You're Yul Brenner Westworld, Reporting from the field. (Weekend Pattering for Friday, September 22nd, 2017)

Panel

Doonesbury by Gary Trudeau

Previously on Panel Patter

Cover of the Next Week




Can we all take a moment to just appreciate how awesome and fun these Michael Cho covers to DC's silver age omnibuses have been?  Kid Flash is probably my all-time favorite sidekick and I love that his first costume was basically just a Mini-Me Flash costume.  Imagine if Robin debuted in a Batman costume and how awesome that would have been.  

Interviews


*** Interview – Ryan Sands on the Return of Frontier, the 2018 line-up & Parenthood (The Beat)-- The return of Frontier is great news.  But it's the best of reasons why Sands took most of 2017 off.
While Frontier is a showcase series who either features new artists who haven’t been published, international artists or established North American artists. The series had veered from its original goal. It moved slightly away from the original concepts as the series featured work by more established cartoonists than international or new cartoonists. Michael Deforge, Eleanor Davis and Rebecca Sugar were examples of that trend, but this upcoming season of Frontier aims to return to the series’ roots to feature a better mix and distribution of artists.
You can get a subscription to Frontier here.


This and That


*** ShortBox: hit for #6 (ShortBox)-- Orders for the fourth and final ShortBox are up through September 30th.  These curated comic boxes highlight some of the best cartoonists around.  I've got the comics from the last box sitting next to me on my desk, basically constantly mocking me for not getting around to reading them yet.




*** The 10 Best Graphic Memoirs (The AV Club)-- This is a few weeks old already but Mimi Pond, no stranger to graphic memoirs herself, lists out her 10 favorite autobiographical comics.

I have been a cartoonist all my life. When I say all my life, I mean I was looking at the Sunday comics before I could read and copying them. As soon as I could read, my father put the E.C. Mad Comics Signet Paperbacks in my chubby little mitts and soon I was howling at the parody antics of “Starchie” and “Superduper Man.” I think I was eight when I saw Jules Feiffer’s Sick Sick Sick, and it made me feel terribly sophisticated that I could grasp even a word of it. I couldn’t wait to grow up and become neurotic! Even so, I loved children’s books and I often wondered why, when you became an adult, they made you give up the pictures. It was like you were being punished for having reached adulthood. I always wanted more pictures. You had to know where to look, though. I have been looking all my life for those stories, told the way I thought they should be told, drawn in ways that thrilled me to my marrow.

*** IDW Actually Considering Taking Action Against Writer…Based On the Whims of Right-Wing Harassers (The Mary Sue)-- This is one of any number of links that I could have posted this week but most of the other ones were twitter threads like this one from Zainab Akhtar or this one from Jennifer De Guzman.  It's not so much that there's a correlation between these but each of these helps illustrate the tone of fandom right now.  This Comics & Diversity guy (not linking to him but you should be able to find him on Twitter and YouTube) looks to be a prime example of what's going on right now, targeting comics, professionals, and companies for not making comics "like they used to be" or something like that.  

But whether it's you don't like Squirrel Girl, the writer of GI Joe said something kind of silly on Twitter, or that there are girls in the comics clubhouse, there's this real backlash to change or differing expressions of thought happening right now and it's not just in comics.  It's part of the culture right now in this weird, ugly shift back to isolationist and small thinking.  Rick and Morty's Dan Harmon has to call out trolls who are attacking the women on that show's writing staff.
These knobs, that want to protect the content they think they own—and somehow combine that with their need to be proud of something they have, which is often only their race or gender. It’s offensive to me as someone who was born male and white, and still works way harder than them, that there’s some white male [fan out there] trying to further some creepy agenda by ‘protecting’ my work. I’ve made no bones about the fact that I loathe these people. It fucking sucks. And the only thing I can say is if you’re lucky enough to make a show that is really good that people like, that means some bad people are going to like it too. You can’t just insist that everybody who watches your show get their head on straight … And I’m speaking for myself—I don’t want the show to have a political stance. But at the same time, individually, these [harassers] aren’t politicians and don’t represent politics. They represent some shit that I probably believed when I was 15.

Heck, they're even criticizing Superman comics for having him in a recent comic protect immigrants from a gunman here and here

But Superman's fictional; he can take it.  It's these personal attacks on real, live women and men that's particularly disturbing and needs to stop.  

We can be better than this.  We have to be better.  We can have different thoughts, beliefs and interests without demanding blood and money.
So don't be surprised to see the Flash rushing Mexicans across the border or Wonder Woman using her lasso to round up Texas ranchers trying to defend their property.
I think someone at Fox News is trying to use their bully pulpit to pitch to DC right now.

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