Captains Marvel and America
Ever drink coffee from the pot, ?
C'mon, admit it. This is a safe place.
Hawkeye 19 is in stores today.
Maybe my favorite convention photo ever taken. Meet Aurora (Captain Marvel) and her sister, Gloria (Captain America). This is the future of comics, folks. Photo (and dresses and awesome fierceness) by their mom, Yaro Trujillo. -- kelly sue
- matt fraction -
When we had Henry, Soup and I were – well, to paraphrase Daniel Boone – not lost, but a mite bit bewildered there for a bit. The first time Henry cried I said “I don’t know. Feed it?” So there was some learning space, is what I’m saying.
Kel tore into lots of great mom podcasts and learned on one of them about babies and sign language. Children can sign before they can speak and the sooner a baby can communicate what it wants or needs the sooner its frustration abates. This was how we found Rachel Coleman and Signing Time.
Her Baby Signing Time series, full of songs, gentle music, and essential baby signs (More! Eat! Drink! Potty!) fell into regular rotation and soon the whole family was singing and signing along.
And one sleep deprived day it occurred to me that sign language – ASL or otherwise—is a lot like comics. You’re telling a story with images and minimal motion. There’s a degree of acting on the part of the speaker. It has a unique grammar that, while similar to spoken English, isn’t transliterated spoken English – much like comics and film. And I thought, huh, one day I should do a sign language comic.
So that day’s today. And I wouldn’t be here without Miss Rachel and her daughters Leah and Lucy and nephew Alex. Even Hopkins the Frog. Thanks, Coleman clan. Thanks, Signing Time.
HAWKEYE 19 picks up from the end of…. 16? Where the Barton brothers lay in their foyer bloodied, brutalized, and beaten. Clint’s suffered profound hearing loss. Barney’s in a wheelchair.
And yet it’s not the first time they’ve found themselves here…
•
SEX CRIMINALS 7 is at the printer as we speak; should street in a couple-few Wednesdays. I sent 8 to Chip yesterday.
David and Annie are cranking on respective HAWKEYE issues subsequent. Matt’s starting work coloring 20 so we’re getting there.
Howard’s nearing the finish-line on SATELLITE SAM 10.
ODY-C #1 is going to have an eight page foldout to open things up. We wanted to go 10 but apparently that’d break the printing presses. SO there’s still like 24 pages of story AFTER that ten pages, all in one issue.
This happened:
- kelly sue deconnick -
Despite (because of?) having a pretty grand life, all things considered, I'm in a funk this morning. Is there a word for the mix of despair, guilt and impotent rage that accompanies the morning news? I think it started with a Frank DeFord piece on Roger Goodell, which led to this Forbes piece on the Ray Rice fiasco, then to this Feministing piece. Is this really so hard? My son is SIX YEARS OLD and he understands that his sister is FOUR and HALF HIS SIZE and sometimes she will provoke him or even hit him and it's not right or fair or just but when it happens he needs to get himself out of danger and to an adult, not, say, knock her unconscious. He's six. He can barely read, but he understands the basic notion that he is responsible for his own actions and provocation is no excuse for physical violence.
Then my search for progress on the rescue of the missing Nigerian school girls turned up more depressing backward motion. What the fuck is wrong with this world, my friends? How are there human beings who would pull children out of schools at gun point for the crime of wanting an education...? I feel deeply powerless in the face of this horror. And... guilty. Guilty that I get to go on about my day with the reasonable certainty that I will read bedtime stories to my children tonight. It's been more than 100 days since the mothers of Chibok had that luxury. And I feel sick that I don't know what to do about that.
I have absurd fantasies that every one of us safely outraged behind our keyboards could actually DO something. There must be millions of us. Two hundred and nineteen girls are still missing. If only we could walk together into the Boko Haram encampments and take them back. Millions of us. How many militants are holding our girls? Hundreds? Thousands? I bet we could trample those bastards like elephants on dry grass.
If only.
So where do I go from here? Is there a smooth transition for 'oh, hey! and here's the status of my books!'? There's not. I just have to ask you to forgive me for screaming into the ether and move on.
Let's start with BITCH PLANET. That seems somehow appropriate.
So... good news/bad news. The good news is that things are continuing apace, and I'm feeling... what? The good kind of terrified, if that makes sense. The bad news is that we're pushing the solicit so the first issue won't come out until December, as opposed to November. Nothing's gone wrong, we just realized we could do something really cool if we pushed it, and after much weighing of options we decided it's better to wait a little longer and try it. So... that's what we're doing. Yay...? I know, we probably should be celebrating, but it feels like a bummer.
Decidedly NOT on the bummer end of the scale is that the site is up at www.bitchpla.net. Not a lot there yet, but you can have a look at the NON-COMPLIANT mark that Valentine De Landro designed. (Scroll down a bit here and you'll see it in tattoo form. We had a bunch of temporary tattoos make up and I started giving them out at SDCC last weekend.) If you got one, show us a pic by tagging it #rucompliant on Twitter or Tumblr. We want to seeeeee.
CAPTAIN MARVEL is as far ahead as it's ever been, which is a novel experience for me. HIGHER FURTHER FASTER MORE is wrapping up and we're about to launch into the books that will compose the second trade -- tentatively titled STAY FLY. Look for more info on that in the AR video that will run with CM6.
My work this week has been on PROMETHEUS FIRE AND STONE: OMEGA, BITCH PLANET and an unannounced prose project. Everything's moving forward at a steady pace, though, of course, never as quick as I'd like. Got some new research materials for PRETTY DEADLY VOL 2 and have been immersed in those. I miss Ginny and Alice and Sissy and the others. My heart hurts to get back to them. [Seeing Sissy and Ginny and Death (!!) cosplayers at SDCC didn't do anything to lessen that ache. Cosplayers: you have no idea how powerful you are.]
Oh, and in all my spare time, I'm starting a column at ImageComics.com. I have a few ideas going, but if there's anything in particular that you'd like to see covered, reply to this email and let me know.
On the home front, Tallulah has declared herself Black Thunder. We thought you should know.
This week's request from the survey:
"I'd like to get 'homework assignments.' Maybe Matt could recommend a comic once a month for the readers to 'reverse engineer' much like he's done on his tumblr page..."
So your homework is this: read Bendis’ new book WORDS FOR PICTURES. It’s the book I wish existed when I was a kid trying to learn.
And then – find a page from a comic you love. It’s best if there’s words on it. Now take the words away. Does the page still make sense? Can you still tell what’s happening and why? If the sound were to drop of out a film covering the same shots and dialogue beats, would you be lost? Now take away the pictures. Does the page still make sense? Can you remove either? Does the page itself push the story narratively? If so, why, and if not, why not? And if not, does it belong there? Why? Why not?
Now write a version of that page entirely without words that still gets the point of the page across. It can be longer than a page for the sake of the exercise.
Find another page from a comic. Any comic. Literally any comic. Ask yourself questions about it. As many questions as you can think of. Why this, why that, why not the other thing. Was this a choice, why was it made. Just keep banging away at questions. Why this shot, what does this shot say, what does this panel say, what does it say next to the other. Take it apart. Take it all apart and see what you can find under the hood. Don’t have to answer -- the point is in the asking.
#ICYMI
The Golden Age of Comics Is Now at Complex Magazine
Here's Why Comic Con 2014 Was Actually Great For Comics at i09
Chuck Palahniuk on Fight Club 2 at Paste Magazine
Full List of Eisner Winners and Nominees on Comics Alliance
Lauren Sankovitch is Non-Compliant. Are you compliant? #noncompliant #bitchplanet
tl;dr
July 30 - Hawkeye 19 in stores
August 6 - Kelly Sue, Fraction, Bendis, Soma & Oeming signing at Excalibur, Portland, OR
August 13 - Captain Marvel 6 in stores
August 13 - KS signing at Illusive Comics and Games in Santa Clara, CA
August 27 - Hawkeye 20 in stores
August 29-31 - Kelly Sue at Dragon*Con
September 5-7 - Fraction at Cincy Comiccon
September 9 - Henry Leo's Birthday
September 10 - Hawkeye 21, Captain Marvel 7 in stores
September 20-21 - KS & MF at Rose City Comic Con
October 8 - Hawkeye: LA Woman tpb & Captain Marvel: Higher Further Faster More tpb in stores