Eric Bezdek

Why is Everyone Mad at Joe Quesada?

admin — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Joe Quesada, editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics since 2000, is controversial to some in the comic book world. Although he has been fairly successful as editor-in-chief through increased readership and the introduction of several new series of comics, many critics point out a few of his flaws and how some of his decisions are hurting comics.

Quesada has emphasized and encouraged the sales of trade paperback collections of comics, rather than the traditional monthly installments. Some criticize this approach because the monthly comic books are often used to track reader interest. The paperback collections, they argue, cannibalize monthly sales.

Even more controversial, though, is his involvement with the Spiderman series. As the editor, Joe Quesada made the final approvals of a new storyline for the series. The storyline, which caused some backlash from many Spiderman fans, featured the demise of the marriage between Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson, via a deal with Mephisto, a devil-like character, which also helped save Parker’s dying aunt and lead to the world forgetting that Spiderman had unmasked himself. Many argue that this storyline is not only poorly executed, and poorly written, but it is little more than a contrived stunt to “reboot” the series.

Stan Lee’s Spider-Sense for Success

admin — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Stan Lee may not be a household name, but many of his creations are. Stan has worked in the comic book industry for over six decades and is responsible for some of the iconic super heroes of all time.

After toiling for nearly twenty years in obscurity for Timely and Marvel comics, Stan was given the challenge of making a super hero team to compete with DC Comics Justice League of America. Rather than sticking a few of the established stars together, Stan, along with Jack Kirby, created the Fantastic Four. Marvel, which at that point was turning out mostly romance books, decided to jump back into the Super Hero books.

Stan created new heroes at a breathe taking pace. The Incredible Hulk, Daredevil, the X-men, Thor, Sgt. Fury and His Howling Mad Commandos, The Invincible Iron Man, and arguably the biggest comic book star, Spider-Man. Stan also revived Captain America.

Those characters are everywhere today, from comic books, to the big screen, even on Broadway. Stan thought that the new characters he created, which were different from any characters out there, would really resonate with the public. I am sure even he could have never imagined how right he was.

Neil Gaiman: Destined to Be a Dreamer

admin — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Coraline, The Sandman, and The Graveyard Book are just a few of the wonderful stories that sprang from the mind of the very talented, very unique mind of Hugo award winning author Neil Gaiman.

Neil Gaiman was born on November 10th, 1960 in Portchester, England. His dad was a retailer and his mother a pharmacist. His early life was marked by his religious beliefs, made up of a mixture of Scientology and Judaism. Gaiman was an avid reader, with The Lord of The Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia among his early favorites. Gaiman’s family’s religious beliefs kept him out of many of the top schools in England.

In the early 1980′s, Gaiman began his writing career by doing interviews and writing book reviews, eventually working his way up to short stories. He stepped up to a full length book in 1984 with a biography of Duran Duran. He teamed up with Alan Moore and did some work for Eclipse Comics before the company went bankrupt.

In 1988 Gaiman launched the wildly successful comic book, The Sandman. It ran until 1996. Gaiman has worked on many different comic books, including a Batman story in 2009 titled “whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader”.

Gaiman also has remained busy writing novels and screen plays.

George Herriman’s “krazy komics”

www.ericbezdek.com — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Every so often, one institution or another will make a list of the most influential comics of all time. While these lists are by no means common, it’s an even rarer occasion when George Herriman’s Krazy Kat is left off the list. In 1999, the Comics Journal recognized this when it listed Krazy Kat as the 1 best American comic of the 20^th century. If you’re looking for somewhere to spend the money you’re saving after switching your wireless internet service, Fantagraphics’ collections of the classic strips (starting with 2002′s Krazy & Ignatz 1925-1926: “There is a Heppy Land Furfur A-waay”) are a great way to experience what everyone’s been talking about.The strip is centered around three anthropomorphic animals. There’s the titular Krazy Kat, an ambiguously-gendered feline who speaks in a dialect similar to that of Herriman’s native New Orleans (known as Yat). Herriman refused to specify a gender for Krazy, instead referring to him as “something like a sprite, an elf. They have no sex. So that Kat can’t be a he or a she.” Krazy Kat is a naively innocent counterpart to the mischievous Ignatz Mouse, who finds his greatest pleasure in throwing bricks at Krazy’s head. Nevertheless, Krazy is hopelessly in love with Ignatz. Offissa Pup, representing the “Limb of Law and Arm of Order,” often thwarts Ignatz’s plots against Krazy, ironically leaving the Kat wondering where his “l’il ainjil” has gone. The strip ran daily in William Randolph Hearst’s New York Evening Journal from 1913 to 1944. However, the characters appeared even before that as minor characters in Herriman’s first strip, The Family Upstairs.As you might guess from the title of the Fantagraphics collection, imaginative and playful spelling is a hallmark of Krazy Kat. Fellow experimental linguist e.e. cummings was a public fan of the strip and even wrote the introduction to the first published collection. However, Krazy Kat‘s linguistic playfulness would be nowhere as influential if it were not combined with a similarly poetic visual vocabulary. Herriman set the strip in an offbeat version of Coconino County, Arizona, and southwestern and Navajo motifs appear regularly. While the daily strips originally stuck to a five-panel vertical format, Herriman used the full-page Sunday strips to experiment with unique panel and layout designs. The artistic qualities of the comic made it a favorite with art critic Gilbert Seldes, abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning, journalist H.L. Mencken, and Beat pioneer Jack Kerouac.Numerous cartoonists owe a debt to Herriman and Krazy Kat. His mark can be seen most clearly Chuck Jones’ Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cartoons and Patrick McDonnell’s Mutts, but Will Eisner and Charles Schulz have also proclaimed the comic’s influence on their own work. If you’ve never experienced Krazy Kat and his friends before, there’s no better time than the present.

The unique team of brothers behind popular series “Axe Cop”

admin — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 12:00:22 +0000

It’s rare that two brothers can cooperate long enough to create a work of art, much less continue doing it for any length of time. In the entertainment industry, the Coen brothers are probably the best known example, crafting such hits as Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and No Country for Old Men. However, a new super-team of brothers has hit the world of web comics, and their clout in the industry has growing. The brothers are Malachai Nicolle, writer, and Ethan Nicolle, artist, and together, they are the creators of “Axe Cop.” Both artists are young and ambitiousEthan is 29, and Malachai is5.The project originated when graphic artist Ethan (Chumble Spuzz) and Malachai (come on, he’s 5) were playing together. Malachai came up with the character of “Axe Cop” while running around with a toy fireman’s axe, and Ethan drew some strips as a way of practicing the webcomic medium. During the same playtime, the character of Flute Cop (Axe Cop’s brother, though neither knows this) was created.The Axe Cop website went live in January of 2010. You can read through all the archives, or just get acquainted with the strip’s wide supporting cast. Besides Axe Cop and Flute Cop, there’s Telescope Gun Cop (who started as an ally, but became an enemy after Axe Cop rejected him), Dinosaur Soldier and Avocado Soldier (transformed versions of Flute Cop), Uni-Man and his son Uni-Babyumm, you should probably just look it up yourself, as this is only the tip of the iceberg. New “episodes” of the strip are posted to the site every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, while the “Ask Axe Cop” episodes appear on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Trust us, you’ll need the weekend to recover from laughing. If you don’t like reading things on the computer (which wouldn’t make sense, since you’re here), you can wait until January, when the first volume of the comic will be collected by Dark Horse. The publisher is also putting out a 3-issue miniseries next year, at which point we expect everyone and their mother to become an “Axe Cop” fanatic.

Peter Bagge, as in plastic

admin — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 12:00:59 +0000

The pronunciation of cartoonist Peter Bagge‘s last name is ironic, since he somehow manages to make his characters on the paper page look as though they were made of plastic. Bagge has brought his malleable style to a variety of genres, from superhero to comedy to social commentary, often combining one or more elements. In his early days, Bagge even worked under the tutelage of comics legend Robert Crumb, and published his early strips in Crumb’s anthology Weirdo. In 1983, Crumb named Bagge editor of the magazine, a position he held for the next three years.Bagge is one of the few artists in comics to work for both independent and mainstream comics publishers. His early work for Fantagraphics, the series Neat Stuff and Hate, introduced both Bagge’s iconic characters the Bradleys as well as Bagge’s “elastic” style, which portrays typical alternative comics themes (such as the alienation of modern youth) in art which borrows from early Warner Brothers cartoons. His first work for a major publisher was 2003′s Sweatshop, the story of a fame-earning cartoonist which drew parallels with Bagge’s own life. This series wasn’t as successful as the long-running Hate series, however.Bagge’s other mainstream work includes “The Incorrigible Hulk,” his take on the Marvel Comics superhero, which was serialized in a 2009 mini-series, and Apocalypse Nerd, a humorous take on two charactersa computer programmer and a “manly man”who must band together after a nuclear attack. The latter series was published by Dark Horse Comics and is available in a collected edition. Bagge’s work has been seen in Reason and Mad magazines, and his most recent graphic novel, Other Lives, was published by DC in 2010. This twisted take on modern-day paranoia and dysfunction represents the latest in the artist’s ever-evolving style, instantly recognizable to his fans but also open to new readers.

One man’s mission to recover early comic art gems

admin — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 12:00:35 +0000

With the recent increase in comics scholarship, comics anthologies have experienced a resurgence. Yale University Press’s 2-volume An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories is a great introduction to alternative cartoonists after about the mid-1950s. However, even those early pieces show only half the lineage of Western comics, leaving out the experimentalism of early practitioners of the art. Dan Nadel has taken it upon himself to recapture these hidden experiments for modern consumption.His first volume, Art Out of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries, 1900-1969, was published in 2006. Despite the title, the book is heavy on the first thirty years of the 20^th century, with Gustave Verbeek’s 1904 series “The Upside-Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo” representing one of the earliest (and still most interesting) inclusions. The book also spotlight Charles Forbell’s 1913 strip “Naughty Pete,” along with humorists like Milt Gross and Harry Hershfeld. With 29 creators divided across five different categories and 320 pages, this book is a treasure for anyone interested in early pop-cultural art, as well as for modern comics fans interested in where artists like Chris Ware got their inspiration.Nadel’s second anthology, Art in Time: Unknown Comic Book Adventures, 1940-1980, isn’t exactly a sequel. As you can see, its time period overlaps with the earlier collection. Instead of unknown artists, many in this collection are well-known in comic book history. There’s H.G. Peter (Wonder Woman), John Stanley (Little Lulu), Jesse Marsh (Tarzan), and more. However, the pieces of their work shown here are forgotten forays into other genres, like John Stanley’s horror stories. The rest of the book showcases the burgeoning underground and psychedelic artists of the era. The task of choosing between either of these volumes is just too difficult, so we recommend checking them both out as soon as possible.

Megan Kelso brings a woman’s touch to the Times comics page

admin — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 21:53:08 +0000

The New York Times Magazine has become one of the most mainstream outlets for alternative cartoonists. In the past, the magazine’s featured continuing strips by Rutu Modan (The Murder of the Terminal Patient), Jason (Low Moon), Daniel Clowes (Mister Wonderful), and more. Megan Kelso’s Watergate Sue ran from April 1 to September 9, 2007, and told the story of a womanSuehaving her first baby. At the same time, she’s struggling to get the story of her own birth during the Watergate scandal from her mother. The entire storyline can be read at the Times’ “The Funny Pages” site.Kelso’s style in Watergate Sue is accomplished but casual, with characters that move naturally but look like they’re made of rubber. There’s even a visual connection with the characters of the old Hanna-Barbera cartoon The Flintstones, since both feature bold black outlines, rounded faces, and eyes with no pupils.The artist’s work has appeared in many other venues, such as Pulse magazine from Tower Records, The Stranger (Seattle), the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and the Sacramento News and Review, besides publishing her own minicomics such as Girlhero and Queen of the Black Black. Her collection of short stories, The Squirrel Mother, was published in 2006, and was critically-acclaimed. Besides the title story (about a squirrel mother who abandons her children), the collection also includes historical reimaginings of the lives of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, and a piece called “Meow Face” focuses on a young girl locked out of the house by her mother.Although Kelso’s work is often from the perspective of a girl or young woman, there’s a lot to admire for readers of all kinds. Her most recent book, Artichoke Tales, ties together plotlines involving the Civil War and herbal medicine.

Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library: no card required

admin — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 21:39:09 +0000

Unlike many alternative comic artists, Chris Ware’s name has found its way into the mainstream media time and time again. This is largely attributable to his 2000 graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, which collected work done between 1995 and 2000. Critics worldwide praised the book, from Time Magazine putting it on their list of the 10 best graphic novels to the Guardian awarding it their First Book Award.Ware’s style is instantly recognizable for its clinical, geometrical layouts and circle-headed characters. Ware is an avid collector of early 20^th century art and cites many of these artists as his influences, including newspaper comic artists Winsor McCay (Little Nemo in Slumberland), Frank King (Gasoline Alley), and Charles Schulz (Peanuts). He’s also mentioned Surrealist artist Joseph Cornell and alternative comic artist Richard Mcguire as influences on his storytelling, which often unfolds in non-linear, parallel narratives. For example, in Jimmy Corrigan, the stories of Jimmy Corrigan as an adult, Jimmy Corrigan as a child, and Jimmy’s grandfather as a young boy during the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 intertwine to create a dream-like world. Fantastical elements like robots and a disturbing (and disturbed) superhero known as The Super-Man echo throughout the storyline.Ware had the potential to break even further into the mainstream earlier this year, when he was commissioned to do the cover for the 500^th issue of Fortune magazine. He told the magazine that he would take the job “because it would be like doing the cover for the 1929 issue,” which of course didn’t bode well for anyone expecting a politically correct piece. Ware’s finished product, which included images of cars piling up in Detroit, a Factory of Exploitation in Mexico, and hooded prisoners in Guantanamo, was ultimately rejected. However, you can still check out his current continuing series Acme Novelty Library, the 19^th issue of which came out in 2008.