s chair, kind of roped off?
It’s fun. I have a degree in theater and used to act, so it scratches that itch. Once you reach a certain age, once you’re over 40? You don’t care. If you ask me a question, I will answer it. Which sometimes gets me in trouble.
Straight from the offices of Publishers Weekly, it’s More to Come! Your podcast source of comics news and discussion starring The Beat’s own Heidi MacDonald.
In this week’s episode, Heidi and the rest of the More to Come Crew – Calvin Reid and Kate Fitzsimons – discuss Batwoman, J. H. Williams III, W. Haden Blackman and DC’s editorial interference issues, the revived Penny Arcade “Dickwolves” controversy and ramifications for PAX, iFanboy stops operations, Mark Waid turns print comics retailer, Heidi MacDonald gives a talk about less known influential graphic novels at the Library of Congress and much more in this podcast from PW Comics World.
Now tune in Saturdays for our regularly scheduled podcast!
Catch up with our previous podcasts or subscribe to More To Come on iTunes
As the mainstream media continued to make hay over Batwoman’s banned wedding, DC’s co publisher Dan DiDio took to twitter last night to give his side of things. If you’ve ever been to a DiDio-led DC Nation panel you’ll recognize his brand of brisk confidence and moving on. Probably the most telling tweet—and the one the most people emailed to us— was this, which pretty much lays down the “appearance of change” mandate that so many licensed character work under.
So you know, shocking change, maiming, death, sidekicks turning evil…just nothing “real time” about characters progressing in their lives.
This may be a little hard to swallow—and the increasing use of “season” planning, the soap opera pacing and finite endings of most episodic TV and their comic book spin-offs like Buffy and X-files seems to support a more evolutionary approach to characters. Yet it is understandable that these ginormous franchise character—now so valuable to Warner Bros bottom line—would have a lot of scrutiny. Still, reading DiDio’s tweets, he did make it seem as if the one of a kind, unparalleled art of Williams—which has, let’s face it, been synonymous with Batwoman for her entire run—was completely interchangeable with some guy from Space Goat or some other busy art studio.
Of course, don’t cry for JH Williams. Like the lover man standing by with flowers and a reservation at Pre Se after his target has been ditched, Brian Bendis was there waiting:
WIlliams’ made it clear his work on the Sandman prequel wouldn’t be touched—presumably it’s already in the can and the book is far far far too important to DC to tinker with. Still, that was a bit of a bridge burner.
DiDio saved his biggest shocked for the end however.
When the news broke earlier that co-writers JH Williams II AND W. Haden Blackman (and not just Williams, as some sites reported) had quit Batwoman due to editorial interference, it was clearly going to be a big issue for the day. What’s been most worrying THOUGH is how quickly people have attempted to spin this into a story about homophobia — rather than a story which is more accurately about editorial edict.Both are obviously issues, but they have different ramifications. By focusing on an issue which is only tangentially related to the real issue, we’re doing Batwoman’s creative team and even DC Comics a major disservice. This isn’t an outright attack on homosexuality, but an attack on creator-control. It’s important that we focus on what’s actually going on here, rather than escalating a false claim about DC as a company.
In the joint letter posted to their websites this morning, the co-writers specifically noted that their reason for leaving the book was because of editorial differences. They included several examples of such differences, which meant several of their storylines had to be altered – their planned Killer Croc origin storyline which had been in the works for months, their current arc on the series…. and the wedding between Batwoman and her fiancee Maggie Sawyer.
This has been the part of the letter most people have brought attention to. Yet when asked immediately afterwards by Andy Khouri, Williams made it clear that DC were unhappy with the MARRIAGE part of the storyline, rather than the GAY part.
This has been reiterated by DC themselves – when I asked them for comment, they sent the following response:
As acknowledged by the creators involved, the editorial differences with the writers of BATWOMAN had nothing to do with the sexual orientation of the character.
While DC has been guilty of many things, an anti-gay agenda hasn’t been one of them in recent years. Batwoman has been one of their most critically acclaimed books (making the creative change even tougher to take) winning several GLAAD awards along the way. While the gay character Bunker in Teen Titans hasn’t been without problematic portrayals, he was also an attempt to integrate the DCU.
On Twitter, the issue was discussed by Williams, journalist Andy Khouri and out writer Jim McCann:
While potential homophobia is a legit issue to question, it doesn’t seem to be the case, and it has diverted attention from what the real problem here would be – that DC appear to have an editorial system which is strangling creators, and forcing them to leave. Andy Diggle, Gail Simone, Joshua Hale Fialkov, Rob Liefeld and more have spoken at their unhappiness with DC’s editorial team over the last year, with the majority of them quitting books because of the problems. It’s got to the point where one prominent DC writer actually DMs his friends to say that his script hasn’t been edited.
Dark Horse’s Scott Allie also took to Twitter for a series of much-recommended posts about the subject, which you can find here. He points out that an anti-marriage policy isn’t a bad policy for a company to have – the problem is when editors don’t implement policy clearly. As has been stated by the creators but subsequently overlooked by many, the issue here is that DC’s editors allowed the story to move forward, when they knew ultimately it wouldn’t be allowed to go anywhere. As noted in conversation with Gail Simone:
While it’s tempting to dump on DC for everything they do, it’s important to stick to the subject here, a problem which is real and tangible, rather than a problem being trumpeted by various well-meaning people. LGBT representation is an important issue – but it’s a tangential aspect of this storyline, rather than the main focus.
In a letter posted to his website today, JH Williams III has announced that he and co-writer W. Haden Blackman have quit Batwoman due to editorial interference. He cites being blocked from telling several stories he wanted to tell as being the reason for leaving – most crucially that DC told him that he would not be allowed to show Batwoman’s wedding to her girlfriend.
Their last issue will be issue #26.
Blackman also has the statement on his website. In the statement, they write:
Unfortunately, in recent months, DC has asked us to alter or completely discard many long-standing storylines in ways that we feel compromise the character and the series. We were told to ditch plans for Killer Croc’s origins; forced to drastically alter the original ending of our current arc, which would have defined Batwoman’s heroic future in bold new ways; and, most crushingly, prohibited from ever showing Kate and Maggie actually getting married.
All of these editorial decisions came at the last minute, and always after a year or more of planning and plotting on our end.
The claim about the gay wedding being shuttered is going to be a very controversial topic over the next few days, I would imagine. On twitter Williams has suggested DC were more worried about the word ‘wedding’ than about the word ‘gay’. The character has been openly gay since the start, and plans to wed her to her long-term partner Maggie Sawyer had been in place within the series for the last few months.
DC have had a fair-constant wave of creators leaving their titles over the last few years, many – like Rob Liefeld – citing editorial interference in their work. Batwoman was one of their more acclaimed series, however, and it’ll be interesting to see if DC continue the series onwards now neither of her original creative team are on the project, as Greg Rucka left DC for similar reasons just prior to the New 52 launching.
I asked if this will affect Williams’ imminent run on Sandman Overture for DC, and he offered this response:
You can follow the creators on Twitter – W. Haden Blackman and JH Williams III.
Great interview. I’m enjoying how he’s changed Batwoman and made it a much more balanced book between her life and crime-fighting.