Smash Pages Q&A: Elizabeth Beier on ‘Bisexual Trials and Errors’

Elizabeth Beier only started working in comics a few years ago, but the graphic designer has made a name for herself self-publishing two issues of the comic Bisexual Trials and Errors, and comics like We Belong and I Like Your Headband. The winner of the 2016 Queer Press Grant from Prism and a Moth StorySLAM winner, this fall Northwest Press is publishing Beier’s first full length book, The Big Book of Bisexual Trials and Errors.

The spine of the collection is Beier’s own autobiographical story of starting to date after a six year relationship and being intimidated and finding her way through the entertaining confusion. Those comics, along with the flow charts and infographics that Beier enjoys crafting, manage to be funny and relatable in a way that transcends age and orientation. But the book is also much more that. Beier mentioned that she loves to draw faces, but she’s also interested in voice, and that interest in authenticity, in specificity, in capturing individuals and their stories is at the heart of her work. This is a coming of age story about a twenty-something woman, but it’s also about a woman situating herself in and coming to understand her community.

The book will be coming out this fall from Northwest Press, and the book is currently up as part of Kickstarter Gold, which highlights new projects by creators who have used the crowdfunding site in the past “making new works inspired by their past projects, so backers can discover extra-amazing ideas.” In 2013 Northwest published Anything That Loves, a comics anthology of comics story that took place in “the world outside of gay and straight boxes,” as editor and publisher Zan Christensen put it. The book was a critical and commercial success and Northwest will be publishing Beier’s book as a companion to and a continuation of that conversation. The campaign, which can be found here, runs through July 27.

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DC & Archie & Harley & Ivy & Betty & Veronica & Dini & Andreyko & Braga

Creators Paul Dini, Marc Andreyko and Laura Braga team up for a crossover tale starring DC’s Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy as they meet Archie Comics’ Betty and Veronica.

The distance between Gotham City and Riverdale is about to get much, much smaller, as DC Comics and Archie Comics bring together four of their most popular female characters for a big crossover: Harley Quinn, Poison Ivy, Betty and Veronica.

Harley Quinn co-creator Paul Dini will team with Marc Andreyko to write Harley & Ivy Meet Betty & Veronica, which will feature art by Laura Braga.

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Sharknife returns in Corey Lewis’ ‘Sun Bakery’ #5

The popular character who previously appeared in two graphic novels makes his triumphant return in August.

Corey Lewis’ infectiously fun restaurant defender, Sharknife, will return in the creator’s Sun Bakery anthology this summer.

Last seen in 2012, Sharknife previously appeared in two graphic novels published by Oni Press. An employee of The Guandong Factory, Caesar Hallelujah protects the restaurant from the monsters that live inside its walls by transforming into the heroic Sharknife — much to the delight of the establishment’s customers.

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Comics Lowdown: Comic-Con to Stay in San Diego

Plus: Udon to publish Daigo manga, another comics shop is robbed, a comics professor quits his job

It’s official: Comic-Con International will remain in San Diego for now, resisting the blandishments of other cities such as Los Angeles and Anaheim, which have been trying to woo it away. San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer announced on June 30 that the city has signed a three-year deal with Comic-Con that will last through 2021; the current contract ends after next year’s show. Faulconer made a pitch for expanding the convention center, something that has been talked about for years now; the City Council recently refused his request to put a special tax on the November ballot to fund an expansion. Con-goers get a bit of a break in this new contract, though: The last contract held all hotel rooms to their 2016 prices for the duration, and the new one only allows a 4% increase over the 2018 price over the subsequent three years.

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Smash Pages Q&A: Sophie Yanow

The creator of ‘War of Streets and Houses’ talks about her journalism comics collection, ‘What is a Glacier?,’ and her work translating ‘Pretending is Lying.’

Since her book War of Streets and Houses was published by Uncivilized Books, it seems as though Sophie Yanow has been publishing work on a regular basis. She’s become a significant comics journalist, regularly publishing pieces in The Nib and The Guardian and elsewhere, covering the protests at Standing Rock and the U.S. elections. This year she has two very different comics coming out. The New York Review of Comics has just released Pretending is Lying, a comics memoir by Dominique Goblet that Yanow translated. At TCAF, Retrofit Comics released What is a Glacier, which collects some of Yanow’s journalism comics.

Yanow is currently teaching at the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont and this career model – making nonfiction comics, teaching, translation – has existed among prose writers and poets for generations, but it’s something new to comics. We spoke recently about Goblet, translation, nonfiction and the idea that Pretending is Lying.

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Prepare for winter with Benjamin Dewey’s ‘Game of Thrones’ prints

Have Jon Snow and Daenarys Targaryen face off on your wall before they face off on TV.

Benjamin Dewey, artist for The Autumnlands and creator of The Tragedy Series, will help hype you for the return of A Game of Thrones with these two prints, featuring everyone’s favorite Mother of Dragons and King in the North.

It’s more than likely that we’ll see Jon Snow and Daenarys Targaryen stand face to face at some point before the series ends, so why not hang these two prints up facing each other and live out that scene now?

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Image Comics pulls ‘Divided States of America’ #4 cover after widespread criticism

After criticism from creators and fans, Image Comics announced that they would not use the controversial cover to Divided States of America #4 that was originally solicited. Instead, they will use the planned cover for issue #6 on issue #4.

The quick version:

1. Released with Image Comics’ September 2017 solicitations, the original cover to Divided States of Hysteria #4 featured an image of a Pakistani man being lynched, his pants down with his genitals mutilated, and a name tag with the slur “Paki” on it.

2. The cover was met with criticism from creators, fans and critics; these reactions followed quickly on the heels of negative reactions to the first issue and its portrayal of a trans sex worker being attacked.

3. Image Comics released a response over the weekend, which included the announcement that they would not use the original cover, replacing it with what would have been the cover for issue #6.

So what’s this all about? Let’s break it down …

[NOTE: The original cover to Divided States of America #4 is pretty graphic, but I’ve included it below and have attempted to hide it … but given differences in browsers, there’s no telling if the code doing so will work as intended in every browser instance. So, please be warned.]

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Comics Lowdown: Manga pirates can’t go legit

Plus: ‘Check Please’ goes to First Second, ‘Infini-T’ Force goes to Udon, Jill Thompson, Red Planet and more.

A Pirate’s Life… Ain’t what it used to be. Cecilia D’Anastasio talks to several former scanlators (including NJT, who set up MangaHelpers back in the day) about their struggles to go legit, and she also talks to some legitimate translators about what they do. While scanlators defend what they do as providing a service by fans, for fans—no ugly profit involved—it’s also true that publishers may not want to license a series that is already being widely read on bootleg sites. Also, they are finding that publishers don’t want to hire them, and the pay isn’t enough to let them quit their day jobs. Because, as Kodansha Comics’ Ben Applegate observed, “Whenever there’s a large group of people giving away their labor for free, it’s going to depress pay for those who are trying to do things legitimately.”

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Smash Pages Q&A: Transience and forgotten memories

Do you remember yesterday? I often barely remember where I parked but I more or less know what I do day to day. In Transience, Leo Johnson and Ricardo Mo have assembled a collection of stories that build a world wrecked from amnesia.

In a unique science fiction premise, they’ve imagined a world where a series of biological attacks have left cities and towns around the world without the ability to form new memories. Each morning, people wake up with the previous day lost to them. Each story is set in a different city around the world where years have passed since the attack.

The creative teams tackling these stories often come from the location of their story, and make up an international team of collaborators that helped form this world.

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Fund Me Friday: ‘A Perfect Circle,’ Elizabeth Beier and more

Plus: ‘Blocked: Stories from the World of Online Dating,’ Chris Samnee, Craig Rousseau and the Killer Bees!

As crowdfunding continues to be a viable method for creators to fund their creative endeavors and connect directly with fans, comic-related projects flourish on sites like Kickstarter, Patreon and IndieGoGo. Here’s a look at a few recent campaigns that caught our eyes.

A Perfect Circle minicomic

Creators involved: Writer Eric Esquivel and artist Ryan Quackenbush
Deadline: July 22
Goal: $150 (Funded!)

What to know: Esquivel shared where the story idea for this eight-page minicomic came from on Tumblr. “I got dumped at the tail end of October last year. It was, as these things often are, horrible,” he wrote. “To cope with my confusion, I did what I always do: wrote a comic about it. Specifically: a comic book about a guy who–after realizing that the last three decades of his life have been essentially a repeat of the same sad story over, and over, and over again– embarks on an epic journey to find a supernatural means with which to obliterate his personality, and start fresh.”

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Smash Pages Q&A: Eleanor Davis on ‘You & A Bike & A Road’

The creator of ‘How To Be Happy’ discusses her latest book from Koyama Press, which details her cycling trip from Arizona to Georgia.

In 2014, Fantagraphics published How To Be Happy, a collection of short comics by Eleanor Davis, which immediately established the cartoonist as one of the major figures of her generation. In the book, Davis jumped between styles and approaches, telling different kinds of stories ranging from the fantastic to realistic. Since then she made a children’s book with Drew Weing, Flop To The Top, for Toon Books. She also made the comics novella Libby’s Dad, which came out last fall from Retrofit Comics, and was recently awarded the Slate Book Review 2017 Cartoonist Studio Prize for Best Print Comic.

Davis’ new book, out now from Koyama Press, is You & A Bike & A Road. The book is a series of comics about a bike trip that Davis undertook from Tucson, Arizona, where she grew up, to her home in Athens, Georgia. We spoke recently about the book, the journey, agitprop and more.

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Archie returns to his ‘classic’ style in ‘Your Pal, Archie’ #1

Check out a preview of the first issue, due out July 26.

This past spring Archie Comics announced that their “classic-style” Archie would return in a new series by Ty Templeton and Dan Parent … with a small twist. Parent and Templeton have tweaked the artwork a bit, noting it “will be influenced from the styles and fashion of The CW’s hit new Riverdale TV series, but will remain familiar for fans of the classic style.”

The company has now released a preview of the first issue, which looks and feels more like the traditional Archie, but with the twist they noted in their release. The first five issues will feature connecting variant cover by Les McClaine, and there’s also an Incredible Hulk #181 tribute cover featuring Archie vs. Jughead that’s exclusive to Stadium Comics.

Check the preview out below.

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