** Just a week after the birth of his son, Marvel artist Reilly Brown's apartment was damaged by a fire in the building next door to his.
As luck would have it, the flames themselves had little direct effect on our building, thanks to the hard work of the Hoboken Fire Department on the coldest night of the year, as well as my landlord’s foresight in installing a firewall between the buildings. However, yesterday we learned that because of the firefighters doing their thing, and the amount of smoke that got into our apartment, there will be months of renovation to fix everything and repair the smoke and water damage in the building, particularly our apartment, which was on the top floor where the fire was the strongest. Almost all of our belongings were saturated in smoke, and although some things can be cleaned, a lot of things can’t be, like most of our clothes, books, and anything that belongs to the baby. It’s not healthy to have a newborn in contact with that kind of third-hand smoke.In the post on his Tumblr, Brown lists the ways you can help his family, by buying original artwork from his dealer or getting commissions directly from him. He's even opened up a Gumroad site and is selling his convention sketchbooks though there.
Honestly, when I saw the fire burning only feet away from our own apartment, I’d written the whole place off, so anything that we can recover I count as a blessing. Shawna and Will are safe, and that’s the most important thing.
** Jansson and Burgos elected to Eisner Hall of Fame; 14 more nominees (The Beat)-- Heidi MacDonald reports on the two cartoonists that this year's Eisner judges are automatically inducting into the Hall of Fame and the 14 other nominees that will be voted on during the Eisner voting process.
As is tradition, this year’s Eisner Awards judges have selected two cartonists to be automaticallyinducted into the Will Eisner Comic Awards Hall of Fame for 2016: Carl Burgos(Golden Age creator of The Human Torch) and Tove Jansson (cartoonist of the internationally popular “Moomins”).I'm always amazed by just where you can find Jansson's Moomins books. They're practically everywhere.
And the other 14 nominees to vote on are pretty good as well: Lynda Barry, Kim Deitch, Rube Goldberg, Edward Gorey, Bill Griffith, Matt Groening, Jack Kamen, Francoise Mouly, George Pérez, Antonio Prohias, P. Craig Russell, Rumiko Takahashi, Jacques Tardi, and Herb Trimpe. Through the Eisner voting process, four of these cartoonists will be also inducted into the Eisner Hall of Fame. There are not many ways that you can go wrong by voting for any of these people.
** Two Long-Delayed Archie Horror Comics Series Will Return This Summer (Vulture)-- The first issue of Afterlife with Archie hit comic shops in September 2013. The eighth and so far last issue #8 was published in May 2015. It looks like the ninth issue will be hitting the stands in June.
The writer of both Afterlife with Archie and the also-returning Sabrina Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa offers an excuse even though he doesn't think it's an excuse.
The writer of both Afterlife with Archie and the also-returning Sabrina Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa offers an excuse even though he doesn't think it's an excuse.
After a too long delay, Archie Horror is back from near-death, with a new issue of Afterlife with Archie and a new issue of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. With follow-up issues already in process! There’s no excuse for late books, just apologies. It’s been a humbling — and busy — few months. I’ve been working on our soon-to-be filmed television pilot Riverdale, which will bring our favorite characters to life for the first time in … decades, maybe? Again, that’s not an excuse, just something that’s been taking up a lot of time and energy.** Quotes About Comics is turning into one of my favorite Tumblr sites lately and this quote from Moebius really reveals a lot about how you can read his comics.
To go with this quote, Dark Horse has finally released some information on their upcoming Moebius Library.
The long out-of-print Edena Cycle from Moebius gets a deluxe hardcover treatment! Moebius’s World of Edena story arc is comprised of five chapters—Upon a Star, Gardens of Edena, The Goddess, Stel, and Sra—which are all collected here.
I don't believe the final part of the Edena Cycle Sra has ever been published in English. I know I'll be in line for this book.
** The Making of Daniel Clowes and a golden age for comics (The California Sunday Magazine)-- There are so many great things about this article about Clowes. First there's the portrait of that's drawn by Rotu Modan, Chris Ware, and Anders Nilson.
Then there's the opening description of Clowes.
Clowes is in an upstairs room of his Piedmont home, a lovely two-story 1912 Craftsman set along an equally lovely tree-lined street of this East Bay suburb, talking about how the book came to be. Six feet tall and slim, Clowes has a salt-and-pepper beard and sharp blue eyes. Despite possessing the most sardonic of wits on paper, he laughs easily and often in person, at his jokes and others’. This afternoon, he’s taking care of his beloved beagle, Ella, who has dementia and barks every 20 minutes or so because she forgets that Clowes is at home. Along one wall of the room, which doubles as artist studio and comics archive, collections of Peanuts and Nancy and Gasoline Alley share shelf space with Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library and the complete works of R. Crumb. An old-timey paperback carousel is stocked with Mad magazine reprints; in a nearby cabinet there’s a tin-toy knockoff of Fred Flintstone, his 5 o’clock shadow an eerie blue.
And they haven't even gotten to talking about his new comic Patience or his career yet. And this portion talking about how the cartoonists of the 1990s were kind of riffing on the same things:
Follow the arc of Clowes’s career and you’ll see how he and his peers have riffed on one another’s themes over the years, like the best of jazzers. Clowes’s angry young men are second cousins to those of Joe Matt (Spent) and Johnny Ryan (Angry Youth Comix); years before Enid and Rebecca appeared in Ghost World, Jaime Hernandez was chronicling the lives of two teen punk girls, Maggie and Hopey, in his masterful, decades-spanning Love and Rockets. You’ll see the same wistful nostalgia in the works of Ware and Seth (Palookaville) and Clowes.
** Framed! Meet the creators shaking up modern comics (The Guardian)-- The snarky part of me wants to say that Image PR did a great job getting this story placed.
And leave it to Mark Millar to proclaim superheroes are on their way out when he's done a lot of the work to show them the door:
“I suspect that heroes are going to phase out,” says Mark Millar, the Scottish writer whose early 00s Marvel series The Ultimates was the foundation for The Avengers movies and thus the entire Marvel cinematic universe. “If we’re not at superhero saturation point yet, then we’re very close to it. Those characters made a lot of sense in the middle of war and economic crisis, when fear and uncertainty draw you to heroic figures who can put things right. But that moment can’t last forever. Post-Star Wars, I think we’re going to see the return of upbeat, family-friendly science fiction.”
