Out of all the Vertigo titles that were announced as part of their line relaunch, The Twilight Children was one of the most mysterious yet most anticipated. The series’ writer, Gilbert Hernandez, forms one-third of the team behind the incredible character driven stories that filled the pages of Love and Rockets. Darwyn Cooke, the series’ illustrator, has become […]
Gilbert Hernandez’s Palomar—a masterpiece of small town life, longing and the search for love—survived a challenge and will remain on the shelves at the school library in Rio Rancho, NM Betsy Gomez reports for the CBLDF.
The book was challenged a few weeks ago as “child porn” by a parent in a highly slanted scare TV report. A review committee has decided that the book can stay:
The Rio Rancho review committee agreed. By a 5-3 vote, the committee voted on March 16 to retain the book.
“We commend the Rio Rancho Public Schools for adhering to its challenge policy, and are pleased with the result that the review committee has retained this important book for the benefit of its student community,” says Charles Brownstein, Executive Director of KRRP sponsor organization Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.
As NCAC’s original letter stated, a decision to keep Palomar would “demonstrate respect for your readers and their choices, for the professionalism of the librarians who serve the reading public, and for the First Amendment and its importance to a pluralistic, democratic society.”
5-3 is a little close, but the literary merit of Hernandez’s work is universally acknowledged and it’s a relief to see that the obvious scare quotes of the first TV report were not persuasive.
Gilbert Hernandez has a new weekly comic at Vice.
So one good thing happened this week.
Cartoonists doing thing, blabbing about it.
§ Reminder — we’re doing our 31 Days of Halloween countdown of spooky art, comics and animation. Send us your links!
§ Congratulations to Noelle Stevenson on finishing Nimona, her webcomic which will be published by Harper Collins in May of 2015. Reminder: the link is a spoiler so beware!
§ Simon Hanselmann continues his press tour with a revealing interview in The A.V. Club.
§ I wanted to do a more in depth analysis of this piece enumerating the Top 100 Events in the United States 2014; Comic-Con in San Diego is listed as the top entertainment event, beating out Sundance. The Academy Awards are the #1 awards event and SXSW is the #1 music festival. (Does CMJ even exist any more?) But then I ran out of time.
§ Steve Morris reprints an excellent list of how to submit writing samples to comics publishers—in many cases you can’t. Breaking in as a writer is still an uphill battle.
§ David Hine writes for the Huffington Post on his comics adaptation of Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs.:
The Man Who Laughs is not an easy read. It was written late in Victor Hugo’s career when he was living in exile on Guernsey, and his contemporaries dismissed it as an inferior work. It’s certainly a pretty turgid read, crammed with long-winded exposition and with a non-linear timeline that annoyingly gives away all the best plot twists too soon. I felt like scrawling “Spoiler Alert!” in the margins when I wasn’t skipping the endless inventories of titles, ranks and possessions of the English aristocracy. But while I was often infuriated by the book’s structure I found myself gripped by the underlying story. Here was a truly enthralling tale of love and humanity, of ordinary people struggling to survive in an unjust and unequal society. At it’s core is the story of a young man who is kidnapped, mutilated and sold to travelling entertainers, yet who retains his integrity and his dignity through the love of his adoptive ‘family’, the eccentric philosopher Ursus, his pet wolf Homo and the beautiful blind girl, Dea.
§ The Boston Globe reviews Michael Cho’s Shoplifter:
In order for a graphic novel to be memorable, it must fulfill both parts of its genre label: The graphics must be arresting enough to justify their presence on the page, and the words must be well-composed. Michael Cho’s “Shoplifter’’ is that rare thing, a graphic novel debut in which text and illustrations fit together like two halves of the same mind; as a result, the taut story told here makes an impact and manages to show distinctiveness while doing so.
§ Also in Boston, a cartoonist claimed making a watermelon joke in a comic strip about President Obama wasn’t racist; many disagreed. Eyeroll. SMH.
§ Gilbert Hernandez has a wide ranging chat with CBR about his two graphic novels out this fall, Bumperhead and Loverboys.
This year you’ve made “Bumperhead” and “Loverboys” plus a new “Love and Rockets” plus a reprint of “Fatima.” Is this your new normal pace?
It’s something that I can do. It’s work and it’s tiring. I don’t plan on doing so many graphic novels at once, let’s put it that way. It’s just the way that things are scheduled with the publishers. After I finish a book, I can’t just go back to the same publisher and do another one. I jump to another and start a new project. I have to be ahead all the time, producing material. That’s why it ended up coming out at the same time. “Loverboys” might be the quickest long story that I’ve ever done. The time that I put into it was pretty brief, just a couple months. None of it’s rushed. I put the same care into it that I put into everything. But I can imagine a day when I go, “Hey, I can’t put out two new graphic novels a year anymore.” [Laughs]
Disclosure: Gilbert Hernandez is tied as my favorite cartoonist ever, so I’m just gonna keep plugging his stuff until they make me stop. Bumperhead is easily one of his best works ever and serves as a perfect entre to his work without having to plunge into the deep end of Palomar’s tangled generations. I have no idea what Loverboys
is about but the cover looks like primo Beto, and what more would you ask for?
§ Is Stan Lee The Watcher?
§ And NOW a Beat VIDEO FILM FESTIVAL!
Cartoonist Cat Staggs and her partner are featured in the Target video about building a nursery for a new baby.
This ad for a bankish thing features a woman who hangs out in a comics shop. The Mary Sue was excited by this example of normalization.
Ed Piskor (Hip Hop Family tree) returns to his family home, which is in tatters, after 19 years in this video for Pittsburgh Magazine. Sorry about the game last night, Pittsburghers. You can’t go home again and here’s more proof.
Beat Pal Christopher Moonlight made this half hour film at the San Diego Comic Con in 2012 about Hollywood encroachment. Among those seen, David Mack, Camilla d’Errico and Batton Lash. Learn more about this film at the FB page.
Professor X';s habit of grasping his temples in pain could give the impression of being a whiny wimp, as this supercut displays.
Did you like our film festival? Send more video links and we’ll do it again!
Recorded at Publishers Weekly, it’s More To Come, the weekly podcast of comics news, interviews and discussion with Calvin Reid, Kate Fitzsimons and The Beat’s own Heidi MacDonald.
In this week’s episode, the More to Come Crew discuss 2014′s San Diego Comic-Con including the long-awaited Eisner award vindication of Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, Image Expo and indie comics, a slightly smaller presence for offsite TV and video game hoopla, digital comics, the con experience and convention safety concerns.
Download this episode direct here, listen to it in streaming here and catch up with our previous podcasts on the Publishers Weekly website, or subscribe to More To Come on iTunes
Sensation Comics, you may recall, is the digital-first Wonder Woman series that will feature diverse folk doing diverse stories about everyone’s favorite star-spangled Amazon. Digital comics will be collected into print issues every few months. So dropped into this rather barebones exclusive story about issue #3 is the stunning news that Gilbert Hernandez will be drawing a Wonder Woman story! And Sean E. Williams and fashion-y illustrator Marguerite Sauvage will be doing another!
SENSATION COMICS FEATURING WONDER WOMAN #3
Written by GILBERT HERNANDEZ and SEAN E. WILLIAMS
Art by GILBERT HERNANDEZ and MARGUERITE SAUVAGE
Cover by IVAN REIS and JOE PRADO
When Wonder Woman allows an other dimensional science-villain to capture her, she expects to swiftly deal with his android minions and save the day. But he’s able to brainwash her and that’s when things go haywire! Then, back on Earth, we share a rare moment from Diana’s rock-star days.
Can you guess which story is from Beto?
Andrew Wheeler got properly excited about this and offered some Gilbert art from Wonder Woman Day over the years.
Sauvage is also an exciting choice to draw Diana. (She recently scored the gig doing covers for Hinterkind, the Vertigo series.)
All behind this rather more typical Reis/Prado cover.
How has it escaped the notice of the world for a week that Drawn and Quarterly announced that Gilbert Hernandez’s Bumperhead will debut at San Diego this year? And a cover and preview were released? For shame, comics industry, for shame. Would you ignore the new David Lynch movie? Gilbert Hernandez is our David Lynch. This standalone graphic novel picks up a bit, emotionally and chronologically, from where Beto’s acclaimed Marble Season left off, as described by the previww, with the innocent joy of childhood giving way to disaffected punk youth.
A raw, disaffected, punk rock/glam rock/drunk rock/speed-freak rock coming-of-age story about growing up in America, seen through the eyes of Bobby, or Bumperhead. Told in the subtle yet thought-provoking way that only Gilbert can, Bumperhead follows a life as it zooms by — from childhood bullying to first love to the realities of becoming a (disappointing) grownup.
CANNOT WAIT. 
Nursery Rhyme Comics
Edited by Chris Duffy
Introduction by Leonard S. Marcus
$18.99
ISBN: 978-1-59643-600-8
Ages 9-12
On shelves October 11, 2011
Nursery rhymes. What’s up with that? (I feel like a stand up comedian when I put it that way). They’re ubiquitous but nonsensical. Culturally relevant but often of unknown origins. Children’s literary scholar Leonard Marcus ponders the amazing shelf life of nursery rhymes himself and comes up with some answers. Why is it that they last as long as they do in the public consciousness? Marcus speculates that “the old-chestnut rhymes that beguile in part by sounding so emphatically clear about themselves while in fact leaving almost everything to our imagination” leave themselves open to interpretation. And who better to do a little interpreting than cartoonists? Including as many variegated styles as could be conceivably collected in a single 128-page book, editor Chris Duffy plucks from the cream of the children’s graphic novel crop (and beyond!) to create a collection so packed with detail and delight that you’ll find yourself flipping to the beginning to read it all over again after you’re done. Mind you, I wouldn’t go handing this to a three-year-old any time soon, but for a certain kind of child, this crazy little concoction is going to just the right bit of weirdness they require.
Fifty artists are handed a nursery rhyme apiece. The goal? Illustrate said poem. Give it a bit of flair. Put in a plot if you have to. So it is that a breed of all new comics, those of the nursery ilk, fill this book. Here at last you can see David Macaulay bring his architectural genius to “London Bridge is Falling Down” or Roz Chast give “There Was a Crooked Man” a positive spin. Leonard Marcus offers an introduction giving credence to this all new coming together of text and image while in the back of the book editor Chris Duffy discusses the rhymes’ history and meaning. And as he says in the end, “We’re just letting history take its course.”
In the interest of public scrutiny, the complete list of artists on this book consists of Nick Abadzis, Andrew Arnold, Kate Beaton, Vera Brosgol, Nick Bruel, Scott Campbell, Lilli Carre, Roz Chast, JP Coovert, Jordan Crane, Rebecca Dart, Eleanor Davis, Vanessa Davis, Theo Ellsworth, Matt Forsythe, Jules Feiffer, Bob Flynn, Alexis Frederick-Frost, Ben Hatke, Gilbert Hernandez, Jaime Hernandez, Lucy Knisley, David Macaulay, Mark Martin, Patrick McDonnell, Mike Mignola, Tony Millionaire, Tao Nyeu, George O’Connor, Mo Oh, Eric Orchard, Laura Park, Cyril Pedrosa, Lark Pien, Aaron Renier, Dave Roman, Marc Rosenthal, Stan Sakai, Richard Sala, Mark Siegel, James Sturm, Raina Telgemeier, Craig Thompson, Richard Thompson, Sara Varon, Jen Wang, Drew Weing, Gahan Wilson, Gene Luen Yang, and Stephanie Yue (whew!). And as with any collection, some of the inclusions are going to be stronger than others. Generally speaking if fifty people do something, some of them are going to have a better grasp on the process than others. That said, only a few of these versions didn’t do it for me. At worst the versions were mediocre. At best they went in a new direction with their mat
Everyone else has lauded this illustration of the Masters of the Universe by the great Gilbert Hernandez, and we will not be the only ones to miss out on the action.
Via Andy Khouri’s weekly art dump, which is really pretty amazing.
Yeah, we will have to give it another issue to really get going. Which is sad, because this issue was gorgeous. Cooke and Stewart delivered just stunning work every panel. Unfortunately the story is nothing to get excited about yet. And I’m a gigantic Gilbert Hernandez fan.
Honestly, it read to me like the Palomar side of Love and Rockets but without the sexual overtones, which is fine with me. It’s probably the best thing with a Vertigo label I’ve read in years and years.
I think Beto’s Vertigo work is kind of an interesting animal, as he leans a little more Lynch and less Almodovar or Waters. I prefer when he’s in the latter mode, but its hard not to celebrate any new work from the elder Hernandez. Easily the highlight of my comics reading week, Two Brothers aside.