Happy holidays! An anonymous fear submitted to deep dark fears. Just trying to draw like Helen Jo today. The new Deep Dark Fears book is
available now at
Amazon,
B&N,
IndieBound,
iBooks,
Google Books, your local bookstore, and wherever books are sold!
Here’s the whole goddamned horrible and amazing Easter thing we got in the mail all in one post. I think World Harvest Church does this just to force Jesus Christ back from the sky early to topple their tables. It must be a huge temptation for Him.
But He won’t, because He doesn’t want to get Resurrection Seed all over His face.
One last thought – I just now got the double meaning of “the ultimate giveaway.” At least I hope that’s supposed to be a(n extremely tacky) double meaning. It is distinctly possible nobody at that church realizes what Easter celebrates. Hrm. Upon further reflection, I’m not sure what possibility is worse.
Shia LaBeouf’s Self-Published Comics May Be a Secret Code from Space
By Matt D. Wilson
Better known as an actor, the son of Indiana Jones, and a renowned scholar in the language of Cybertronian,Shia LaBeouf made a surprise appearance at the C2E2 comics convention in Chicago this past weekend, signing self-published comics that the Chicago Tribune described as being “borderline philosophical” and having “crude, child-like drawings.” I unfortunately missed the signing, but when I discovered that my local shop, Chicago Comics, was selling two of his three comics in the store, I dashed from the convention over to pick them up.
They are… an experience to read. If I didn’t know any better, I might say they’re secret messages sent from space robots to warn us of impending armageddon. Or maybe they’re just some freshman-English-level poetry thrown into a couple picture books. Probably the latter. One of the two LaBeouks I bought, Let’s F***ing Party (above), has no narrative at all.
![comicsalliance:
“ The Problem Of Women In Comics: Where They Are (and Aren’t) [Opinion]
ComicsAlliance welcomes guest writer Rachel Edidin, who works as an editor at Dark Horse Comics.
Lately, between Womanthology and DC’s All-New-Almost-All-Male 52,...](https://64.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lqpay5O4oC1qcw9rdo1_500.png)
The Problem Of Women In Comics: Where They Are (and Aren’t) [Opinion]
ComicsAlliance welcomes guest writer Rachel Edidin, who works as an editor at Dark Horse Comics.
Lately, between Womanthology and DC’s All-New-Almost-All-Male 52, the popular lens has turned-as it is wont to do every year or so-to the Problem of Women in Comics, namely, whether there are enough of them, and if not, what, if anything, should be done to fix that. As often as not, those conversations have two side effects:
First, they erase the women who do work in comic, by ignoring them, by dismissing them as tokens, or by discarding wholesale the areas of comics where women are most numerous and visible. The difference between the questions “Where are the women?” “Why aren’t there more women?” and “Why are so few women here?” is subtle but savage, and too often, the latter two questions and their nuance are discarded in favor of the clean sweep of the former.
Second, they bypass context. The Women-in-Comics problem doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s the product of a myriad of factors, combined and compounded over decades, tangled inseparably with the structure and the very definition of comics as we recognize them. If we’re going to fix this (and I don’t think there’s any reasonable doubt that this is something that needs to be fixed) we need not only to address immediate problem — the comparative dearth of women in comics, particularly in shared-universe superhero and other high-visibility genres — but to examine what created and now maintains that inequality.
So, how did we get here? What steps would you need to take to create and calcify the kind of demographic inequality that has become endemic to comics? Turns out it’s not that hard, and I’ve narrowed it down to three simple steps.
1. Purge the mainstream of all but one narrow subgenre, produced by two publishers.
2. Spend decades persistently and systematically alienating female creators and readers from that genre.
3. Manufacture pretexts to dismiss or simply ignore any work that doesn’t take place within that narrow genre / publisher paradigm.
Rachel elaborates on those points in this excellent editorial for ComicsAlliance.
When she left DC Comics in September of last year, Janelle Asselin was one of the few female editors at the company. Asselin, who worked on the Batman line, was an editor on Birds of Prey as well as an associate editor on Batwoman, Detective, Batman and few other books. During her time at DC Comics, Asselin began work on graduate thesis in publishing at Pace University. The topic was one that I have a lot of interest in — increasing the sales of comics among women. I follow Asselin on Twitter and kept tabs on her progress over several months. With the thesis finished, I set up some time to speak to her about her findings. The following is an interview with her about the findings of her thesis and thoughts about women in comics.
Janelle, you took on this thesis when you were an editor at DC Comics, which as you say in your piece, focuses on male readers. Tell me about how you came up with the topic.
I knew when I started my masters program that I wanted to do as much as I could to turn what was a generally focused publishing program into being comics related. I often used comic companies for assignments and things like that. So I knew that I wanted my thesis to be about comics from the very beginning. My thesis advisor had me come up with two possible topics, so I chose women and comics as one and copyright and comics as the other. Through the course of doing some basic research and talking through both topics with friends and family, it became clear that while both interested me, the topic of women and comics was the one I was really passionate about. I worry that a lot of times, commentary on the topic of women and comics veers into the negative, w
hich is so easily dismissed by people on the other side. I wanted to write something positive - something that admitted the problems in the industry (which are plentiful) but more importantly offered what I saw as solutions. And certainly being in the midst of the early days of planning the New 52 and watching, from the inside, as DC hatched marketing plans and all that as I came up with my topic was…influential.
That seems to imply you had some questions about how they were choosing their targets for the new 52. Were you surprised about the lack of targeting of female readers (i.e. the identification of the male 18-34 target)?
I wasn’t surprised, but it was hard to think - I’m working on a book like Birds of Prey which I’m OBVIOUSLY pushing to be aimed at women 18-34, and instead the whole part and parcel was aimed at one narrow demographic. I don’t think it’s a good idea to ignore a demographic that could be so valuable and which is largely so untapped at this point.
So This Happened of the Day: Scrubs castmates Zach Braff and Donald Faison get the band back together for a very special Vanilla and Chocolate Bear rendition of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”
[reddit.]
Women for Santorum: ‘A baby from rape is a gift from God’ (Found at Joe. My. God.)
Brilliant satire.
When life gives you rape, make rapeade.
Awesome art of the day: “Breakdancing Jesus” by Cosmo Sarson
GO JESUS GO JESUS GO
Submitted by Don’t Taze Me Bro
The truth is people are leaving [superhero comics] anyway, they’re just doing it quietly, and we have been papering it over with increased prices. We didn’t want to wake up one day and find we had a bunch of $20 books that 10,000 people are buying.
DC Comics Co-Publisher Dan DiDio on the upcoming line-wide relaunch.
As the DC Comics relaunch approaches, Co-Publisher Dan DiDio offers some unusually frank reflections in an interview with The Los Angeles Times on the necessity of reaching out to new readers, why they raised the prices of their comics, and why it didn’t work.
(via comicsalliance)
YOU SHOULD HAVE KILLED ME WHEN YOU HAD THE CHANCE, CHARLES
chrismcfeely
dramaticspoon
#this does not fill me with confidence
yeah the glass sucks but it’s still no match for our shitty weak bears
fail glass covering our cringe bears
