Parents fight to remove Alison Bechdel’s ‘Fun Home’ from school curriculum, Hope Larson’s ‘All Summer Long’ and more!
Legal: The high court in Madras, India, has ruled that political cartoonists are entitled to freedom of expression, stating that since it is their job to sway public opinion, often by making fun of public figures, they should not be vulnerable to lawsuits:
Upholding cartoonists’ unbridled freedom of expression, Justice Swaminathan stated that the “art of the cartoonist is often not reasoned or even-handed, but slashing and one-sided.”
He went on to quote extensively from US Supreme Court Justice William Rhenquist’s celebrated judgement in Hustler Magazine Inc v Falwell (1988): “The political cartoon is a weapon of attack, of scorn, ridicule and satire; it is least effective when it tries to pat some politician on the back. It is usually welcome as a bee sting, and it is always controversial in some quarters.”
The judge and several other commentators made numerous references to American cartoons, including the New Yorker cover depicting Donald Trump naked.
Saladin Ahmed is an award-winning writer of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, best known for his epic fantasy novel Throne of the Crescent Moon. Last year he began writing comics at Marvel. His series Black Bolt was one of the most acclaimed superhero stories of the year, and he’s writing two new series at Marvel launching this spring including the much anticipated Exiles.
This year Ahmed also has a new comic, Abbott, drawn by Sami Kivela and colored by Jason Wordie. The five-issue miniseries from Boom tells the story of Elena Abbott, a reporter in 1972 Detroit who is dealing with social and political issues of the era in addition to a supernatural threat she’s trying to understand. The series and the lead character are very much a type, the noir influenced supernatural investigator and the series is reminiscent of Jamie Delano’s run on Hellblazer, which like this was a horror/fantasy story that was very political and concerned with social issues. It’s the story of a time and place that has a lot of echoes with today as Ahmed pointed out in our conversation.
The third issue of Abbott is out this week and Ahmed was kind enough to answer a few questions about the project.
DC Comics, Marvel, BOOM! Studios and Black Mask Studios all represented in the 10 nominees in the comic book category.
The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, or GLAAD, have announced the nominees for their 2018 Media Awards, which recognize and honor media for their fair, accurate and inclusive representations of the LGBTQ community and the issues that affect their lives.
BOOM! Studios received four nominations, including one for last year’s winner, The Woods. They were followed by Marvel with three, DC Comics with two and Black Mask Studios with one. James Tynion IV, writer of The Woods, was involved with three of the books that received nominations.
The GLAAD Media Awards ceremonies will be held in Los Angeles on April 12 at The Beverly Hilton, and in New York on May 5 at the New York Hilton Midtown.
The artist discusses his latest project with writer Greg Pak, involving giant robots, an interstellar war and the teenager in the middle of it all.
Takeshi Miyazawa has been drawing comics for years now. Some of us first noticed his work in Sidekicks and Love in Tights, others noticed his work when he started working for Marvel, with his runs on Runaways and Mary Jane and Ms. Marvel.
His current project, Mech Cadet Yu, is a book he co-created with writer Greg Pak and is about an interstellar war, an alien invasion and the unlikely teenager who finds himself at the center of this. It’s hard to make a book about giant robots that looks and feels new and dynamic, but Pak and Miyazawa have done just that. In every issue they manage to expand and deepen the world they’ve established in fascinating ways.
Next month the fifth issue of the series, and a collection of the first four issues come out, and Miyazawa answered a few questions about the project.
The novelist and screenwriter discusses her work on ‘Slam! The Next Jam,’ the BOOM! Box series that wraps up next week. Check out exclusive artwork from the final issue!
Pamela Ribon has had a long, successful writing career. She’s the author of novels including Going in Circles and Why Moms Are Weird and the memoir Notes To Boys (And Other Things I Shouldn’t Share in Public). She’s a member of the Disney Animation StoryTrust and has written or co-written a number of films including Moana, Smurfs: The Lost Village, and the upcoming Ralph Breaks the Internet: Wreck-It-Ralph 2. In 2016 Variety named her one of “10 Screenwriters to Watch” and she is a 2017 Film Independent Directing Lab Fellow.
Ribon also co-created and writes Slam! The series from BOOM! Studios’ BOOM! Box imprint revolves around roller derby derby and two very different women – Jen and Maisie – who become friends through the sport. The first miniseries featured artwork by Veronica Fish, while the second one, Slam! The Next Jam, features art by Marina Julia and covers by Fish.
It’s a series that spends a great deal of care and attention on how the sport works, on injuries, on depicting bodies and body types properly. More than that, it’s a also a comic that takes advantage of being a comic, playing with the form in a number of small but powerful and dynamic ways that demonstrate that Ribon has a deep understanding of how the medium works and what it is capable of doing. But really it’s a story of people and passion and obsession told with care and a great sense of fun.
If that weren’t enough Ribon wrote the just-released Rick and Morty #32, and has a graphic novel coming out next year, My Boyfriend is a Bear. The second miniseries, Slam! The Next Jam wraps up next week, and BOOM! sent an exclusive look at the issue to accompany my discussion with Ribon on roller derby, relationships and Chris Ware.
Plus: Hell’s Kitchen is trendy, fun and socially progressive comics, Alex Simmons and Erica Henderson celebrated, industry of immigrants
Legal: Political cartoonist Ted Rall has lost another round in his lawsuit against the Los Angeles Times. Rall, a former freelancer for the Times sued the paper for defamation and wrongful termination last year, after the editors determined a blog post he had written about his treatment by the Los Angeles Police Department was inaccurate. The Times dropped Rall as a freelancer and published an editor’s note stating that the blog post was incorrect. Last week, a Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Joseph Kalin ruled that because Rall was a public figure, the editor’s note and any other articles about him are protected by the First Amendment. Consequently, Kalin granted the motion by the Times’s parent company, Tribune Media, to strike the complaint.
Legal: The Malaysian political cartoonist Zunar (pictured above) has filed a lawsuit against the government and the police, including 16 individual police officers, for seizing his books and T-shirts at a fund-raising event last December. Zunar had organized a “Tea with Zunar” event at the Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall in Kuala Lumpur on December 17, but before it began, police arrested the cartoonist and an assistant who was in charge of sales, and they confiscated 1,187 books and 103 T-shirts. Zunar and his assistant were released, but the merchandise was not returned. In the suit, Zunar alleges that the arrest and seizure were illegal and that some booksellers will no longer carry his books because of the fear they will be confiscated.
New partnership with Nickelodeon will bring more 1990s Nick shows to KaBOOM!
BOOM! Studios and Nickelodeon have entered into a partnership to create comics based on the network’s 1990s television shows (so no Paw Patrol or Blaze, much to my son’s regret), and they’ve recruited an interesting creative team for the first one — Ignatz award-winner Box Brown will work with artist Lisa Dubois to tell new stories about Tommy, Chucky, Phil and Lil.
DC Comics, IDW, Marvel, BOOM! Studios, Image and Black Mask Studios all represented as comics category expands to 10 nominations.
The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, or GLAAD, have announced the nominees for their annual Media Awards, which recognize and honor media for their fair, accurate and inclusive representations of the LGBTQ community and the issues that affect their lives.
DC Comics and Marvel Comics both received three nominations apiece (Dc shares one of theirs with IDW, as the co-published the Love is Love anthology), while BOOM! Studios received two — which include last year’s winner, Lumberjanes.
The digital comics platform’s new program features exclusive comic content for comiXology and Kindle.
ComiXology has announced a line of exclusively digital comics, teaming with BOOM! Studios, Valiant Entertainment and the estate of Harvey Kurtzman on new content. Called “comiXology Originals,” the comics can only be found on comiXology and Kindle starting next year.
“Our mission is to make everyone on the face of the planet a comic fan, and with comiXology Originals we’re excited to offer a range of content by diverse creators,” said comiXology co-founder and CEO David Steinberger in a press release. “It’s fantastic to be working with publishers across the spectrum to deliver great comics to comiXology and Kindle, offering fans stories that they can’t get anywhere else.”
BOOM! Studios will offer a more realistic take on the WWE superstars, starting with a comic about the Shield.
Before Comic-Con International kicked off, BOOM! Studios announced a partnership with World Wrestling Entertainment to create comics based on WWE superstars. Not many details were revealed at the time, although they did share several comic images featuring WWE superstars. At the con itself, they revealed the focus of their first comic, their overall approach and the writer who will help bring it all to life.
IGN reports that during the con, BOOM! announced Spider-Woman writer — and WWE fan — Dennis Hopeless will write WWE: Then. Now. Forever., a 40-page one-shot starring Dean Ambrose, Roman Reigns and Seth Rollins set during their Shield days. Shield, not SHIELD. So no, they won’t be cast as secret agents or space pirates or gladiators in Rome; the only Roman Empire that’ll be featured is the dwindling piece of the WWE Universe that still cheers for Reigns. The comics will be more realistic takes on the superstars, rather than putting them into a fictional universe like the last round of WWE comics did.
With issue 7 released of Cluster in early September writer edbrisson was kind enough to grant me an interview for his creator-owned Boom Studios! series.
Written by: Ed Brisson\Illustrated by: Damian Couceiro\Coloured by: Cassie Kelly
Midlothian is on the brink of a full-scale war between GOE and the rebels led by Samara and Grace.
Tim O’Shea: While the bulk of this interview pertains to issue 7, I would love focus on the opening of issue #1 with Samara Simmons’ arrest. How did you decide on that for your open?
Ed Brisson: It felt like a good place to seed the initial mystery of WHY Samara had ended up in prison, which eventually leads her to Midlothian. Love giving the reader just enough info so that we can get on with the story and then slowly doling out details as we go.
Also I love in issue #1, the story beat shown here.
What prompted you to play it that way?
Samara has a lot of baggage and she’s trying to deal with it in her own way, without any help from others. She could have easily turned to her father and NOT ended up on Midlothian. She could try to make friends in Tranent to make her time easier, but she didn’t. She’s in a self-imposed exile to pay penance for her crime.
What made you want to tell this original series at BOOM?
It was an idea that I’d been batting around in one form or another since high school. At one point, in early 2014, I’d picked it back up and was working on it and thought that Damian would be an amazing collaborator for it (He and I had done SONS of ANARCHY for BOOM, but had also done a few indie things together, going back to 2004). I was about to draft him an email and, I shit you not, as I was writing it, an email from Eric Harburn (my editor at BOOM) arrived in my inbox asking if I had any interest in doing a creator owned book with Damian at BOOM. It was fate! I told him that I was 100% interested and sent the short pitch for CLUSTER and, well, here we are now.
Who are some of the old-school, hard-boiled action storytellers that inspire you?
I’m a huge crime fan. My favourite authors are Elmore Leonard, Jim Thompson, Richard Stark, Charles Willeford, Richard Price, etc, etc.
I’m also a kid of the VHS generation and am a fan of 80s horror and sci-fi films. I tried to bring a lot of that influence into this book – movies like ALIENS (of course), DEADLOCK (rereleased as WEDLOCK), ROBOCOP, ENEMY MINE, THE BLOOD OF HEROES (basically any sci-fi with Rutger Hauer!). While CLUSTER is, of course, a comic first and foremost, giving it the flavour and feel of an 80s sci-fi flick was important to me.
Damian designed everything you see in the book. He’s responsible for bringing that feel to it. CLUSTER would be nothing without that.
Were there other names you considered or was the Punch always the Punch?
It was always The Punch. I like that it works two ways: that it’s your punch/time card and that if you mess with it, you’re gonna get hurt.
Compare the early issues to issue 7, which characters have grown on you?
McHenry is a character that really grew on me. He’s an awesome unstoppable force. If we were ever to do more CLUSTER, I’d love to do his origin story. Milton, one of the Pagurani, was a lot of fun to write, mostly because he doesn’t talk. His primary mode of communication is a big thumbs up.
I was struck at the scene were multiple dead bodies are draped next to active soldiers. Can you talk about not shying away from the casualties of war.
In that scene in particular, I just wanted to get across the idea that McHenry was this deadly bad ass that is not to be messed with. He’s not the type of guy who’s going to try and escape by sneaking around, he’s going to escape by cutting a path through anything (and anyone) that stands in his way.
I think it’s also important to pull back and show scenes like this sometimes to show what the actual devastation looks like. I mean, you can have a spaceship dog fight and ships explode and it becomes almost like a videogame, where once an avatar is killed, they just vanish. We really wanted to show that there are victims. There are bodies. People who once were are no longer. There’s a real devastation to this level of war and that should always be something that we think about – otherwise, why does the rest of it matter?
Do have anything else on the creator-owned horizon?
Well, although I can’t say much about it just yet, CLUSTER isn’t it for me and BOOM. Not long after it wraps, I’ll be writing a new creator owned book with them, due out in very early 2016, I believe. In fact, after this interview, I’m back onto writing the script for it. I’m very excited to get down to work on it and I think people are going to really dig it.
BUT, I can’t get into details! Just keep your peepers peeled.C
With issue 7 released of 