Comix – Page 100 – Wis[s]e Words

Lovery links

Published on April 22, 2009

A Game of Thrones to be filmed for tv …in Belfast? Cue dry as dust press release:

First Minister Peter D Robinson MP MLA and deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness MP MLA, have confirmed that HBO, the USA’s leading pay cable network, will film a TV pilot in Northern Ireland this year.

‘A Game of Thrones’, is scheduled to arrive in the third quarter of 2009 and is set to be an epic project. It is expected that the production will utilise various locations, as well as build a massive set in the Paint Hall.

Mr Robinson said: “This is the first time that a TV production of such vast size and scale has been filmed in Northern Ireland. The announcement comes following the visit by the deputy first Minister and I to Los Angeles in March. It will be a welcome boost to the production sector, helping develop the industry here and bringing employment and investment to Northern Ireland.

(Incidently, Paul Cornell, amongst others, is going to write for Martin’s Wild Cards series.

Samuel Delany on racism and science fiction:

Since I began to publish in 1962, I have often been asked, by people of all colors, what my experience of racial prejudice in the science fiction field has been. Has it been nonexistent? By no means: It was definitely there. A child of the political protests of the ’50s and ’60s, I’ve frequently said to people who asked that question: As long as there are only one, two, or a handful of us, however, I presume in a field such as science fiction, where many of its writers come out of the liberal-Jewish tradition, prejudice will most likely remain a slight force—until, say, black writers start to number thirteen, fifteen, twenty percent of the total. At that point, where the competition might be perceived as having some economic heft, chances are we will have as much racism and prejudice here as in any other field.

How to teach historical context via a single comic; that is, Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth.

Factor in the photorealistic gestures and that can only be the Batsuit of the 21st Century. But why did folks at DC decide to go with the throwback costume at the dawn of a new century? Nostalgia? What happened in 2000 that made the less cartoonish Batsuit more attractive to fans of the book? Because the subtraction of the shield was not the only change: the greys now skew black, the blues shift black-navy, and the yellow of the utility belt pales to a washed and muted gold.

Back in the eighties, after Swamp Thing and Watchmen had made a superstar of Alan Moore he cashed in on this not by getting some prestige assignment at the Big Two, but by self publishing his most ambitious project to date: Big Numbers. Originally it was going to be called The Mandelbrot Set, as Moore’s big idea for the series was to be fractals and fractal storytelling. Bill Sienkiewicz was tapped to do the artwork, two issues were released in 1990 to general applause and then Sienkiewicz and Moore had a falling out, Sienkiewicz’s assistant Al Columbia was slated to take over, drew one issue which however was never published as Columbia destroyed the pages. Big Numbers became one of the big lost classics of comix, some excerpts of the third isssue were published here and there, taken from high quality photocopies, but there were no photocopies of the entire issue in circulation; that is, until now:

In any case, everything I know leads me to believe that this is a copy of the unpublished third issue of Big Numbers, and I genuinely didn’t believe it existed, and certainly never expected to actually see a copy, led alone own one. Even Alan Moore doesn’t have a copy, to the very best of my knowledge, which in this case is considerable, as I decided to specifically ask his permission before I posted this here. He is happy for it to be made available to the world, so here it is.

Go look.

Scans_daily shutdown: it’s the community stupid

Published on March 2, 2009

So reading Mike yesterday I learned Scans_Daily has been shut down after Peter David complained about it to Marvel and they leaned on Livejournal. Or at least that is the version believed by most people, though denied by David himself. A kerfuffle quickly ensued, with little sane ommentary emerging out from amongst the people happily pissing on Scan_Daily’s ashes or wishing death on David.

Just more Internet Drama? Of course, but it is more important than that. For those who don’t know about this (probably all of you unless you’re heavily into online comix fandom yourself), Scans_Daily was a Livejournal community which started out as a place to post homesexual slash fantasies, but morphed into a highly popular community of comix fans, based around commenting on scans of interesting new and old comics. All illegal as hell of course, but it had some ground rules about posting (no more than half an issue) and was largely tolerated for some five years or so. After all, for those who want to get their comix fix online for free, there’s bittorrent and Usenet, where new releases are available the week they arrive in comic shops (or faster than they can cross the Atlantic, in my case), while a huge percentage of especially North American comics dating back to the 1930ties can also be found easily in a variety of formats. So going after Scans_Daily, a community that was remarkably friendly to newer comics readers and a great propaganda site for comics as a whole (as noted by Mightygodking) makes little sense. As does alienating a community of several thousand at a time when an individual title’s fortune is decided by shifts in readership smaller than that. But it was bound to happen sooner or later, as it takes only one complaint for a site like scans_Daily with its obvious copyright violations to be shut down.

The … discussion … that followed its demise unfortunately followed well worn tracks: the haters go for the “it’s illegal so don’t whine that you’ve been shutdown” tactic while the defenders attempt to make the case that what Scans_Daily did was a-okay, using clever and not so clever arguments. Both miss the larger point: Scans_Daily was a community, one with no real equivalent elsewhere in comix fandom and the takedown destroyed this community. To me, this is the real crime, rather than the copyright violations this community was based around. As Bruce Sterling noted as far back in 1991 in The Hacker Crackdown, there have always been online communities revolving around technically illegal activities and they’ve always reacted badly when the authorities come knocking. The original Usenet was illegal, existing on the sufferage of the organisations involved in DARPANET, the Internet’s predecessor and which was supposed to be used for serious research, not “Ho’od Win” threads on net.comics. So was the original Unix community for a large part, massively violating AT&T’s intellectual property but in the process creating a lot of the software we still use. Intellectual property has always been a battlefield, between corporate interests who’d like us to pay for every time we read a particular book or hear a particular song and the rest of us, who see no reason to do with our books, comics, songs what we do with everything else we buy: whatever we want.

It’s this loss of control that led to the Scans_Daily shutdown, as Peter David got pissed that an X-Factor issue of his got spoiled there, after which he complained to Marvel, who then complained to Livejournal and a flourishing community got shut down. For the moment, it’s backfiring on him as a lot of people are now mad at him, which in turn let to puzzled responses by outsiders and moralistic posts about “it’s piracy, so stfu”. But for those of us who were regulars there –and I was far from a hardcore member — we’ve lost a community of friends and likeminded people, which is by far the greater crime. And it’s this that explains the far from even tempered reactions to Peter David’s actions: when you attack a community, even an online based community based around a hobby though childish by the great unwashed, you attack people themselves. No matter how much in your right you are legally.

Aargh

Published on November 28, 2008

aagh

The perils of trawling through the XKCD archive.

Who watches the Watchmen? I will

Published on November 14, 2008

I’m way too excited about this. To be honest I never believed this could be filmed and keep even ten percent of what was in the book, but after seeing V for Vendetta a few years back, which managed to work as a movie while keeping the important parts of Moore’s story intact (even if Moore didn’t like it himself), I have good hopes for Watchmen.

And you?