How to use this Page

Planet Comicon has been the one of most loved cons of the Kansas City area for 17 years and this weekend will be one for the books. Sure you can meet Nolan North and Troy Baker who voice Nathan and Sam in the epic Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End. Yes, Stan Lee will be at the […]

Hanna-Barbera characters like you've never seen them before.

The post DC’s ‘Hanna-Barbera Beyond’ Will Remix and Reimagine Classic Characters appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

The other day we mentioned that the hugely popular team behind Harley Quinn of Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti had imposed a sensible signing limit for shows, which makes sense because they are two of the busiest people we know. For instance, Palmiotti is currently running Kickstarter — his ninth—for a standalone graphic novel in […]

"The series ending doesn’t mean you won’t see Starfire pop up in other places!"

With the exponential rise in comics shows, and a corresponding rise in attendees, there's been a lot of talk recently about various pros imposing signing limits or charging for autographs at show, with the money often going to a charity. Popular con guests Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner have just made their policy clear.

What’s that? It’s the sound of DC getting ready to publish another comic book featuring Harley Quinn. This new comic is a mini-series with writing duties from Frank Tieri (Catwoman) and Jimmy Palmiotti (mastermind of the main Harley Quinn comic book.) The interior art is drawn by Mauricet (a Belgian artist known for The Crossovers) […]

In case you were watching The Big Bang Theory Llast night (Spoiler: we weren't) you may have seen the gnag arguing over a sexist poster in the comics shop they frequent. And you may have guessed that it was the work of Amanda Conner (and colorist Paul Mounts.) The poster was created to show all the sexist cliches you can have in one unfriendly comics shop and Amanda hit them all...but let's face it, it's still a lovely piece.

Here’s where I finally release what’s left of our SDCC audio content…as a follow-up to last week’s set of DC and Marvel Television interviews, here are our chats on the animated side of things including discussions with Dan Harmon, Justin Roiland, Bruce Timm, Andrea Romano, Ike Barinholtz, Seth Meyers, and more! Additionally, here are the audio […]

Harley Quinn #17

By Harper W. Harris

Down in the bustle of the DC booth, I got a chance to talk with Amanda Conner, Jimmy Palmiotti, and Chad Hardin, the team behind the ever popular Harley Quinn series, as well as newer books Harley Quinn and Power Girl and Starfire.

Harper W. Harris: When you wrote issue #12 of Harley Quinn, did you always plan on expanding that story into its own series or story?

Amanda Conner: Jimmy did.

Harley Quinn and Power Girl #2, out 7/22

Jimmy Palmiotti: Yeah, when we writing it, I said, it would be great if we could just make it a couple weeks later when they came out of the ring, and if this team up does okay, maybe they’ll let us tell that story. And it did do okay–it did better than okay! So when we pitched it to Dan [Didio], we said, well, we’d like to take what happened during those two weeks, how Power Girl got in a wedding dress, why these three eyed cats, and make it into six issues. He said, “If you can figure out all that, then go for it.” So we did. And we had Stephane Roux that wanted to draw it–we got lucky getting Stephane, so it all came together. It was sort of not a plan, but I left the door open in case something happened.

HH: What has it been like to return to Power Girl, a character that you had such a big impact on several years ago?

AC: We actually love Power Girl so much, and we miss working on that character, so we just said lets put Power Girl and Harley together, why not!

HH: They’re a good pairing so far! So speaking of Harley Quinn, the character has obviously gotten immensely popular in the last year or so. Has that level of fan involvement or popularity changed the way you view the character or the way you aim to tell her story?

AC: Not really–I mean we always loved the character. We wanted to make her the truest Harley that we knew how. I think it’s just resonated with a lot of people, because they feel like it’s very Harley-ish. I think that might be one of the reasons people love it so much, she feels like Harley. She’s wacky, she’s crazy, a little homicidal, but lovable.

JP: We like to say it’s because of Chad’s artwork too that’s sucking everybody into the book. I mean we got lucky–again a lot of things were just timing. The timing was right for the book, the tone that we thought may or may not work actually worked. It’s always a hit or miss when you’re going to change things up a little bit. We got lucky this time, I could tell you about the 40 other times we didn’t get lucky, but that would take up a whole other interview. We’re happy this worked out!

HH: Yeah, I think a big part of its success is the fresh, funny approach to a superhero story. What is your process in writing it as a comedy? Is there a lot of throwing out ideas, sketching them out, then seeing visually a way to make the situation funnier or add a new joke?

JP: We don’t really write it so much as a comedy as this is the story, and then we find the funny, absurd moments in it. All superhero comic books could easily be done like this with everything they do, everything from the capes to how ridiculous it is, if they can do all this, then why aren’t they doing that situations. So with Harley we actually try to lay out the story very grounded, like a regular comic format, this is what’s happening. As a matter of fact, as absurd as it is sometimes, she’s actually more based in the real world than some other characters because she goes through the motions: she’s on the street, she goes from this place to that place–there’s no jump to scenery, she has to get somewhere. We have whole scenes with car services and cabs–

Chad Hardin: Or she’s at work, or eating.

JP: She’s trying to do three jobs…it’s actually really grounded. But in that, it’s sort of like our own lives, right? There are these absurd moments that we see every day and we giggle and then we forget about. With Harley we have these absurd moments and we take it to a hyper sense of reality. And then we hand it over to Chad.

CH: Whenever they hand me the script, it’s like, how can I make this…more. You know, take the football across the goal line so to speak.

AC: And you always do!

JP: We like to think of it, whether it’s perceived that way or not, as a very grounded in reality story. We could be completely wrong and be just getting by on what we think, but that’s how we see it.

AC: You can have a very grounded story, but when Harley gets involved, everything just goes upside-down.

CH: She’s the touch of chaos that spins the universe into this chaotic motion, and that’s where the absurdity comes in.

From Harley Quinn #12, which led to the Harley Quinn and Power Girl mini-series

JP: I also think it’s why people like the book. It’s one of the few books–we know the procedure of a superhero book is that it’s going to have the fight and then the cliffhanger–with Harley, you actually have no idea what’s going to happen on the next page. We throw random things–like all the sudden there are 800 birds on her–like we just go randomly in places and it should be that way, because that’s how her brain acts, so it shouldn’t be so linear in that way. It seems to work and we’re always happy when we get Chad’s pages back and we’re all laughing at things that we didn’t even write that are in the background. We’re like, that’s a really good working team when everybody’s putting their best into it. And with Alex Sinclair on colors, it’s one of the most fun books I’ve ever worked on.

HH: You guys definitely have an awesome team going, a great collaboration. Chad, how is the process different drawing for writers that are very talented artists in their own right?

CH: I don’t know how to explain this so much, but it is different in that it’s the most challenging book I’ve ever been on, but I don’t know why. It just is. But I think it’s because I don’t dare dial anything in.

AC: We know where he lives.

CH: Everything’s got to be perfect, perfect, perfect. We’re crossing all the t’s and dotting all the i’s. But I think the fans really respond to that.

JP: I harass him once in a while.

CH: If Jimmy doesn’t like something, I can tell immediately. He’ll give me like a one word note, like “cool” or “awesome”–if I don’t get that, I’m like, okay, something’s wrong.

JP: Like, “Staten Island has more trees.” He drew a scene, and he doesn’t know Staten Island, it has more trees.

AC: There is no island off the coast.

CH: Oops! I actually did go to New York, I walked around Coney Island and took a million pictures. But off the coast, I have no idea. Across the Brooklyn Bridge, I have no idea.

JP: We’re dealing with a real city, there are 4 million people in Brooklyn that might have something to say if we completely turn everything away.

HH: You can’t really fake that geography.

JP: Yeah. Even with the scatapult on the roof, Amanda kind of figures out where it is using Google Maps, where it would go over buildings.

CH: We have a map of the building, the floors. I know which way it faces, we’re pretty anal about it.

AC: Oh, we’re so anal about it–I downloaded all these apps so I can know what degrees it needs to be pointed at to hit any J Train that might be going over the Williamsburg Bridge–Oh no that’s the L Train, nevermind!

Starfire #3, out 8/12

HH: I wanted to talk about Starfire–how did you get attracted to that character?

AC: They asked us to write it. [Laughs]

JP: They ask, how do you feel about Starfire, I’m not sure how I feel about Starfire. Amanda definitely has more history with her.

AC: I read all the Wolfman Perez Teen Titans, so I liked the character a lot. And I’ve seen her go through a lot different incarnations.

JP: They sent us the New 52 trades, and we read those, and I was like, okay, that’s that, but we also like the cartoon a lot. We laugh our asses off at the cartoon. There’s got to be a way we can make this work for us, in order for us to have interest in writing it. Dan said, alright, then pitch how you would want to do it and we’ll see if it works with what we’re thinking. We pitched the book you have. We said it’s a new town and she doesn’t want to be a superhero so much, like a new start. And they went for it. I think they had confidence with us doing Harley that maybe we could handle that. I don’t think we would’ve been offered it if we weren’t doing Harley. I don’t think it would’ve been a book they would have come to us with, so we hard to earn that book.

Harley Quinn #17, Starfire #2, and Harley Quinn and Power Girl #1 are all in stores now, with new issues coming soon!

Abraham Riesman continues his excellent series of “hero histories” with a look at Harley Quinn who has become perhaps THE stand out mainstream character of the current comics era. (I’ll have aphoto gallery opf Harley toys from Toy Fair in a bit.) (Deadpool vs Harley Quinn, I’m saying it until it happens.) And she’s had a strange history, with most of her development taking place outside of comics, from her origin in Batman: The Animated Series to her Arkham Asylum re imagination.

Over the next seven years, Dini, Timm, and Sorkin built Harley into one of the most memorable Batman characters of all time. That was no small trick, given that the Batman mythos was already more than 50 years old and had featured the same general cast of archetypes for decades. It was made all the more remarkable by the fact that she didn’t even exist in the mainstream Batman comics of the time — it was all happening on a kids’ TV show and its spinoff products. And even though children were the target audience, Harley’s story lines were provocative in ways no other Batman tales had been.

Anyway, the current Conner/Palmiotti version is also discussed as well as the many various feminist interpretations of Harley. It’s a good piece about a complex character. What do YOU think makes Harley so popular?

PS: Also the success of Harley means everyone can acknowledge what we’ve been saying all along: Amanda Conner is a great cartoonist!

Artist Amanda Conner has been working in comics since the late 80′s. She’s been in the top tier of mainstream comics creators for a long time now, but with  DC Comics’ recent New 52 reboot, Amanda Conner got the chance to relaunch the new Harley Quinn series, and has in the process solidified herself as one of the greats, while also redefining one of today’s most popular characters.

Conner developed her drawing skills at The Kubert School in Dover, New Jersey, one of the first technical schools for sequential art founded by comics legend Joe Kubert. She met her future husband, and current collaborator on Harley Quinn, writer/inker Jimmy Palmiotti, in the early 90′s when he was an editor at Marvel.. The couple was also responsible for a recent popular run on DC Comics’ Power Girl. Throughout her career, she’s worked with some of comics’ top creators, including Warren Ellis, Peter David, Garth Ennis, and Darwyn Cooke.

Her work has also been featured in The New York Times, MAD Magazine, and Revolver.

You can follow Amanda Conner on Twitter here.

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

Tweet

“I’m sorry I’m late with my book”, Jimmy Palmiotti said rather humbly, opening a “spotlight” panel on March 31^st 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.

Tweet

by LTZ

A while back, the Beat’s own Henry Barajas – tireless observer of Kickstarted comics that he is – took some time to preview a crowd-funded book by Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti, Jimmy Broxton, and Juan Santacruz. Sex and Violence, Vol. 1 was laid bare (spread-eagle, perhaps) to its supporters this past week, after reaching its funding goal. The only hurdle yet to cross is for Palmiotti, Gray, and cover artist Amanda Conner to actually sit down and sign the damned things. I was part of the crowd that funded Sex and Violence; I expect I’ll get my copy in the mail any day now. In that copy, and in everyone else’s, too, there will be my name (my government name, my “goes on job applications” name), thanked for helping to finance, well, sex and violence.

I wonder if this bizarre offshoot of buyer’s remorse is common amongst Kickstarter supporters. The thing is, it’s not exactly remorse. It’s more like Schroedinger’s cat, where a funded project exists in a quantum state of being both satisfying and regrettable until you get your copy and find out for yourself. “So, goofus,” the dialogue begins, “why did you throw money at it if you weren’t sure you’d be happy with it?”

I’m not sure I have a good answer for that. I like Jimmy Broxton’s art, I guess. Getting an Amanda Conner art print or whatever else is pretty cool. As writers, Palmiotti and Gray have yet to grievously offend me, but then again, I’m not exactly snatching Freedom Fighters off the racks so roughly that the staples kink. It almost, maybe, makes a little more sense when I take the long view and consider the status quo of adult-people comics today.

Joe Casey, agent provocateur, just released a comic called Sex, which I saw praised on Twitter as “the most 2003 comic of 2013.” Brandon Graham’s Multiple Warheads, a book I love without qualifiers, started as a porno gag strip in an NBM anthology. Matt Seneca’s Very Fine Comix debuted with Daredevil 12”, a XXX Marvel comic spoof; Jane Mai just put out Blumpkin Spice Latte, a zine that’s 99% dick talk (with the best title of 2012). Sex is in the air in comics, these days, but it’s kept its edge, sticking mostly to the dim corners or weird vortices of the market.

Violence, of course, is the foundation modern comics were built upon, and the sword that they live and die by to this day. I shouldn’t even need to point out examples, but the “big moments” in the Diamond-distributed scene always revolve around bloody carnage. Think Damian Wayne, freshly skewered. Glenn from The Walking Dead: turned into a piñata. Avatar Press is its own thing entirely. Both Mark Millar and John Romita’s certified hit Kick-Ass and Frank Cho and Joe Keatinge’s upcoming Brutal have promo art that looks jacked straight from the cover of Pantera’s Vulgar Display of Power. DC Comics’ big multimedia tie-in for the quarter isn’t just a fighting game, it’s a fighting game built by the people who make Mortal Kombat.

So in this rough-sex-and-eyeballs-popping milieu, Sex and Violence seemed like a romp. Sure, it was being pitched as tawdry, sleazy, exploitative, and unshakably macho despite itself… but sometimes the grindhouse is the place to be. All of this is very much after-the-fact justification, but it seems to add up. But that just takes us back to Schroedinger’s cat. It could be fun and trashy. If could just be trashy and a little sad. I paid my admission, so the least I can do is find out.

There are two halves to Sex and Violence. You’d think that with the title structured the way it is, this duplex approach would lend itself to a sex story and a violence story. It almost does (one tale is certainly more violent than sexual, and vice versa for the other), but not enough to comment on the idea at any other point in this piece. The book starts with “Pornland, Oregon,” illustrated by Jimmy Broxton. In what starts as a sideways riff on the movie Hardcore, a young woman is made a deep web sensation forevermore by being murdered in a snuff film. As it turns out, in one of those funny coincidences life likes to play, her grandfather is a retired Mafia hitman, and all expected murders and executions follow in due course. The second story, drawn by Juan Santacruz, is “Girl in a Storm,” about a lesbian NYPD officer who becomes obsessed with spying on her beautiful neighbor, and has to deal with the small complication of that neighbor already having a woman to keep her bed warm. Things, as they must, get more sordid from there.

So is it any good? Jimmy Broxton’s minimalist (and very British, in a way I can’t put my finger on) style sells “Pornland” rather well. Abetted by Challenging Studios’ color palette of blue, grey, purple, and what I can only call “various shades of Dave Stewart red,” Broxton makes “Pornland” into something not unlike the crime media of the 70s, when character actors could still look like the bottoms of feet: Get Carter, The Outfit, The Squeeze, some imaginary episode of The Rockford Files with more exposed breasts… In fact, the plot of the thing is pretty much Get Carter with some serial numbers filed off, and things like “a vaguely sympathetic hero” and “romance” bolted on like a new spoiler on a Gremlin. That’s not bad, mind. If you’re going to be something in the avenge-young-relative sub-genre, Get Carter is really what you want to be.

On the other hand, “Girl in a Storm” is just… there. The story strains to be Brian de Palma, which is a noble ambition until you realize that Brian de Palma is usually straining to be other people (in this case, a Sapphic voyeur version of Rear Window) – it’s a well that quickly dries up. Juan Santacruz is a veteran superhero artist, and that’s a downside here. Instead of a claustrophobic, psychologically maladjusted story of obsession, passion, forbidden desire, violence, and all those other things that we pretend not to love, the leggy all-but-baby-oiled figures and brightly-lit colors give the whole thing a plastic shine. The look of the strip – which, in a strip about looking, is really the most important thing on multiple levels – isn’t enough to elevate an uninspired script, and both sides end up worse for it. If “Pornland” is Get Carter, “Girl in a Storm” ends up as a post-depilation-culture take on something like a Christina Lindberg movie, and not one of the really twisted, memorably corpse-mutilating ones like Thriller.

So this is what’s going to have my name tucked away in it, until we’re all dead and beyond. I don’t feel particularly embarrassed about this, I suppose. I probably should, and the sting is probably lessened by my name being so generic as to sound like an ethnic take on “John Smith.” Only half of Sex and Violence is really any fun – a statement more true than I intended it to be when I typed it – and I overpaid, based on that math. It’s not egregiously offensive (by comic book standards) and it’s not a work of genius. It just exists, and me with it, twins conjoined at the donation. It’s hard to work up a head of steam one way or the other when both pleasure and disappointment come mild.

LTZ sells comic books, and infrequently contributes to the Beat. He even more infrequently contributes to his own site, Nowhere / No Formats. He tweets about how hard this rigorous schedule is at @less_than_zero.

TweetMarvel’s solicitations for May are sneaking out, but the first thing that caught my attention – Amanda Conner providing art for Marvel, in the form of this variant cover for issue #2 of Brian Wood and Oliver Coipel‘s adjectiveless X-Men series. Whew! Long sentence. We get a look at all the team being all classy [...]