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I want to be the new Fantagraphics. I'll show them, I'll show them all.
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May 22, 2020 20:49
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 18:30 |
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Can't wait for Lynd Ward's Ambush Bug!
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May 22, 2020 21:00
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Will anyone have the courage and willpower to step up to the plate and do Zenescope or Antarctic Press?
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May 26, 2020 20:12
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I think for anybody from the comic strip megathread checking this out, it might also be fun to opt for a fantasy syndicate or Sunday page instead of a more conventional publisher, although I'm not as familiar with how fantasy drafts work and for all I know that might throw things askew. Edit: I also stickied this thread for the week just so it gets more eyes, I'm really excited to see how it plays out.
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May 26, 2020 20:29
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Napoleon Nelson posted:What's more grown up than gore and boobs? Nothing, that's what. I'll take Avatar Press. Please for the love of god everybody let Napoleon Nelson have Kieron Gillen.
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May 26, 2020 22:32
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Hans Holbein's Spawn
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May 26, 2020 23:53
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I'm EST but I'm used to doing stuff by PST.
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May 29, 2020 22:16
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In this imaginary scenario can I suppose that, say, Fantagraphics has the license to stuff they may not actually have the license to? Not, like, Spider-Man or whatever but Golden Age comic strips or things like that?
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May 31, 2020 01:34
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Oh, and I guess I'm up! I'll be frank, I picked Fantagraphics kind of on a whim, but after some thought I've decided I want to stick with writer-artist cartoonists primarily rebooting or revamping titles made famous by writer-artist cartoonists. Some of these are in the public domain, some of them aren't, some of them have even been printed or licensed by Fantagraphics already, but I want to slap a new and potentially interesting new coat of paint on some things I like-- because really, part of the fun here is just getting to type about stuff we're into. My first pick is an exercise in hedging my bets and nabbing one of the more famous people on my shortlist. It's also, probably, very very predictable. I'm selecting Alison Bechdel to revamp The Addams Family. Alison Bechdel is the author of the enormously successful graphic memoir Fun Home, its follow up Are You My Mother?, the long-running lesbian serial Dykes to Watch Out For, and a few decades worth of political cartooning and memoir. She's an inductee into the Harvey Awards Hall of Fame, a Macarthur Fellow, and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship among other awards. None of this says much about her approach to cartooning, however. Since the early 80s Bechdel has excelled at carefully observing human behavior, leveraging an even, deadpan style to draw out and accentuate the pathos and absurdity of her subjects with wryness and sympathy. She's a dedicated advocate of outsiders and marginalized people, happy to thrive on the margins of mainstream society. For most of her career these outsiders have been countercultural lesbians like the characters of Dykes to Watch Out For, which began in 1983:  +  or the dysfunctionally queer family unit of Fun Home:  In each case these characters' oppositional relationships with the world are amplified by Bechdel's precise, jittery pencils, and her extraordinarily gift for cramming a panel with signifying detail. No line is ever useless in a Bechdel comic, even if it is idiosyncratic-- a lot of time, the joy of surplus is kind of the point. With that in mind, and keeping in mind how adroitly she uses the figure of the eccentric house in Fun Home and her career-long fixation on found family and solidarity, I'm putting her on The Addams Family.   Bechdel has mentioned her childhood obsession with Charles Addams in several interviews, the way her confusion at his often-enigmatic cartoons fueled her fixation on poring over them. His most famous creations, The Addams Family, were introduced in 1938, a ghoulish and sometimes whimsically perverse clan of cheerful freaks and monsters. It's easy to draw a line, I think, from his lush but spidery lines, his gothic mansions, and Gomez' broad grin, to Bechdel's cramped but densely realized houses and apartments and the ludic margins her characters carve out for themselves. I should also note that while Bechdel is maybe better known in 2020 for the poignancy of Fun Home and the political foresight of DtWOF, she's also super loving funny. I think that putting her in charge of something more fantastic and surreal, something she's followed since childhood, would give her a chance to lean back into her comedy chops. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 03:28 on May 31, 2020 |
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May 31, 2020 03:23
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Corto Maltese was created by the Italian cartoonist Hugo Pratt in 1967, a laconic, worldly man of the sea who sails around in the early 20th century fighting generally opposing tyranny and fighting for the underdog. Pratt's Maltese looks like a sculpture chipped out of a glacier, a man of sharp angles and inscrutable glances. His action scenes are tense, short, and brutal, his treatment of place expansive and poetic. These are comics about tough people in a difficult world, shot through with moments of beauty.    While most of Corto Maltese's adventures are fairly realistic and unsparingly precise in their attention to violence and hardship, Pratt also excelled at surreal dream sequences and descents into hallucination or whimsy, during which his command of composition and image really came to the forefront. So who better to take the reins of a new take on Corto Maltese than the late, great Darwyn Cooke. Cooke's best work, in my opinion, were his adaptations of Richard Stark's Parker novels. Unlike the grittiness of Brubaker and Philips, when Cooke wrote about and drew lowlives and killers he kept a tinge of romanticism to them that fits Corto Maltese to a tee. His mastery of adventure, noir, and flashes of comedy are perfect for a series finding an older, wearier Corto Maltese taking to the seas again in the world just prior to WWII, finding new adventures on rewritten maps and reinventing an old adventurer's place in a world made unfamiliar. His classic DC series New Frontiers demonstrates him applying this same approach to the DC Universe-- a pitch-perfect blend of thrusting characters rooted in idealism and wonder into a compromised world without compromising that sense of promise and hope. Plus who would possibly be better for a series about a globetrotting sailor roaming around hunting nazis?     
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May 31, 2020 23:01
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gently caress, Hanks/Corben is such a good and out of control idea.
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Jun 3, 2020 08:35
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Should I just go ahead and pick?
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Jun 4, 2020 22:58
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Mark Trail is a comic strip created by Ed Dodd in 1946. From the outset, the platonic version of the strip was pretty noble-- Mark Trail's a photojournalist who lives in a National Forest and goes on various fairly low-key adventures, often ending up involved with low-stakes crimes and fighting but for the most part a pretext for drawing him wandering through nature showcasing various animals and plants. For all that it's DNA is rooted in adventure serials, Mark Trail at it's fleeting best is a much more lyrical and languid kind of comic-- the iconic panels from its heyday shunting Mark and his friends to the far background as the panel offers a loving close-up of whatever flora or fauna Dodd was interested in that day. If you've ever poked your head in BSS' own Comic Strip Megathread you've probably gleaned that the days of Mark Trail being anywhere close to good are long behind us. Compare the Mark Trail of 1946:  with the contemporary counterpart:  Ok, so it's never been the greatest thing to ever hit the medium, but I think that in 2020 there's a space for an adventure-based slice of life comic about paying attention to nature and considering our symbiotic relationship to the world around us. That's why I'm offering the perhaps unenviable task of rehabilitating to mangaka Ryoko Kui. Ryoko Kui is best known for her 2014 manga Dungeon Meshi, a fantasy comedy about a group of adventures who have to forage and cook for themselves while heading deeper and deeper into what at first appears to be a wholly typical D&D style dungeon. She distinguishes herself as a writer in her thoughtfulness and wit in thinking through the ecological and cultural implications of something like the classic "Tomb of Horror" or "Temple of Elemental Evil" type structure, finding inventive and interesting extrapolations of worn out fantasy tropes in each installment. She's also a master of expressive and charming characters, as well as fleshing out the world around them with a compelling depth of detail and grit.      Month-to-month Dungeon Meshi is one of my favorite things currently going in comics internationally, and I think if anybody can forge Mark Trail into something worthy of its premise, it could be her.
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Jun 4, 2020 23:27
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Roth posted:To write Batman we have decided to go with Yoshihiro Togashi creator of Yu Yu Hakusho and Hunter x Hunter. He will be channeling his time writing the York New City arc, and all of the criminal intrigue and crazy supervillain powers that involves. Togashi has a wonderful talent for writing compelling villains that feel like actual people with their own goals and relationships instead of just being an obstacle for the hero. One of Batman's strongest points has always been its rogue's gallery, making Togashi a wonderful fit for the series. That's a nice, classic Batman pin-up and the evil (?) horse in the pages you posted is really expressive in an operatic, over the top way that I think would suit Batman's villains really well. Even if I shrink it back to a thumbnail it's a really striking page composition wise with really dramatic lighting, I'd be pretty stoked to see that guy take a stab at a Bat book. I've never read HxH but I've heard good things and I know drat sure I want to know more about the guy who looks startled to be wrapped up in Dippin Dots.
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Jun 5, 2020 05:18
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Here's one I was excited about, although I held off on the pick for a bit to see if anyone else would claim him. Everybody knows Popeye, renowned Sailor Man and spinach guzzling freak, although a lot of his cultural residue comes from the masterful Fleischer Studios cartoons. His first burst of popularity, however, was as the breakout star of E.C. Segar's Thimble Theater, which started in 1919 and ran for just over nine years before finally introducing Popeye. Thimble Theater remains a gleefully anarchic comic brimming with wild and unpredictable energy-- one which did a ton imo to codify the medium's slapstick, cavalier approach to comedy violence. Segar's Popeye is an unexpected radical, always prepared to pop a cop in the jaw or overthrow a tinpot dictator. Here's a brief montage of him either beating the poo poo out of somebody, getting the poo poo beaten out of him, or getting ready to beat poo poo.     Before I reveal who I think is the right choice to helm a Thimble Theater reboot worthy of Segar's manic dynamism, I want to take a brief detour into a comic I see as one of the spiritual descendants of Popeye:  Jack Cole's Plastic Man literalized the rubbery, elastic, invincible bodies of Segar's characters, stretching the potential limits of the cartoon body to their wildest extremes. If Popeye's punches and brawls defied realistic physics, Jack Cole used Plastic Man and Woozy Winks to turn the comic book scrap into a surrealist feast:   That's why the only person Fantagraphics can trust with E.C. Segar's legacy is the only person that has ever made sense to carry on Jack Cole's:  Kyle Baker is, to my mind, indisputably one of the greatest living cartoonists-- funny as poo poo, fervently political, and committed to a career-wide testing and probing of his craft and of his medium.  From the fierce satire of his early masterpiece, The Cowboy Wally Show  to his breakout pencils on Damage Control in 1991, and onwards to stuff as varied as his searing Nat Turner biography or the abovementioned Plastic Man run, he's been both one of the most radical creators in his field both socially and aesthetically.   (plus, as his 1990 Dick Tracy miniseries for Marvel proves, he knows his way around the grammar of early newspaper strips) 
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Jun 6, 2020 01:57
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I don't know if the order's all higgledy piggleby but I'm good to go whenever!
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Jun 10, 2020 19:58
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Vargo posted:"And now, new writer/artist for Betty & Veronica - Guy Gilchrist!" Alan Moore's Brother Rock
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Jun 11, 2020 16:06
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I do like how everyone's picks are fun and surprising, but also totally consistent with what I know of them as posters.
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Jun 13, 2020 17:14
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Holy poo poo, that's a good pick.
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Jun 14, 2020 02:52
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 Shortly after the news of Jaime Hernandez' exclusive contract with Image broke, a devastated Beto announced the cancellation of Love & Rockets, signaling the end of a 40-year collaboration. "It's nothing but... but Hate & Jalopies," he was heard to mutter, slouching down an alleyway with his fists thrust into his pockets, a frayed and tattered Errata Stigmata costume peeking out from the rim of a nearby garbage dumpster. "Nothing but Hate & Rockets, man."   But what's next for beleaguered Beto, cut loose and with a heart full of rage? "I'll show them. I'll show them all. I'll draw a great new comic, where all the ladies are cool and tough and naked, with super spies and cool cars and deceptive depths of interpersonal relationships with an emphasis on deep and hard-earned friendship. And maybe sex robots! gently caress you, Jaime! I'll make my own love! A-and I'll make my own rockets!"  Fantagraphics is proud to announce that Beto Hernandez has agreed to join us from the depths of his self-imposed cosmic exile to helm not one but two titles, each of which we hope will soothe his tormented soul in this time of betrayal. Modesty Blaise was created by Peter O'Donnell and Jim Holdaway in 1963, and ran in British newspapers until 2001. It's a fast-paced, completely engaging spy narrative anchored by the unflappable and resourceful titular character, who, along with her best friend and sidekick Willie Garvin, embarks on a whole bunch of espionage and action adventures, many of them in a slightly more grounded variation on the basic James Bond/Avengers formula.  Modesty is an ideal Beto character-- a complicated and ruthless woman who has carved out a position of hard-earned mastery amidst the world of men. She's constantly embroiled in violence and intrigue, and often just walks around with nothing on-- a prototype for Luba or Fritz, except with beating peoples' asses in. Here we see her karate chopping a wizard... to death...?  The core of Modesty Blaise though is the relationship between Modesty and Willie, an extraordinary portrait of a close friendship nestled in the pulpiest of mid-century pulp. It's exactly the kind of thing Beto excels at-- the human and even the sentimental smack dab in the middle of the sordid.  Beto will also be leaning into his most outlandish and extravagant sensibilities-- veering away from the neo-noir and giallo tendencies he's often pursued in his non L+R work and more towards the goofy retro SF aesthetic he's occasionally mined in some of his shorter pieces.   He will be undertaking a revamp and relaunch of the cult classic franchise:  Barbarella Jean Claude Forest's Barbarella ran in the French V Magazine from 1962 to 1964 and shocked readers with its frank but ludic sexuality. Like most of Beto's protagonists, Barbarella fucks. While much of the original run has aged with much less than perfect grace, Beto has always handled fantastic or surreal sexuality with wit and aplomb, and can get as weird as anyone else in the business.   "I am trapped in space now, horny all the time and doomed to a life of fantastic cosmic adventure," the broken-hearted Beto relayed back to Fantagraphic's earth offices. "Barbarella is my destiny."  "Look, I don't like it either," confided Fantagraphics EIC How Wonderful. "Shouldn't Katie Skelly get this one? I mean, Kelly Sue DeConnick already did it. But alas, who am I to turn down a Hernandez." How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 17:39 on Jun 14, 2020 |
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Jun 14, 2020 16:48
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Sorry I'm late, it was my wife's birthday and I was busy with a million other things besides. Anyway: I first discovered Ben Passmore through one of his zines I think, and I recognized his style right away when "Your Black Friend" blew up--  It's fluid and clear, but with an oddness to it that comes out through the surprising elasticity of his forms and the outsized playfulness of his typography:   I love his political cartoons for being so blunt and trenchant-- they don't spare anybody he doesn't see fit to spare, but he still does it in this really effortlessly paced, kind of roundabout way like listening in on a really good conversationalist:  But I was blown away when I found some of his fantasy and sci-fi work later. He could do the sharp, precise social commentary, sure, but he could also go wild and draw pages as outrageously large in scale and as stuffed with dream-like elaboration as anybody in the medium:    While throughout, his works are united by a cool, pastel-tinged palette, austere landscapes, and a sense of scale and distance just being slightly out of joint. I knew I wanted to pick Passmore for this from the beginning, but I struggled to think of what to put him on. I think he'd be great on something like Little Nemo in Slumberland, following McKay in crafting form-defying wonderlands of size and shape while exposing the representational underbelly of that work. I also considered something more down to earth-- a Gasoline Alley revamp--? But that seemed like a waste. It clicked when I saw by chance an article that mentioned both him and George Herriman in the same end-of-the-year retrospective. George Herriman was one of the all-time greats of the comic strip page, the creator of Krazy Kat in 1913 and a mixed-race artist during a time when the industry was at its most segregated. Krazy Kat is readable as iterations of a number of rangy, loosely modular gags, but it's also a sustained exercise in frustration, release, violence, pleasure, the sublime grammar of getting hit in the head with a brick times infinity.  As ruthlessly austere and and bare the world of Ignatz and Krazy is, it's the product of an artist forced to be preoccupied with the exercise of power. It's impossible to imagine a white artist in the early 20th century making it.  Krazy Kat is also just an astonishing feat of composition, one justly celebrated as much for its experiments in layout and design as for its writing. It's consistently an ornate, satisfying, surprising artifact of its medium.    Basically, Krazy Kat uses a hyper-stylized, stridently unrealistic world to tell stories about tensions urgently present in the world of the reader. Passmore excels at both of these, the plain-faced, bare mechanics of narrative and story that lay out injustice and irony in a deadpan, efficient fashion, and the teeming, surreal aesthetic world of excess and distortion. Both Herriman and Passmore treat the page as a labyrinth-- a field in which the reader might be led by the and before being thrown into a disorder and confusion that's overwhelming but which reveals itself as inevitably designed, comics which teach you how to read them through information overload Krazy Kat as horror comic, or, perhaps, Krazy Kat as the experimental gag strip 2020 demands. How Wonderful! fucked around with this message at 06:13 on Jun 19, 2020 |
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Jun 19, 2020 06:09
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A pause might be wise until the ink is dry.
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Jun 26, 2020 17:33
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Things are tentatively looking good and moving along nicely so I think if people wanted to start this up again it might not be a bad idea? I certainly still have a bunch of picks in the wings.
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Jul 14, 2020 00:31
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I'm going to be in the woods from tomorrow through Friday so feel free to skip over me if we get that far!
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Jul 28, 2020 19:05
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 18:30 |
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lifg posted:Surely nothing is more important than the comics fantasy draft. You're right. Everyone keep an eye on the skies over the next few days, I'll send up a smoke signal revealing my pick.
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Jul 28, 2020 19:26
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