Holland’s Glory: Minck Oosterveer draws Spider-Man

Comix, Oh Those Crazy Cloggies
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Spider-Man and the Black Cat drawn by Minck Oosterveer

Minck Oosterveer is an old school Dutch newspaper cartoonist who used to do several adventure strips for Holland’s largest newspaper, until it dropped all of them. He was the last to work in this tradition, the last Dutch creator to have his own adventure strip. Unfortnately the Dutch comics market, both in newspapers and otherwise, has little room for him. His recent work on the Storm series, originally drawn by the legendary Don Lawrence, sold relativelt well but was intensely disliked by the fans, while his western series for the reborn Eppo, Ronson Inc also failed to set the world on fire, cancelled after two albums.

But where the Dutch comics market had no room for him, he has managed to get a foot on the ladder in the US. After a try out story for Boom! Studios, Oosterveer worked with Mark Waid on two miniseries: The Unknown and The Unknown: The Devil Made Flesh. From there he followed Waid to Marvel, working on at least one issue of Ruse and that in turn led to work for the miniseries Spider-Island: Deadly Foes. All relatively small beer perhaps, but it still pays better than working for Dutch publishers does, as he admitted in an interview Michael Minneboo had with him a couple of months ago:


Marvel betaalt royalty’s en het beginnerinkomen is indrukwekkender dan het eindinkomen dat je hier kunt verdienen. De enige die nog een paginaprijs betaalt is stripblad Eppo. Maar daar krijg je per pagina de helft van wat ik bij Marvel ga verdienen. In Nederland kan ik eigenlijk niet meer rondkomen met strips maken. Dat kun je de Nederlandse uitgevers niet kwalijk nemen, want de albumverkoop is hier gewoon te laag.

Marvel pays royalties and the money you start with there is more than you could earn here. The only ones still paying a page rate is Eppo strip magazine. But there you get half of what I’m going to earn at Marvel per page. In the Netherlands I really can’t ake a living from comics anymore. You can’t blame Dutch publishers for it, because album sales here are just too low.

And this is a cartoonist who has been working for years and this year even won the Stripschapsprijs, the Dutch equivalent of an Eisner, for his entire career as one of the few people working in a realistic drawing style in the Netherlands. Yet now he too has had to abandon the Dutch market for greener pastures…

On the one hand it’s very nice to see a Dutch artist managing to build a career in the US comics market, definately not an easy market to break into. On the other hand it is a symptom of how bad the Dutch market is, that even veteran cartoonists cannot make a living off it anymore.

China Mountain Zhang — Maureen F. McHugh

books and books review, science fiction
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Cover of China Mountain Zhang


China Mountain Zhang
Maureen F. McHugh
313 pages
published in 1992

China Mountain Zhang is the fourth novel I’ve read in my Year of Reading Women project. It had been on my shelves unread for over a decade before that, silently accusing me every time I walked past. Some novels are like that, shoved aside each time for a more interesting looking book. Which is one of the reasons I put it on my list of twelve science fiction novels written by women to read this year: to force me to finally read it.

Because I should’ve read this long ago. China Mountain Zhang was Maureen McHugh’s debut novel and was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards in 1992, winning the Lambda Literary Award (best science fiction with LGBT themes), the Locus Award for best first novel, and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award (feminist themed science fiction). It also has always been a highly regarded novel in the fan circles I hang around in. Yet until now I never had even tried to read it, largely because everytime I looked through my bookshelves the cover repelled me. And of course you should never judge a book by its cover, but in this case the cover did seem to promise something worthy but dull I never was quite in the mood for. A bit dumb, because of course China Mountain Zhang turned out to be just as good as its hype had made it out to be.

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Who keeps inviting John C. Wright to these things?

science fiction, wingnuts
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SF Signal is a commercial science fiction portal/blog which holds regular socalled Mind Melts, where they asks several science fiction writers their opinion on some topic or other. Usually these are mildly diverting but no more than that, as everybody struggles to say something original to questions like “which difficult science fiction books would you recommend”, but sometimes it goes wrong and they invite John C. Wright to participate. It’s not just that he’s a Libertarian-Catholic wingnut with a persecution complex the size of Jupiter, but that he’s so unbelievably pompous. For example:

World of Null-A was savaged by science fiction’s earliest and best known professional critic of the genre, Damon Knight, who pushed the work into undeserved obscurity, perhaps because he preferred the type of works written, or, rather, committed, by poseurs and artistes such as I mention with scorn above. Mr. Knight dismissed the paradigm-shifting technique of plot-weaving as mere sleight of hand. But perhaps it not as easy as it looks to juggle all the pieces of a jigsaw in midair, forming one picture to the reader, and then, by flipping one more bit of the puzzle into view, to both change the whole picture of what has gone before, and have the picture make sense; and then to do it again. The scientific process itself is nothing other than this juggling of jigsawwork to create successively more elegant and accurate pictures of the cosmos: to dismiss it in art is to overlook it’s significance in life. Others have attempted the Vanvogtian style of paradigm-shifting, either successfully, as with The Paradox Men by Charles L. Harness, or unsuccessfully, as with Mr. Knight’s own deservedly forgotten Beyond the Barrier, a work that serves as a living reminder that those who cannot perform a tricky technique of art at even an apprentice level should not mock it as a mere trick.

Nails on chalkboard.

Get Nick Mamatas a hugo: All You Need is Kill

books and books review, science fiction
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Nick “proven noticable” Mamatas is up for the Best Editor, Long Form Hugo for his work on the Haikasoru line of translated Japanese science fiction. James Nicoll has decided to campaign for him, by reviewing all Haikasoru books he can lay his hands on. He started with All You Need Is Kill, coincidently the only Haikasoru book I’ve read myself, so I thought to help out by reposting the review f it I did last year at my booklog:

All You Need Is KILL


All You Need Is KILL
Hiroshi Sakurazaka & Alexander O. Smith (translator)
381 pages
published in 2004

James Nicoll was casting about for science fiction books to read one day last week and got pointed in the direction of Haikasoru Books, a newish line of translated Japanese science fiction, found something to his liking and posted about it, as well as a poll on which Haikasoru title to read next. All of which explains why I was pulled towards the cover of All You Need is Kill when I saw it in a local bookstore. Since James liked the Haikasoru that he got and I trust his taste, that was enough reason for me to take a chance on this. I wasn’t disappointed.

What I got with All You Need is KILL is a fast paced, short novel (only 200 pages) that takes two old, familiar science fiction concepts and mashes them up into something new: Starship Troopers meets Groundhog Day. Earth has been invaded by the alien Mimics, seemingly non-sapient but still with the ability to learn from their mistakes and most of the poorer part of the world has been overrun already. Keiji Kiriya is just one recruit given a short training, shoved into a battlesuit called a Jacket, sent out to defend Japan from the Mimics then dying in his first battle — only to wake up in his bunk the day before.

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