By: Heidi MacDonald,
on 6/21/2016
Deep in the grubby sump of one of those so-called ‘Social Media’ sites, there is a clump of aging comics fanboys called The Really Very Serious Alan Moore Scholars’ Group, known to its sad and lonely adherents as TRVSAMSG. When they’re not annotating everything in sight, or calling down ancient evils on the heads of […]
By: Heidi MacDonald,
on 6/2/2016
The comic book Watchmen, penned by Alan Moore and drawn by artist Dave Gibbons, is one of the most revered books in DC Comics’ nearly century-spanning catalogue. However, their treatment of the work’s creators has always been more than a little murky. Many people both within and outside the industry know that DC’s relationship with Moore […]
By: Heidi MacDonald,
on 4/2/2013
“I’m sorry I’m late with my book”, Jimmy Palmiotti said rather humbly, opening a “spotlight” panel on March 31st 2013 at WonderCon, and asked the audience if he ought to put on some “background music”. Amanda Conner, his co-spotlighter, and Palmiotti explained, tongue in cheek, that if the panel appeared “random”, months of deep thought had allowed them to “plan it to be random”. Attendees were already engaged by the humor, and probably by their avid fandom of both Conner and Palmiotti’s work, in this panel Conner and Palmiotti hoped would be “interactive”.
For the first part of the panel, they followed a rough chronology of the story of their working and personal relationship together, but Q &A was welcome throughout. Palmiotti explained that the “magic started” between the couple when he inked a GARGOYLES cover for Conner and a friendship developed between them. This friendship allowed them to learn the “horrible, wonderful sides” of each other, Conner commented. Palmiotti added that they “knew each other insanely well” long before they started dating.
Their first big collaboration, where both provided their own input for a personally satisfying project, involved the VAMPIRELLA comic when Conner asked Palmiotti to create a script where she would be allowed to portray the title character “on the toilet”. Palmiotti, in gallant fashion, concocted a plot involving laxative-laced candy on Halloween, a child-eating demon, and a heroic devourer in Vampirella. Palmiotti encouraged writers to play to the desires of artists and “give them stuff they really want to draw” to produce great results. That’s been their “theme ever since”, he said. Comics have been their “career of choice”, Palmiotti reflected, even though their were “other choices” possible. Conner’s other choices, for instance, included working in advertising, and prior to that, owning a comic book store.
This chronological tour abruptly leapt to the present as both Palmiotti and Conner commented on keeping late hours, particularly at the con. The “number one rule”, Palmiotti shared sagely, is “never look at the clock. It ruins the night the next morning, worrying about it”. Then the “only indication”, he said, “is hearing birds. I don’t like that”. This commentary had the audience in uniform, vocal agreement. Conner and Palmiotti introduced another recurring topic in the panel, the sheer number of shoes Conner has managed to assemble. She insisted she had no more than 20 pairs of shoes, but Palmiotti remained dubious, putting the number at more like 600.
This speculation was interrupted by a question from the floor about the “timetable” on the planned collaboration CAPTAIN BROOKLYN. Conner explained that she’s working on a “glut of covers” at the moment, but when she’s finished those off, she’s going to stop other work and focus on BROOKLYN. Conner confirmed that they are “thinking about” the possibility of doing a Kickstarter for the project. CAPTAIN BROOKLYN, Palmiotti explained, is about a garbage man in Brooklyn, with a “house full of cats” and “Russian massage parlor girls next door” who has to devise a financial means of helping his sickly grandfather. On top of that, he comes to possess “superpowers that really don’t help his life”. Palmiotti says the book, as scripted, is “funny” but he trusts Conner to “bring it down to earth” and “ground it”, a power he feels is her particular strength as an artist. Her work “has a soul”, he said, “The eyes have a soul”, but he jokingly threatened her with finding a replacement if she doesn’t pick up the production pace.
Since the panel declared itself to be “interactive”, I asked Conner about her background studying comics art at the Kubert School in New Jersey, and whether she felt it was beneficial to study comics specifically in order to become a professional comics artist. The benefits, she said, of specialized study, is that she now knows how to “use a lot of other tools besides drawing specific to what I want to do”. At the time that she attended the Kubert School, she said, “most other art colleges frowned on comic art” and it was “not respected”. She feels things are “more open now”, but at the time, she said, the Kubert School was “exactly what I needed”. Palmiotti commented that at that time, the Kubert School also had very few women, about 4 in her class, Conner recalled. Now comics are a “little more accepted”, Palmiotti said, and the word “geek” is on the rise.
“Now we’re the cool kids and can talk about stupid stuff”, Palmiotti commented, including channeling child-like behavior to geek out about things like films. Both Conner and Palmiotti revealed that they are avid film watchers, and particularly Palmiotti, who goes to the movies a couple of times a week. Conner focuses on particular films that catch her attention, which she watches “repeatedly”. As a kid, she was a huge fan of The Poseidon Adventure, then Star Wars, The Terminator, The Long Kiss Goodnight, and more recently, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. Palmiotti’s most recent film enthusiasm is for the film Upside Down, particularly fascinated by this love story featuring reverse gravity fields and conflict between differing worlds.
An audience member brought up the subject of the completion of Conner’s run on SILK SPECTRE from the BEFORE WATCHMEN series, a project that ran only four issues rather than a possible six. “It could have stretched to 6”, Conner said, but she found it wasn’t necessary to do so. She declared herself relieved to have finished the job, since it was “labor and research intensive” to make sure she “blended it into the original storyline” of the mid to late ‘60’s. Her goal, which made the job more difficult, was to present “not people’s perception of the 60’s, but actually the ‘60’s” in contrast to our current, commercial views of the time period. This quest led her to contact her mother and her aunts, the youngest of which was “Laurie’s age” during the same time period. Palmiotti, who witnessed Conner’s rather excruciating commitment to historical accuracy in her art, came to call SILK SPECTRE “that effin’ book’ (which was the PG-13 version of the phrase).
Palmiotti said that Conner “became obsessive with every building” she drew, as well as clothing. The “layout” for Laurie’s house, apparently, was drawn from a single panel featuring a single room in the house in WATCHMEN. Conner built an “entire house” around a living room contained in the original comic. Palmiotti reminded the audience, who then applauded, that Conner’s work on SILK SPECTRE has since been nominated for a Reuben Award in “good company” with Evan Dorkin, and Bernie Wrightson, two of their favorite creators.
I asked Conner and Palmiotti what, particularly, they are looking for that they find attractive in a project in terms of character and plot. Palmiotti replied that he’s looking for several things, including the “soul of a character”, “what they want”, “what they fear” and “something at stake”. He’s very drawn to idea of romance in comic books. “It’s there even in JONAH HEX”, he said. “I like the idea of two people who have something in common, a goal”, Palmiotti explained. Even if he’s writing “horrible people”, he’s “looking for a likeable trait”. His example prompted a lot of laughter from the audience, proving the maxim “It’s funny because it’s true”. He said that even “Hitler’s dog thought Hitler was awesome” because the dog, being fed and tended by his master, could find a likeable trait. You have to “find those things in the characters”, he said, and ask yourself, “Why would we care?”.
Conner’s particular take on character focuses on the idea of perfection and imperfection. “I try not to make the character so perfect”, she said, preferring to create a character who is “someone like you know”. She wants her comics audience to react by thinking, “I know somebody who’s just like that”. That’s one of the reasons Palmiotti finds Spielberg films compelling, he explained, since they “start with the hero screwing up” and “we relate”. If a hero is “too perfect, there’s push-back”. He doesn’t respond to films where there’s a “super handsome guy and a perfect girl”, finding them “boring”.
An audience member’s question about Conner’s work drawing BARBIE in the past led to an energetic discussion of Wonder Woman as a character and the possibilities of new directions for her books. “I would love to write WONDER WOMAN”, Palmiotti admitted; he sees her as “more down to earth, less superior” than some other creators since being “too perfect” is a turn-off, though he thinks some solid work has been done on WONDER WOMAN. He observed that in some WONDER WOMAN comics he’s read, the creators “make everyone else more interesting” than Wonder Woman and he can’t understand that approach. “She’s the most interesting person in the room”, he pointed out, not her surrounding characters. Of course, he added, he would only want to write WONDER WOMAN with Conner as the artist on the project.
The last few questions fielded by Palmiotti and Conner included their typical work schedules, which they revealed to be opposite, and therefore difficult in timing, Conner’s recollections about her work for indie magazines, which she described as “guerrilla comic book making”, and what comics they like to read right now. Conner cited Terry Moore, finding herself “rivetted” by every story. Palmiotti’s a big fan of Darwyn Cooke’s work, but also always comes home with a “stack” of comics from the shop on Wednesdays. He buys every #1 issue from every company, he revealed, and continues to “try everything… like it’s my job”.
Conner and Palmiotti certainly presented a fully interactive panel, so much so that when panel time ran out, it felt like an interrupted conversation with plenty more to say. Hearing stories from their daily life and their work suggested that the divide, especially for these collaborators, is artificial, with influences moving back and forth constantly. Maybe that’s the secret to their wide-ranging output in comics, and a glimpse of the reason behind the energy they continually bring to the industry. The panel illustrated well the benefits of the “spotlight” approach to con appearances giving enough time and focus on particular creators to generate a conversation with their audiences.
Photo Credits: All photos in this article were taken by semi-professional photographer and pop culture scholar Michele Brittany. She’s an avid photographer of pop culture events. You can learn more about her photography and pop culture scholarship here.
Hannah Means-Shannon writes and blogs about comics for TRIP CITY and Sequart.org and is currently working on books about Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore for Sequart. She is @hannahmenzies on Twitter and hannahmenziesblog on WordPress.
By: Heidi MacDonald,
on 6/13/2012
I learned something new today. Remember how Watchmen started out as a treatment for the Charlton characters DC had purchased? Come to find out out, DC didn’t purchase the rights to all the Charlton characters and Dynamite now has the rights to Peter Cannon/Thunderbolt. As in, the prototype for Watchmen’s Ozymandias.
It seems that Pete Morisi, who created the character, had merely leased the rights to DC. Dynamite has licensed the character from the Morisi family and the book is set to debut in September. The writing team will be Alex Ross and Steve Darnall. You might remember that Ross and Darnell collaborated on Uncle Sam, many moons ago. (Personally, I was always fond of Darnall’s mid-90s Empty Love Stories.) Art will be by Jonathan Lau.
This isn’t the first post-Watchmen Morisi character revival. Back in the ’90s, Max Allan Collins and Terry Beatty revived Morisi’s private detective character “Johnny Dynamite” for a horror-tinged mini-series at Dark Horse.
While not exactly a household name these days, Morisi does have a cult following among artists. The first issue of the Dynamite revival will include a previously unpublished Morisi origin story for Peter Cannon, so you can get a good look at his work. Mark Waid is also tagging along to write a forward to the comic.
Official PR follows, plus come covers and interior art.
BEFORE WATCHMEN!
BEFORE OZYMANDIAS!
THERE WAS PETER CANNON!!!
June 13th, 2012 – Mount Laurel, NJ - Dynamite proudly presents - Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt returns to comics this coming September! Peter Cannon was created by the late Pete Morisi. Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt #1 is written by Steve Darnall and Alex Ross, drawn by superstar artist Jonathan Lau, with covers by Alex Ross, Jae Lee, John Cassaday, and Ardian Syaf!
In Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt #1, Peter Cannon is a world-famous author, an international celebrity, and the superhero known as Thunderbolt. He is acknowledged far and wide as the man who saved the world from destruction. Unfortunately, he has little interest in fame, even less interest in people, and the peace he has created is based on an illusion. Now, as old and new enemies plan to destroy his efforts-unaware of the secret he carries-Peter Cannon must fight to keep the peace and preserve his own existence, while fending off deadly foes…and mysterious admirers.
Issue #1 also contains extra material – Peter Cannon’s never before published origin story by Peter Cannon creator, Pete Morisi for a total of 48 pages all for the regular price of $3.99! This issue is soooo big, it features a forward by Mark (Kingdom Come) Waid!
“I have a great sentimentality for all of the Silver Age heroes,” says Alex Ross. “Peter Cannon belongs to that age of the heroic pantheon, and we have the chance to use him,
By: Heidi MacDonald,
on 4/26/2012
In The Question #17, cover-dated June 1988, Rorschach appears in a very brief dream sequence. The story is called, to avoid any confusion, A Dream of Rorschach. Here’s the cover, the title page, and the two pages where Rorschach appears. He’s mentioned here and there on a few other pages, and there’s an editorial recommendation for Watchmen at the end of the letters’ page. Also, note the thanks to Moore and Gibbons on the title page…
As a lagniappe to the current “All Things Alan Moore” wiki currently going on in our comments, here’s Pádraig Ó Méalóid with a little remembered crossover between the Watchmen and the Question…that took place all the way back in
The Question #17, June 1988. Think of it as “The Five Doctors” of this particular timeline.
The story is written by Dennis O’Neil and edited by Mike Gold…and obviously things were a lot friendlier and more casual back in the day. Handshake, one might say. Or as Stevie Wonder put it:
In a medium where no character ever truly dies, and where even the grandest continuities can be rebooted every other decade, superhero comic fans were still surprised to wake up this morning to the news that DC Comics will publish prequels to one of its most sacrosanct properties: Alan Moore's Watchmen--and they will do so without the involvement of Mr. Moore.
Now, the latter bit of news is not much of a surprise. Alan Moore has famously distanced himself from Watchmen and superhero comics in general. What is surprising is this bold, wake-up-in-a-cold-sweat move on the part of DC. Given the reverence for the original work, a re-opening of the mythology will be met with the highest scrutiny, so DC smartly tapped some of the best writers and artists to lend weight and excellence to the project, including Darwyn Cooke, Brian Azzarello, Amanda Conner, Jae Lee, and Adam Hughes.
The Before Watchmen series will launch this summer in single issues, with a new issue every week. Full details and covers are below:
Before Watchmen includes:
By: Neil Gaiman,
on 4/2/2009
The alchemy of collaboration makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts, wildly different from either part, and scorchingly beautiful. To read this book takes but a few minutes, but if you can't meditate, this book offers peace. It offers a bit of joy and redemption and is likely to make you forget for a few minutes the details that might draw you down. When you return, you'll feel refreshed. You'll feel rewarded. There's not a lot I need to say about this book. It will make a fine gift for any young girl you know, for any woman or family you know or indeed, for yourself. Turn away from the world, just for a moment of solace. When you look back, the world will look better...
By: John,
on 3/24/2009
Watch Dave Gibbons demonstrate the various steps he took to create an image of Rorschach using Manga Studio and a Wacom Cintiq. It’s more of a slideshow of the stages than anything else, but it shows what these digital tools can accomplish in the hands of someone using them to duplicate his traditional process.
By: Chogrin,
on 3/6/2009
Go watch Watchmen! And if you live in Philadelphia, go check it out at the Imax by the King of Prussia mall, where the Philadelphia Cartoonist Society has set up a gallery to promote the movie! The gallery features many Autumn Society members as well! So what are you waiting for? Go see it!
So if you're interested in a set, just e-mail him ( [email protected] ) and he will gladly send you some, while supplies last! The movie rocks!
By: Neil Gaiman,
on 2/25/2009
By: Kevin Levell,
on 10/21/2008
I've been lucky enough to be inducted into the DrawerGeeks illustration fraternity. My good blogging pal Doug Bell has introduced me and I am chuffed to be involved. The rough idea is a fortnightly topic based on fictional characters. The current topic is GIANT MONSTERS and this morning I decided it might be a good way to get myself back into the swing of things.
I wanted to do a rework for Attack of the 50ft Woman but somehow it didn't quite work out like that. I started sketching but couldn't help thinking about the bit in Watchmen when Dr. Manhattan is 50 ft tall blasting things to bits with his fingers in Vietnam. (issue 4 pg 20 for ref)
This was my natural progression of those two thoughts...
WATCHMEN II: THE BRIDE OF MANHATTAN
I love the whole 'B' movie spoof stuff and the word Bride seemed to carry the right sort of connotations with it for this.
Watchmen is a one-off complete story and it struck me that the (giant monster) money-making-machine that is Hollywood could plough headlong into franchise mentality if the upcoming film is a success. I think this might be Alan Moore's worst fear and part of the reason I added the 'Wizard of Northampton' desperately running away from the horror of it all.
By: Jason Boog,
on 7/22/2008
That's the preview to next summer's Watchmen movie, an adaptation of Alan Moore's earth-shaking graphic novel that brought pulp fiction, punk rock and novelistic storytelling to the superhero genre.
I've been foisting this book off on friends for more than a decade, but over the weekend, Batman outdid me a couple thousand times. Check it out at GalleyCat:
"The Watchmen trailer that was shown before The Dark Knight in movie theaters this weekend was promoting the forthcoming motion picture ... Nevertheless, as Bully observed over the weekend, the book promptly vaulted into Amazon's top ten, and as of Sunday afternoon it was the #3 seller on the site"
Book blogs have been debating what happened ever since. Can movies sell books? M.J. Rose, a Publishing Spot alum, saw it as a triumph for book advertising, a tool that most writers and publishers can't afford.
Besides urging you to read the graphic novel, I had one thing to add for all the storytellers in the audience. The Watchmen, unlike Batman, the Hulk or EVERY SINGLE SUPERHERO, EVER, was a self-contained story. The whole film fits inside a single graphic novel. It's much easier to fall in love with a story that can find on Amazon and buy in single swoop on Amazon.
By: Kevin Levell,
on 7/18/2008
Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy - OH BOY!
No your eyes are not deceiving you, that's Dr. Manhattan! I found this link for the first WATCHMEN trailer over on David Bishop's blog
CHECK IT OUT <<<<< clicky for trailer
Seriously excited! I know I'm not alone in being a huge fan of this book. I still have a residue of trepidation about comic to movie transitions - but really how wrong can they get it? From Alan Moore's highly descriptive script to Dave Gibbon's awesomely cinematic art... there can be no excuses, and from this trailer it looks like they'll not need them.
Billy Crudup looks great as Dr. Manhattan and the intrinsic field separator scene is just jaw dropping.
I'm not going to say all the usual nerdy stuff about how long I've been waiting and how many times I've read it - All I will say is that if you haven't read it, then that is like disregarding Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson because you don't really read adventure stories - Buy it and read it before the movie comes out - you need to.
The official Watchmen website has been updated (you can see the trailer in a variety of resolutions there) and there's also a pretty interesting interview with Dave Gibbons in the Production Diary section too!
By: Ginger Nielson,
on 2/29/2008
He never went to sleep to easily. Wolfie was always afraid of falling out of bed.
One night he did just that. He fell into a land of strange little houses, tiny flattened people and rushing rivers.
Wolfgang fell into that land of dreams. Ah ha, I see him. Do you?
And fell 
And fell
But before he had a chance to reach the river, he woke up. He always did.
You may have noticed that he dreams in black and white. Maybe next week his dream will be in color!
I can’t remember him ever mentioning a non-anglophone writer among his favorites – and rarely refers to them on his own work.
[…] from another recent interview, here are some excerpts from Alan Moore’s praise for fellow Purgatorio stablemate Kieron […]