Upcoming anthology spotlights musicians

DJ Mag announced the publishers of Heavy Metal magazine are putting out an anthology based on a music duo next year:

A new comic anthology exploring the world of Daft Punk is set for release in 2027.

Published by French science fiction magazine, Métal Hurlant, the 272-page edition features 26 comics and six articles inspired by the legendary electronic duo, with contributions from more than 30 comics creators. The collection brings together original stories, archival material and essays exploring science fiction, technology, and electronic music.

Available to pre-order via publishers Humanoids, the anthology features work the likes of Laura Pérez, Malachi Ward, Jonathan Djob Nkondo and Zep, as well as contributions from French artists Mœbius and Philippe Druillet.

Music does make a good wellspring for exploration in comicdom, so good luck to them in marketing this.

An online specialty store offering rare and irreverent comics

The Denver Post (archive link) spoke with the owner of an online store called Wig Shop, that offers rare items, and is even working on an adaptation of a fantasy novel originally published in the early 20th century:

Through Wig Shop, Alford, 42, has created a hub for fans of irreverent comics, abstract art, rare books and other printed curiosities. Many Colorado customers — myself included — have met him in person tabling at zine fests and book fairs up and down the Front Range.

No two items among the 1,300 he has sold — he’s assigned a catalog number to each one — are the same. They are made by artists around the country and abroad, who Alford finds through visual platforms such as Instagram and often use online print-on-demand services to publish their work, he said.

“Stylistically, I lean a little more towards silly, fancy, fantasy kind of stuff than horror or violent or sex stuff,” he said. “Sometimes it’ll dip between the two.”

The artists Alford reaches out to are usually receptive when he asks to sell their books in limited quantities, he said. But he has also published his own pressings under the Wig Shop name.

He recently collaborated with a Denver-area artist for the first time for his illustrated pressing of “The Gods of Pegāna,” a fantasy novella by Lord Dunsany first published in 1905.

“[H.P.] Lovecraft’s monsters all kind of came out of this story, and nobody really knows this book,” he said. [...]

“I love this idea of pushing the comics fan toward more refined stuff, and pushing the refined fan more toward the lowbrow stuff,” Alford said of his desire to make the art book.

While encouraging fandom to read something "refined" may be a good idea, I think that's taking a risk if he's implying adventure fare is "lowbrow". But I'll give him credit, if anything, for favoring fancy fantasy more than violence-prone fare. And if he can produce comics, whether original or based on classic literature, that offers more positive themes, that's very good. We need much more optimist fare in an era where darkness and violence have sadly become an all-too familiar staple cliche.

The history of the Super Why cartoons and comics

Animation Scoop interviewed Angela Santomero, an animator who created the Super Why cartoons 2 decades ago on PBS, and which has been adapted to comics as well:

Jackson Murphy: You created “Super Why!” back in 2007. What have you loved about the overall impact this brand has had over the last 20 years?

Angela C. Santomero: Oh my God. You’re gonna make me cry. It was my Master’s Thesis when I was at Teachers College at Columbia University — the idea that we did have a longitudinal study that proved that kids were learning to read from the show, but also, of course, that they were loving the show and loving to read. All of the stories that I’ve heard from parents over the past 20 years have been amazing.

Provided it's not something where wokeism was forced upon it, it'll make a great source for adaptation to comics, and a good source for children's reading.

JM: So there’s been such a rise, I feel like, in the last 20 years, since “Super Why!” started, of comic book movies. Superhero movies. And kids really being interested in this look and this style of storytelling. Have you seen that firsthand, especially now diving into the new show?

AS: Yeah. And what’s so fascinating is we wanted to bring that idea to preschoolers — you could start reading with a comic book and that it is just as legitimate as reading a… chapter book. We did an episode on the original show that was written by Alex Breen, who’s also a co-creator on this series. Kids LOVED the comic book aspect. We had so much fun with the villains — mischievous, really. That idea of how we can get kids to read and the skill to learn to read and all those tools through this format became something we really got excited about to do as its own series.

JM: Were there fascinating aspects for you and your team of specifically bringing this look to life? Did you look at a lot of comic books and study that?

AS: Yes. We’re so research-based, so we dive in from a content analysis, “What’s been done for preschoolers?” Or the fact that five year olds are watching Batman. How do we deliver on that level of action adventure to really make sure we’re delivering on that comic book sensibility, but also be true to the mission of the series, which is to teach kids to read?

I take issue with the part about having fun with the villains, however, because again, that's taking a serious risk of glorification of badness. And youngsters are watching Batman cartoons? Well of course I realize the animated series of the 1990s was a Saturday morning style product, but all the same, should the Masked Manhunter be considered totally children's material? In the comics, it's been far from that for a long time. There was an animated Superman series that came at least a few years after Batman's began, and I honestly wonder why that doesn't get the same regard as Batman's cartoons. Just because it may have less episodes, that makes it less important? Please.

JM: I’ve seen some activities online / social media for “Super Why’s Comic Book Adventures”. What goes into marketing these days with activities for kids?

AS: A lot of it is reaching out to the parents and making sure the parents understand the depth of what we do and how much fun / how much your kids will love it. Social media is about engaging. “Which character are you?” And while we’re doing that, we’re explaining who the characters are so parents have that tidbit of information to think, “Maybe I should be putting this on for our kids.”

It all depends on if they retain any suitability level that was kept before, and don't succumb to the whole notion of promoting LGBT ideology in the cartoons and comics proper. Then, they'll have a valid entertainment product for children alright. As for social media, I hope they realize it's not all fun and games. There's all sorts of predators and other horrific people lurking about there, and if any sane countries are drafting laws to prevent children from becoming vulnerable, that's important. Even if they're talking about marketing to adult parents on social media, it's still strongly advised to be careful in how you deal with the topic of social media.

Here's also an interview from Total Licensing:

There are worrying statistics around the level that children are reading at. How will the show help that?

Those statistics keep me up at night — too many of our children are reading below grade level. But here’s what thirty years has taught me: kids don’t dislike reading. They dislike feeling powerless.

When a child uses her letter sounds to defeat The Eraser, or unscrambles words to set things right, reading stops being homework and starts being a superpower. Every episode is built on the real foundational skills — letter and letter-sound knowledge, phonological awareness, phonics and decoding, spelling, vocabulary — but children experience them as play. If we make reading feel powerful at four by being Super You, they’ll love it at fourteen.

Have you worked with researchers, parents and educators on the show?

Always — that’s non-negotiable for me. Everything I’ve ever made starts with watching real children. We worked with PBS KIDS to do formative research with kids and parents in scripting: if a four-year-old doesn’t get it, we go straight back to the drawing board. And we worked with top-tier literacy advisors to make sure every skill in every episode is the real deal. Our children deserve nothing less than our very best.

I should certainly hope she's worked with parents, and sane parents too at that, because in this day and age, it's vital that an atmosphere that's safe for children in animation and comics be retained. If anybody thinks animation can be used for telling adult stories, it should be in what's written and marketed for adults, and not children. I'm sure it's possible to make different types of cartoons and promote them for different audiences without any confusion, and if marketers haven't done it yet, they'd do well to distinguish between age gaps now.

I wish Santomero well in promoting the comics adaptations, and hope she retains a family friendly angle that I assume the cartoons followed as well. Then, reading can become an important challenge for children even on paper.

Some history of Animerica magazine

Aftermath tells some history of an early magazine that gave coverage of Japanese anime, Animerica, which was in publication from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s:

Animerica Magazine was the closest thing the West had to a Reader’s Digest for otaku, by otaku. The monthly magazine, published by Viz Media, by and large did everything I strive to do in covering anime and manga: write explainers for universe readers, elucidate why a show or its creators matter through easy-to-read columns, exclusive interviews with voice actors and animators, and put folks on to when the new hotness will drop and where they can check it out. The issues I copped had one major difference—and one that hit me as a bit saddening to read in retrospect. Animerica Magazine is the last vestige of an industry for that kind of neuron-firing bliss you can get from scrolling through a webpage. You can only get this visual splendor by flipping through its pages.

Each issue of Animerica Magazine followed a format that’s equal parts pleasantly archaic and entirely backward compared with how online publications prioritize anime and manga. Instead of anime and manga (if they’re lucky) existing as a tucked-away vertical covered by one person in a staff filled with writers and content geared elsewhere, anime and manga are the magazine's centerpiece. Duh, it’s in the name. It's both humbling and heartening to flip through a magazine and see how much work and interest was put into a medium compared to how today feels like we’re still catching up to covering the medium in earnest. Much of my wistful nostalgia is encapsulated by Animanga’s layout. [...]

Even with the hindsight I have as an anime journalist, I found myself learning new information from a magazine two years older than myself. Chief among them was learning why Dragon Ball Z came to the U.S. before Dragon Ball (tldr: more action), the initial episode order (26), and how the Saban version of the show was marketed to 8- to 10-year-olds, hence the censorship. Hearing all this insider information from Gen and Cindy Fukunaga, the husband-and-wife duo who led its U.S. production in the halcyon days of Funimation, felt like an archaeologist brushing dust off a T. Rex tooth. The magazine had the wherewithal to dedicate four pages to illuminate readers on the many puns in its characters’ names and a mini-history of its video games back, a testament to the forward-thinking Animerica had in its coverage of a series that’d become synonymous with the genre.

On the subject of Haim Saban's onetime production studio and localizations, I don't find them appealing in retrospect, and today, I make an effort to avoid his editions, if and when I watch anime. One of the most annoying things about some early examples of localization dubbing is that the USA producers would attach all these ridiculous bells and whistles like third person narrators and other sound effects that might not appear in the original edition, and of course, there's the little matter of removing all that's Japanese about certain dubbed productions, which strongly suggested at the time the USA marketers didn't consider Japanese culture even remotely compatible with US culture. Japan does have its flaws, and there's examples where I came away feeling angry, but there are still plenty of positives you can find by distinguishing. I've got a feeling that, if a country like Bulgaria had even half the industry Japan does, the USA's distribution specialists would still do everything they could to drastically alter even cartoons from Bulgaria so they'd be all but unrecognizable in US localization, with no cultural aspects emphasized, if at all. Though I do wonder why a leftist like Hayao Miyazaki's the one who got to determine and champion his visions, while most other animators didn't.

Animerica may be long gone, but I'm sure it had advantages in print that online sites don't always have, with the main one being that you can sit down on a couch and relax, reading various news articles and interviews that gave insight into how the anime industry was doing at the time. But, modern web technology clearly won out, and now, not many specialty magazines exist in print for the subjects. Though arguably, if we bring up Wizard, they probably did more harm than good to comics in their 2 decade print journey based on the favoratist approach they had, laced with crude humor at times, yet if they were still around today, they'd doubtless go "woke". Perhaps even Animerica would do the same? They wouldn't do anime/manga any favors if they did.

Comics could help overcome reading gaps

That's what a professor in Texas is arguing, according to ABC7-KLTV:

As students across East Texas continue working to rebound from pandemic-era learning loss, one local educator says the secret to closing the reading gap might be found inside comic books.

Dr. Gina Doepker, a professor of literacy education at the University of Texas at Tyler, believes graphic storytelling could be an unexpected solution to helping struggling students catch up.

“If we can get students hooked on books like comics, then that is going to increase their motivation, their engagement, their skills like fluency and comprehension,” Doepker said. [...]

In a world where children grow up surrounded by smartphones and tablets, Doepker says today’s students are naturally becoming visual learners. Because of that, leaning into visual literacy through comic books and graphic novels makes practical sense.

The format helps eliminate the intimidation factor often felt when opening a text-heavy page. Whether it is fiction favorites like Marvel’s Spider-Man, Captain America, and stories about dinosaurs, or non-fiction titles explaining the U.S. Constitution, comics meet children right where their interests are.

The demand among young readers is already evident. A study by Libraries Connected found nearly 80% of libraries identified children ages 6 to 11 as their most frequent comic book borrowers.

Interesting they bring up the Constitution, because with the way the USA suffered in the past decade with cancel culture and other terrible PC issues, it's something children could definitely learn about now in comics format. Of course, bad ideologies can't be made a component of whatever comics children are expected or encouraged to read if the study's to be carried out successfully. And newer Marvel/DC comics don't make good examples for children either; some are actually too "adult" for them at this point too, like more modern Batman books. Perhaps creator-owned/independent comics would make a better choice. And if parents check the content carefully to make sure there's nothing inappropriate for children, then, things'll work out for the better.

Writer offering free CGC variants at next month's NYCC

In this fluff-coated Variety interview, a writer named Matt Dinniman, author of Dungeon Crawler Carl, is said to be offering free graded variant covers of his comic that's based on a novel:

Attention, Crawlers! Collectibles grading company CGC is teaming up with “Dungeon Crawler Carl” author Matt Dinniman for the release of a free exclusive variant cover of his comic book series at New York Comic Con next month.

From Oct. 8-11, CGC will offer a limited-edition “Dungeon Crawler Carl” #0 variant featuring newly commissioned artwork by “The Mask” and “Aliens” artist Doug Mahnke at its NYCC booth, where Dinniman and Mahnke are both set to make signing appearances.

Even if this is a free sample they're offering, what's troubling is that it appears to be "slabbed", and suggests they're experimenting with a new gimmick for catering to the speculator market, using something not unlike a freebie from FCBD events.

Adapted from Dinniman’s bestselling litRPG novel series of the same name and published as a webcomic and in print through Vault Comics, the “Dungeon Crawler Carl” comic book is a postapocalyptic story that follows the titular Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut, as they’re thrust into a deadly game-show-style dungeon where survival depends on wit, grit and leveling up fast.

“Comics are still new to me, and it’s surreal to see all these awesome artists coming together to make badass art in the ‘DCC’ universe,” Dinniman said. “Doug’s cover stands out, and I’m forever grateful an artist like that wants to work on something I created.”

CGC and JSA return to NYCC this year as the convention’s official grading and authentication services. Per CGC, fans submitting eligible collectibles to CGC for grading at the brand’s NYCC booth (CGC Booth #2805, CGC Signature Series & JSA Booth #HB906) will be able to receive the exclusive “Carl” variant for free, limited to one per person while supplies last.

“We’re giving this variant away because we want the fans who’ve followed Dungeon Crawler Carl from the beginning to be the ones who get it first,” CGC’s vice president of comic book grading, Shawn Caffrey, said. “That’s always been the idea behind our program — put incredible art directly into collectors’ hands, free, and let them be part of the moment a series like this breaks wide open.”

But why a variant rather than the story itself? Something's very awry here, and while artwork obviously is a vital part of the process, that doesn't mean they should be turning it out at the expense of the story and entertainment value, and if they're giving away the variant issues in slabbing cases, that certainly makes the whole move look ridiculous. Also note how the author of the original novel, Dinniman, is just getting into the business, and it only suggests even more than he lacks confidence in actually selling the adaptation as much as the original formats. As a result, this news only insults the intellect, because it's not clear if merit is actually the name of the game here.

So of course, you have to wonder if some novelists really are getting into comicdom because they consider it a legitimate medium for their creations. Mr. Dinniman's not off to a good start in proving he sees it that way.

Variety also asked:

What was the process like working with Matt Dinniman on the art? Fans know these characters so well already that remaining text accurate while also having artistic license could be difficult.

Doug approached the cover with a real respect for Matt’s world — the characters, the tone and all of those details “Dungeon Crawler Carl” fans know so well. That gave him the foundation to bring his own distinctive artistic style to the cover while still making it feel unmistakably DCC. David Baron’s colors really bring the finished piece to life, and we think fans are going to love what they created together.

“Dungeon Crawler Carl” #0 has already been released, but this will be the first opportunity for fans to get a Doug Mahnke “DCC” variant. That makes being able to debut it at New York Comic Con especially exciting.

But it still sounds like a cross between speculator collecting and FCBD distribution, instead of asking the audience to buy the whole comic proper. I'm sorry, but they're still failing to convince they're doing this because they believe the medium's a worthy venture.

The business of Midnight Comics

The Atlanta Voice interviewed Lloyd and Natasha Jones, the owners of Midnight Comics, an African-American publisher:

The married couple in question, Lloyd and Natasha Jones, started Midnight Comics on August 5, 2020, and six years later, the brand is flourishing.

After dropping off the latest issues of “The Grey,” “Sol,” and “Tales From Midnight,” Natasha fiddled with a copy of “The Omnibus,” a massive tome of the writing pair’s works combined with the many illustrators they have hired to bring their words to life.

“This is everything we’ve written in the past 5 years,” said Llyod.

Asked what it means to own a Black comic book company with his wife, Lloyd said the art of bringing his and his wife’s thoughts to life is a “dream come true.”

“It’s personally a passion. We both love telling stories, and I have a lot of stories I want to get out,” Lloyd said. [...]

Natasha, the quieter of the pair, is a writer first and foremost. She said that she enjoys creating the characters of the Midnight Comics universe and watching them evolve as the illustrators take her notes and bring them to life on paper. [...]

No comic book character arc is complete without an origin story and a moment of clarity. For Midnight Comics, that moment came during Atlanta Comic Con 2021, a year after they began the business. Despite not being one of the household names, their table at Atlanta Comic Con was always busy. So much so that they ran out of comics.

“The way those books were flying off the shelves. We were like Ok this is the moment,” Lloyd said.

Asked what the most fun part of being business owners and artists has been, Natasha said, “For me, the creation of the characters, building their personalities has been the most fun part.”

And in addition to having a successful business, we have a woman who's evidently finding success too. They'd be wise not to lend their talents to Marvel and DC so long as the Big Two are still dominated by PC-advocates. If Midnight's got some good stories to offer packed with merit, I'll buy some of their books in paperback/hardcover, and for now, wish them good luck in continuing to build up their publisher.

Social media ruined art before AI did

A writer at the Frederick News-Post says social media played a part in dulling artwork well before AI ever did:

Even before artificial intelligence began delivering its tepid conglomeration of “art” and reducing us all to idiocy, social media was already working to make “art content” look depressingly bland.

I, like many in the profession of comic book art, have dabbled in social media in the vain attempt to muster likes, follows and subscribers and, ostensibly, pick up a commission or two. In reality, I’ve come to realize I was trying to beat back the yawning need for validation by turning to online strangers, while discovering that nearly every one of those strangers only wanted my work if it were free.

Curse my vanity! Damn that impostor syndrome!

Whatever I’m doing doesn’t play well with the new pantheon of algorithmic deities. I’ve failed comprehensively at building an online audience. Honestly, the effort takes time I’d rather put into the work itself. Besides, nobody needs to see my grizzled old face explaining how a pencil works. I’m better suited as an invisible author.

Anyhow, the game is rigged. The house — Meta, TikTok, X and the like — always wins.

You may reasonably detect sour grapes here. Welcome to the vineyard.

I’m writing this especially for young artists starting out because I’d like them to avoid a trap I’ve felt tugging at my own ankles: producing bland, familiar work that people quite like, then mistaking their approval for artistic progress.

Something to consider is that artists who do have talent and draw competently, whether with a cartoonish or serious style, were victimized over the past decade by people who despise creativity, beauty and hated sex-positivity. That's not all, of course. The online neo-communists also made exaggerated or outright false accusations of racism/sexism, and that's one of the reasons we arrived at the sad situation we're at now with the mainstream, if anything. Twitter/X had by far the worst examples of what also became cancel culture, something Mark Millar spoke about in the past year, and it's bound to be years before the damage is mended, if at all.

Artistic voice is that almost indefinable critical quality that sets your work apart, that fits some missing jigsaw piece in a reader’s emotions and creates frisson and resonance, scratching an itch they maybe didn’t know they had. Developing it takes time, experimentation and an embarrassing quantity of output you’d rather nobody saw.

All you’ll get from social media is an audience and a scoreboard.

Consider the sketchbook. Mine needs room for mistakes. That’s rather the point. Yet the online sketchbook tour can look like a succession of finished illustrations, each waiting patiently for its merchandise deal. Nothing ugly. Nothing unresolved. God forbid, a badly drawn hand.

Experimentation can be anathema to the demand for consistently pleasing posts. You try something unfamiliar. It looks awkward, and you haven’t yet worked out whether it’s going anywhere or if it even will. That’s normal, but it makes a poor sales pitch in a feed full of polished drawings.

If you’re starting out, the danger is abandoning that experimentation because nobody clicked “like” before you learned what it might teach you. If every piece must be worth posting, where do you put the work that helps you improve? And where, in the interminable production line of performative “content,” do you find time to get better?

I think the mistake made here, if I'm reading correctly, is asking a potentially anonymous audience to give their stamp of approval, rather than experienced teachers and art critics. Relying only on social media drones is surely worse than relying on what might also be a dishonest teacher. And rest assured, of course mistakes happen, and you can't expect to reach peak talent in a fortnight, though I should note that there's a very sick segment of society that would be more than delighted to deceive, influence and shame somebody into delivering ugly, grotesque artwork that won't please consumers at all, and otherwise end the potential artist's career much sooner than expected. That's why social media is a very poor way of finding approval.

In comics, familiar legacy characters add another distraction. Batman arrives with decades of recognition, familiarity and popularity. We know who and what that character is. Any original character faces a steep hurdle to build an audience.

If Batman brings attention, how many disappointing responses to your own creations do you tolerate before returning to the crowd-pleasing cowl? There’s nothing shameful about drawing him. But I do wonder how much work never develops because its creator decides the audience has already voted.

Then there are the recurring styles. In my feed, I keep encountering rounded “Steven Universe”-like cartoon figures, polished Disney-ish faces, manga-derived expressions and enough decorative crosshatching to suggest the comics boom inflicted some kind of 1990s Stockholm syndrome on a certain generation.

Influence is essential, and we all stand on the shoulders of giants, but the generic reward from social media audiences encourages artists to settle before those influences have been explored, questioned and absorbed into a personal visual language.

A better social media site would probably be Deviant Art, and I vaguely recall Marvel staff once said a long time ago they wanted to hire and audition artists who hosted their artwork there, but in the years since, it's pretty apparent they didn't have faith in themselves, and several years back, they hired terrible scribes, quite possibly also because they're stunningly cheap. DC followed suit. Even today, things haven't recovered much. That's why it really doesn't make much difference whether you seek a job drawing Batman, because even Batbooks are far from selling in millions today, no matter what the press says about the Absolute line, and I would think that, if some publishers wanted to, they could figure out how to promote and market a creator-owned comic without having to worry the mainstream would literally trump all attempts to interest audiences in something unrelated. The superhero genre's long been demolished by PC, and there's opportunities at this point to promote stuff that could be science-fantasy, but doesn't have to be superhero-themed in every way. That's what modern marketers are missing.

I'm sure there's what to learn from an account like this about how an aspiring artist wishes to find a career of some sort. But today's artists have to also consider that an online "audience" isn't really the way to go for seeking approval. If anything, artists who want to actually sell their work physically have to make it possible for consumers of physical media to decide with a finished product. And you need to make sure you can find decent teachers and other such specialists who can tell you whether your artwork's got potential, and encourage the artists to keep working to improve where necessary. One so-called veteran nobody should rely upon, however, is Rob Liefeld, based on how his artwork of the 1990s and 2000s was mediocre or just plain outright atrocious. And as some could tell you, he couldn't draw feet. It's a shame some publishers had to associate with such an incompetent scribe out of the notion they could actually make money based on how poor Liefeld's art was. That Capt. America illustration he turned out in the late 90s where Steve looked like a balloon was a most tellingly awful textbook example of how not to draw an admirable character. And unfortunately, there are all sorts of Liefeld-wannabes in today's industry landscape. Liefeld may try to sound like he isn't so PC himself at times on social media, but he did regrettably precipitate the modern situation back in the day, no thanks to various incompetent editors and publishers who could've avoided employing him if they wanted to.

If one's looking for talented artists and other educators who could be more reliable, they need to look for figures like J. Scott Campbell, to name but one worthwhile example. But of course, they could also look at various examples from throughout the decades to see what artists, old and new, were the most impressive, and that's another good way to develop some good skills. I hope modern artists will consider, and in addition, so long as Marvel and DC are hostage to PC and bad directions, that they'll avoid seeking jobs there at all costs. The creator-owned scene for now can have more potential, and that's where they should exercise their skills. And even consider developing projects that're built more on optimism, much like Superman and Fantastic Four.

A decade after Lara Croft was dumbed down for woke's sake, Tomb Raider's programmers still only care about just that

As somebody who's admired the original Tomb Raider series of computer games with Lara Croft, I've been as disappointed as the next person that modern programmers in charge of the franchise repeatedly only show interest in watering down her sexuality, and as the following news from the Straits Times reveals, they still go to all that trouble just to make a point about something that affected some, if not all, of the comics adapted from the game:

Lara may have beaten a path for more female heroines and encouraged young women around the world to pick up a controller, but in the early days, the publicity for the game leaned heavily on her shapeliness.

With the market for video games now expanded well beyond the stereotype of adolescent boys, the team behind the new game says this time they are focusing on Lara as a strong character.

“The way we’re rebuilding Lara, we’re trying to respect the fact that she’s female and we’re just trying to make her powerful, not as an object of sexual attraction,” said the game’s art director Arek Tomaszewski.

Eight years after the last instalment Shadow Of The Tomb Raider and ahead of an all-new entry planned for 2028, Tomb Raider: Legacy Of Atlantis aims to revisit the original adventure “through a modern lens”, Siqueira said.

I've heard that ambiguous narrative about "strong character" before tons of times, and all the game designer is doing is insulting the whole premise of Wonder Woman, to name but one most prominent example from comicdom. It reminds me that a decade back, Gal Gadot told how she encountered people online who claimed WW "can't be intelligent because she's attractive". And I guess she can't be strong for the same reasons? The directors of this new entry in the Tomb Raider series certainly seem to think so, even though, from the pictorial samples I've seen, ironically or not, Lara's actually wearing a shirt with cleavage (something I don't think she wore in the early games), yet her bosom doesn't look that big in most of the photos, so obviously, they've still got very icy cold feet about such petty issues. And that doesn't improve perceptions of the newer video games at all. Must I also point out that, even in the early years of Tomb Raider, there were women who played and practically designed it too, without issue?

So it's utterly disrespectful for modern video game developers to lecture the audience about what the franchise should be. As though it weren't bad enough even the animated cartoons have suffered repellent PC in recent years to boot. I think it'd be best for the franchise to cease as video games, or be sold off, because repetitively producing them according to PC dictates has not improved their reputation, and it's insulting to the intellect to make it sound like boys don't deserve a lady to love. Also, are we to assume the developers have no creative freedom, let alone courage? Well, that's another something you could glean from such a pretentious article. I think it's best to continue saving money on new game purchases if they insist on insulting players' intellect.

Swiss comic for teaching students about AI

Geneva Solutions announced a special comic that's for teaching about AI, but also about wider cooperation:

A 48-page comic book, titled Critical Code, aims to educate students about the importance of multilateral cooperation. It has been distributed in Geneva’s secondary schools and across 15 other Swiss cantons.

Since 2023, international Geneva has faced challenging years, marked by thousands of job cuts across UN agencies, the Palais des Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and scores of NGOs, as well as relocations of key operations. The impact has been profound, forcing Geneva to rethink its future.

In response, the Foundation for Geneva – celebrating its 50th anniversary this year – has championed the creation of a comic book exploring Geneva’s international ecosystem. The work, published in French, German, Italian and English, is called Critical Code.

[...] The 48-page comic has already been distributed by the Department of Public Education to secondary school classes in Geneva and a dozen other cantons. Its goal is to “challenge young people to think about the individual and global implications of AI” while also highlighting the importance of international cooperation, much of which takes place in Geneva. As a key pillar of Swiss foreign policy, the comic also aims to showcase the often-overlooked strengths of international Geneva to the rest of the Swiss population.

Well I hope they're not intent on trying to set up another political outfit to substitute for movements like the UN, because they have been a bad lot for years, and so has the Red Cross. If the comics project is meant to provide a better idea for people, like encouraging them to do technological research, that's what could make it palatable. But they need to stop acting like the UN is virtually everything, when it's not. And if they think AI isn't the best example in technology, maybe they should just say so.

An artist from North Carolina who may respect what the Punisher was created for

Queen City News spoke with artist David Vandyke, who created a comic titled Mercer. What's interesting for starters is that:

In an era of digital art, he works by hand.

“I like the tactility of it, like I like feeling the paper,” Van Dyke said.

He's got a great idea there. While it's always possible to turn out good art with computers, old-fashioned techniques still matter, and can still result in something to appreciate.

He draws a comic book series called Mercer, which he co-created with Jason Seibel.

“It’s basically if the Punisher was a demon hunter type thing,” he says.

Whatever one thinks of the premise of Mercer, what Vandyke says here does seem to indicate he has respect for what the Punisher was created for, certainly far more than some of the leftists who messed up Frank Castle since the turn of the century, not the least being the late Gerry Conway himself.

Vandyke had a very terrible misfortune in the past 2 decades that influenced his decision to become an artist:

He has come far from the chilling conversation he had 21 years ago.

“The doctor literally came into the room and said, ‘Your life as you know it is over,’” he remembers vividly.

Vandyke broke his back in 2005 while working as a mechanic in Gastonia.

“I heard a pop, and something moved out of the corner of my eye, and I just turned and caught it,” he said of a devastating shop accident. “It was like a 400-pound transmission—and I caught it at a dead stop—and it annihilated the bottom two discs in my back.”

That crushed his dream of a drumming career.

At the same time, he was almost in denial.

“This is my identity; this is everything I’m supposed to be. Like, what do you mean [doctor]?” said Vandyke.

But one night, he picked up a pencil and reinvented himself.

“Like before music, what did you want to be?” he asked himself.

The answer is a comic book artist.

Instead of dwelling on depression and anger, he practiced drawing as his body healed.

“You determine your story,” he says.

I'm terribly sorry he suffered back injuries, and hope he's recovered as best as possible since. Taking up an artist's career is certainly a great way to make a comeback, and I wish him well in his new career.

Marvel failed the X-Men long ago, yet Collider thinks it's only recently this happened

Collider argues that Marvel is now failing the X-Men, as if it hadn't already happened, though it's interesting they take issue with one of the most overrated, pretentious leftist writers of modern times, Gail Simone, in their look at what she wrote in recent X-Men stories. The article doesn't begin well:

Comic books have come a long way since their advent in 1933, but they have evolved significantly over the last ten years as the industry has grappled with writing stories in a post-Comicsgate era. Still, some of the most celebrated titles have found themselves falling into familiar and oftentimes uncomfortable patterns.

When the writer starts subtly blaming Comicsgate, something's obviously gone wrong. That's just a distraction reducing the seriousness of the subject.

Few writers embody this evolution more uniquely than Gail Simone, whose early commentary helped redefine how gender and agency are understood in mainstream superhero media. In 1999, prior to her professional writing debut, Simone launched the website "Women in Refrigerators," coining a phrase that forever altered comic book criticism. Sparked by the infamous death of Kyle Rayner’s girlfriend Alexandra DeWitt (who was murdered and stuffed into a refrigerator in Green Lantern #54) the term described a pervasive industry trope where female characters were routinely killed, maimed, or otherwise de-powered purely to advance the emotional arcs of male heroes.

Simone’s sharp critique propelled her into the industry itself, where she swiftly became a powerhouse writer for both DC and Marvel, crafting acclaimed runs on titles like Birds of Prey, Wonder Woman, and even Deadpool while proving that female characters could anchor the same complex narratives as their male peers.

That legacy makes the last two years of her run on Uncanny X-Men all the more jarring. As the first woman to be the mainline’s sole writer, Simone benefited from a degree of “plot armor,” so to say, which allowed her early missteps to be given a pass. However, this run has slowly become a depressing descent into the very creative pitfalls she spent decades dismantling.

Rather than propelling the mutant flagship forward, Simone's work succumbs to clunky prose, dated characterizations, and a frustrating reliance on regressive tropes that feel out of character for not only the franchise, but Simone as a writer. Perhaps most glaring is how the narrative falters under the weight of subtle microaggressions and tone-deaf interpersonal dynamics, which begets the question of how an icon of feminist comic commentary could deliver a story so strangely out of step with her own established standard.

Unfortunately, she continued to work with DC even as they performed many of the same offensive acts she was supposedly against, and even her work on Birds of Prey may have contained allusions to Identity Crisis and Infinite Crisis, which dampens the impact of whatever she was supposedly trying to reverse. It's also worth considering her real life politics are another contradiction that make a joke out of her alleged mission. Even the artwork in some of her later projects became noticeably bad. So why do they suddenly say she's stumbled into "creative pitfalls"? She was sadly always a left-wing phony, and her attacks on J.K. Rowling only made things worse. And the writer appears to have forgotten one more chilling trope: when a girl is turned into a villainess for the sake of it. Another something I don't think Simone ever made a convincing effort to dismantle in her scriptwriting, and she never made a convincing effort to give ladies a complex narrative to rival the male cast members.

The most immediate, and perhaps least egregious, casualty of this run is the regression of Rogue and Gambit, whose iconic relationship is flattened into a hollow caricature. Rather than leading the team as a formidable leader in her own right, Rogue is reduced to little more than a domestic "tradwife" existing solely in relation to her husband. It quickly becomes evident that the narrative prioritizes making Gambit look effortless and cool instead of allowing Rogue to command respect as an actual leader.

Let me get this straight. The writer believes Simone turned Rogue into a "conservative" stereotype? Something tells me the columnist's not being altruistic. Besides, Rogue's potential as a character was damaged 3 decades ago, and Scott Lobdell could be considered the culprit. It's one thing to pair up 2 superhero figures, but another to do it in such sloppy fashion as Lobdell did it, which undermined characterization. It's interesting though, that the woman who wrote this Collider item actually feels Simone's doing stuff that's allegedly anathema to a leftist agenda, when she claims there's "microaggressions" in the script, and the talk of a "tradwife" also gives strong clues where this is really going.

Rogue's dialogue (and Remy's, admittedly) is weighed down by heavy-handed, exaggerated Southern phonetics that read more like mocking stereotypes than authentic regional voices. Compounding this domestic imbalance is the awkward insertion of Calico; forcing an infantilized teenage mutant into their immediate living situation pushes Rogue further into a suburban foster-parent trope, taking her even further away from the frontlines of mutant leadership. The narrative comes across as off-putting as Calico is written in a deeply juvenile way which includes seeing the teenage mutant crawling into bed with Rogue and Remy — a couple she has only known for a few months.

This superficial obsession with making Gambit look cool constantly sacrifices basic narrative logic for cheap, unearned hype. A glaring example occurs during a major battle sequence in Uncanny X-Men #32, where Remy abruptly transforms into the "Wyvern" — a monstrous form that has been teased relentlessly for nearly ten issues and hyped up on promotional art. Instead of delivering a dramatic, satisfying payoff to all of that teasing, the transformation arrives suddenly at a moment that makes little sense within the flow of the story.

The panel they presented doesn't show Gambit in bed while Calico's there, and Rogue's role in that segment is clearly meant to play something like a big sister figure who cheers up a protege who'd been suffering from a nightmare. I don't find Simone's writing appealing today, but it sounds like the columnist's looking for cheap excuses to tear down on motherhood/sisterhood. Nor does it show Gambit looking cool, which I assume means he's battling baddies. But that's not what happens in the material I've seen so far. In any case, if the writer's delegitimizing Gambit as a character by acting as though he's a real person, she's just perpetuating the rock bottom lapse in logic that's been going on for decades.

Most striking is the treatment of Monet St. Croix, a Black Muslim woman whose established characterization has always centered on bodily autonomy and a fierce opposition to incarceration. Reducing her to the temporary warden of Graymalkin — a fascist concentration camp where mutants are detained until human authorities arrive — completely guts the core of her identity, reframing a hero of liberation as an enforcer of state-sanctioned violence.

Monet, from what I know, was not created as a Muslim adherent in 1994. I think it was Peter David who was allowed to force that retcon onto the former Generation X cast member, 15 years ago. What occurred is similar to how heterosexual characters like Obsidian in Infinity Inc. were retconned into homosexual characters. What happened to Monet is atrocious in the extreme, and that the columnist appears to be fine with that also speaks volumes. In the Islamic world, women are treated as 2nd class citizens, and we're being lectured about "bodily autonomy" and opposition to incarceration? I'm sorry, but what's written sounds so deliberate, and again, like a lecture. If the writer's going to take such an accepting view of the Religion of Peace, then this article is politically motivated, though it does have some eyebrow raising details to tell:

Another recurring pattern in Simone’s Uncanny X-Men run is the abundance of cultural insensitivity and subtle microaggressions woven into the dialogue. Asian characters are routinely subjected to lazy, exoticized tropes. Of note, Logan casually refers to the young Japanese mutant Deathdream as a "manga kid,” which Simone glibly responded to criticism by framing it as Wolverine “incorrectly” calling him that. This casual bias rears its head again with Calico’s most recent interactions with Pietro Maximoff. Calico treats Pietro — a character of Romani heritage and a man of color — with a smug, condescending superiority (despite being in a moment of crisis), dismissively refusing to even view him as a true mutant.

Rather than celebrating the rich diversity that has long defined the franchise, these characterizations alienate readers, reducing an ambitious flagship era to a series of uncomfortable missteps. While there is some narrative explanation for Calico’s behavior, it is nevertheless jarring to see a blue-eyed, blonde-haired white woman othering a character who is, historically, the son of a Holocaust survivor. Coupled with the optics of tethering her to the franchise’s most cookie-cutter Southern couple, it feels as though Simone is doubling down on an inherent and accepted bias about Southern ideals.

Watching an industry titan like Gail Simone, whose entire legacy was built on dismantling harmful tropes, fall into these exact creative traps is a deeply disheartening turn for modern comic criticism — especially as she argues with fans of her writing on social media. Yet this failure does not rest solely on her shoulders; Marvel shares equal responsibility for allowing one of its most iconic flagships to languish without editorial discipline or vision.

Honestly, it's hardly a surprise if Simone doesn't respect any of the better qualities of X-Men from the past. Let's recall said quality definitely collapsed since the early 2000s, along with cohesion of continuity, and characterization. But truly, Simone never "dismantled" any harmful tropes, and she added insult to injury for the Atom by fully accepting the assignment of writing a DEI-pandering character of Asian background shoehorned into Ray Palmer's costume in 2006. It was cancelled about 2 years later, and 2 decades later still, nobody cares about a social justice pandering production. But if Simone really is resorting to harmful tropes, should this be a surprise? What it can suggest is that, if she was part and parcel of DC and Marvel's earlier embarrassments, and never took issue with what DC did to any female character not written by her, then she never had faith in her alleged positions to begin with. No wonder she's so overrated.

Since the X-Men is a subject, here's also an article on IGN telling why the X-Men don't have a role in a Wolverine video game:

While there are many mutants famous for being members of the X-Men in Marvel’s Wolverine, in the video game’s story the X-Men do not exist. Rather, Logan is a former member of Team X, the mutant black ops unit that includes the likes of Sabretooth and Mystique. Yes, Jean Grey is in the game, but she is not part of any group called the X-Men because it hasn't been formed yet. Put simply, don’t expect Cyclops to turn up in his comic accurate suit, dropping from the Blackbird under orders from Professor X back at the X Mansion.

But why? Why not have the X-Men exist in Marvel’s Wolverine? In an interview with IGN, narrative director Walt Williams said Insomniac was keen for the mutants in the game to not have a safe place to go to, to not benefit from being superheroes, but rather remind players that mutants exist on the outside — and Wolverine himself, who this game is all about, is perhaps the biggest outsider of them all.

“So Team X is canonical,” Williams began. “It is Logan's first team in his history. It was a black ops team from the '70s made up of wetworks mutant workers. So in telling Wolverine's story, we wanted to bring it back to the beginning of where his story really began in that long string of teams. Because as we know, he's been a member of many teams by this point in his 50-plus year history.

Well that's part of the problem with the comics since the early to mid-2000s, if we take the terrible Brian Michael Bendis' work on Avengers as an example. Several mainstay characters were dropped in favor of hilariously obvious choices like Wolvie and Spider-Man, with Scarlet Witch the biggest victim of jettisoning, yet the same people doing these interviews don't take an objective view of that, and it's no excuse for forcibly omitting his own team from reference. If they want to make this game a solo adventure, so be it, but I don't see why the X-Men have to be downplayed, or written out that forcibly.

“But really what we were looking to do is, because superheroes have become so mainstream at this point in just pop culture and everything through TV shows, comics, movies and everything, that even especially with our own Spider-Man games, these are characters with superpowers that a lot of the world has accepted, that they are celebrated. They have parades, they are honored and stuff. But mutants at the core are outsiders, even within the Marvel universe.

He acts like this has to be the norm at all times, and cannot be changed. Another decided problem. It's exactly what led to the Spider-marriage being thrown out with bath water 2 decades ago, and Mary Jane Watson paying a heavy price in the process.

It’s a detailed answer to a question that fans have been wondering about ever since Marvel’s Wolverine was revealed. And so, while you’ll get co-op gameplay with Jean Grey, she’s not in the story as Marvel Girl or wearing a suit we’ve seen from the X-Men comics. And without the X-Men knocking about, Logan and Jean are free to explore their own romantic relationship — assuming the game itself goes that far — free from Cyclops’ death stare.

Indeed, Williams confirmed to IGN that there is no Logan, Jean, and Scott Summers love triangle at play in Marvel’s Wolverine.

“I don't want to get too much into spoilers because obviously there's a whole story that we want everyone to experience as they play through it,” Williams said. “But I think it's safe to say that we are focusing on just Logan and Jean's relationship in Marvel's Wolverine.”

Gee, so that's what is considered a big deal? Up to the turn of the century, I can't recall if Wolverine was ever seriously seen pursuing a relationship with Jean, and Chris Claremont wrote Logan noticing she and Scott were an item in the late 70s, to the point where Logan quietly discarded some flowers he'd brought her in a trash bin at a hospital when Cyclops was around. It was only when Mark Millar being helming Ultimate X-Men that all of a sudden, exploring a love triangle became a big deal, because in this alternate universe, practically depicting Logan as morally bankrupt was somehow a great idea. But that alternate universe line was little more than one of the most overblown tales of its sort, and came at a time when mainstream was declining.

And it's a shame we once again have examples of MSM sources not admitting the X-Men went downhill long ago.

Video game about boy trapped in comic book unfortunately also trapped in horror genre

InvenGlobal tells about a video gaame titled Yurei, which is about the following:

Yūrei is a psychological horror game set within the haunted pages of a comic book, developed by Team Yūrei. The game was created over five months by ten second-year master's students from Cnam-Enjmin, the National School for Video Games and Digital Interactive Media in Angoulême, France.

Players must follow the comic's progression, reading the story to reach its end. The comic book, which is stuck to the protagonist Jun's hand, constantly speaks to the player, sometimes offering hints and at other times presenting challenges to solve. It acts like a narrator, yet it may also force you to make sacrifices.

The premise of being inside a comic itself may be clever, but making it part of an overused genre is not. It's regrettable the horror genre continues to be what's used as a theme for these kind of computer games, when here, if they'd wanted to, they could've turned it into a fanciful adventure with a brighter setting, yet they stick to potentially violent themes instead. That's the biggest problem with modern entertainment, and no telling how to convince anyone why it needs to change.

And I hesitate to think what they mean by "sacrifices".

Digital comics are allegedly still a big deal

Publisher's Weekly wrote about the market of digital comics, and says it's ostensibly improving after a slump:

Less than three years ago, the lights on digital comics seemed to be getting dim. In November of 2023, Amazon announced the impending shutdown of the Comixology app—the platform that had accounted for the large majority of digital comics sales from every major U.S. publisher for the past 10 years.

But a new digital landscape was quietly developing, as both longstanding comics publishers and upstart digital retailers carved out new approaches to producing, selling, and reaching an audience for online comics. Could 2026 be the year that the comics industry fully comes into its digital era? We talked with publishers and retailers to find out.

The problem is that no sales figures, even digitally based, seem to turn up in this item, and that's the common modern weakness in such puff pieces. Though it does say here that:

Meanwhile, at Sweet Shop, another new retail platform that launched in beta in late 2025, Kenny Meyers has a different approach. In contrast to Neon Ichiban’s suite of features, Meyers believes that the key to digital success is to keep the app and market as simple as possible.

“There’s a lot more to [digital comics] than gimmicks,” Meyers says. “People just want, in my opinion, very simple, elegant ways to discover comic books.”

If the digital market avoids gimmicks like multiple variant covers, that's a good thing, but do people want entertainment value? That's what seems to be missing here. And then, once again, they sugarcoat DC/Marvel sales:

DC Comics has hardly been a late bloomer when it comes to digital comics. The company sold its first single-issue digital comic more than 15 years ago, and was among the first publishers to embrace day-and-date digital sales. In 2007, they even (briefly) attempted to launch a digital-first slate of all-original titles—the short-lived Zuda imprint.

Today, DC is coming off a heady year of growth, fueled by sales of its new Absolute Universe imprint and the surprising success of its digest-sized DC Compact Comics. By the end of 2025, the publisher even overtook Marvel in comics shop market share for the first time in years.

And as new readers came to DC, new digital sales followed. “We're finding an almost equal number of new readers coming in through physical and digital at the same time,” general manager Anne DePies says. “And once the digital readers come in, we've had meaningful success in seeing that they are purchasing across our ecosystem.”

Like other comic companies, DC doesn’t provide public figures for its total volume or revenue on digital sales, but DePies says that digital’s relative share of DC sales has remained remarkably stable over the past decade. That’s true of most other major publishers as well: at Dark Horse, VP of publishing sales Mark Bernardi says that digital readership leveled out to around 5% of sales many years ago, and has stayed in place ever since. At IDW, the share is a stable 10%. Image is a bit of an outlier; publisher and chief creative officer Eric Stephenson says digital sales have never recovered from a slide that started when Amazon bought Comixology.

I'm sorry, but failure to provide any public sales figures, which has been the norm for several years now, does nothing to convince. The ICV2 page they point at doesn't give sales figures either, and 5-10 percent is nothing to marvel at. Mainly because again, no sales figures are offered, yet they clearly hope everybody will take their word at face value. Any sales figures provided for the Absolute line were also laughable, as I recall. None of which matters to a puff publisher like Publisher's Weekly, unfortunately.

I'm sure the digital market has potential for the independent market, however. Perhaps provided, of course, that it's not a company like IDW turning out the products, seeing how far they've fallen in quality over the past decade. Yet there's suggestions the digital market, in the end, is doing no better than the print market, certainly if there's no genuine quality to accompany it.

More about Frank Miller's now tiresome viewpoints

Here's a few more recent items involving an artist/writer who's got to be one of the most overrated in comicdom. First, in this recent UK Observer interview, he tells who his mentor was:

What prompted you to write this book? It’s not a straight-up memoir.

No, it’s a combination – a guidebook for storytelling and a portrait of the amazing little world I inhabit. I think it has something to do with my most important mentor, the artist Neal Adams, who helped me start my career and played the tough sensei in my life. After I met with some success, I asked him what I could do to pay him back for what he’d done for me. Without missing a beat he said: “Do it for the next [generation].” This book is the product of me trying to meet that pledge.

Wasn't Will Eisner an important mentor of his? Or is Miller deliberately trying to obscure Eisner, because the latter didn't live up to the former's exact expectations? Somehow, Miller seems to have disappointed again, all for the sake of political correctness. Besides, what's he actually doing for the next generation that could have lasting value?

You started out writing for Marvel and DC superhero franchises before branching off to create your own worlds, but was working within those confines a useful first step?

Oh, yes. I was being thrown problems to solve that I’d never been thrown before. I was working under specific instructions with this mythology of characters, many of whom I hadn’t even heard of, and learning to work in a much more disciplined situation.

I've got a feeling that even today, there's quite a few older creations he hasn't heard of, and at this point, not only doesn't care about them, he wouldn't be suited to work on them anyway.

You were still in your 20s when you were tasked with reimagining one of the world’s most cherished superheroes, Batman. It must have been a lot of pressure.

I don’t have any memory of having any fear. I was so full of ideas of where I wanted to take it. It was mostly enthusiasm and a sense of overwhelming joy. The amazing thing about Batman is that it’s so versatile. You can find different ways to make it work. Every once in a while I get a chuckle out of how much of The Dark Knight Returns is still surfacing in [Batman] movies after all these years.

Oh, but of course it was a joyous occasion, wasn't it? After all, he got to do swipes at Ronald Reagan, for ambiguous reasons. As for allusions to DKR in movies, the odd thing is that Miller hasn't found most of said movies appealing, and in another article coming later on the list here, they mention that subject.

Like so many East Coast writers before you, you were lured to Hollywood in the late 1980s.

That was wild. It was a whole lot of fun. I was playing in a much bigger ballpark to obviously a much bigger audience. But it was a very different experience: there were a whole lot more bosses.

You refer to “the fiery fallout of fame” and hitting rock bottom after moving to LA. What happened?

I lost my way. I’m afraid I got more involved with ego than with my mission as an auteur, and I lost track of things. But it’s through telling stories that I’ve been able to come back around to find myself and my purpose.

He sure did. His work on the Robocop sequels, if anything, was such a failure. But even his later adaptation of Sin City to film didn't pan out beyond 2 entries, IIRC, with the 2nd, A Dame to Kill For, thudding badly. It reminds me of a description of some two-season TV shows I once noticed on another blog a decade ago: "first season wonders, second season blunders". A similar description could be thought of for some recent live action comic adaptations.

Something that crops up again and again in your work, not least in Sin City, is the flawed but single-minded crime fighter who will clean up the mean streets against all the odds. What’s at the root of that fascination for you?

I’ve always liked my heroes, from Superman to Batman to Zorro. And I’ve always loved crime stories. The more I discovered film noir, the more I realised that stuff spoke to me like nobody’s business.

What's left out is that he developed a dim view of the Man of Steel, all because Supes in his narrow vision is ostensibly "too powerful". As for crime stories, based on the dark vision he alludes to, that's basically the problem: he seems more interested in honing skills for storytelling that's anything but science fiction, and maybe that's one of Miller's biggest weaknesses.

Somebody once asked you if you’re a conservative and you said “No, I’m a libertarian”. Is that still the case?

Let’s just say I’m an independent thinker. You know, being conservative right now means something very different than it did a generation ago. So I find my own way.

Unfortunately, it's been sadly apparent for years now he just can't bring himself to quit ragging on figures like Donald Trump, again, for ambiguous reasons. I just don't know what exactly Miller wants or expects.

As AI encroaches, do you regard it with excitement or something else?

Something else. At first I thought it was a magic mystery box. Then I thought it was the end of creativity. Now I think that it’s going to be something that everybody will eventually calm down about. Its uses are limited. It’s not a panacea, it’s not a god. It will be much like the personal computer, in that it will change things, but we need not all bow down before it.

I wonder how he'd feel if AI were used to imitate his art style, which has been mediocre for years? More to the point, if any would-be artists try cutting corners by resorting to AI to complete their assignment, isn't that dishonest and a poor approach? It's bad enough much of mainstream artwork's become so mediocre, but that doesn't mean we should approve of AI either, if anybody winds up using it as a way to save on employing actual artists.

Next, when the latest Spider-Man movie came out, how fascinating that Miller saw fit to praise this particular film, according to the Hollywood Reporter:

The comics icon took to Instagram to share his feelings about Sony’s latest Tom Holland adventure, calling the film, “The most Ditko movie yet and with my Hand in it for all to celebrate. This fan’s dream come true. Tom Holland is my forever Spider-Man as romantic as he is heroic. Congratulations to Destin and the whole team.”

Miller, who famously wrote The Dark Knight Returns and Batman Year One for DC, has sometimes been a tough critic of comic book movies over the years. In 2014, Playboy asked Miller about the “lousy” movie adaptations of Daredevil and Elektra. “When people come out with movies about characters I’ve worked on, I always hate them,” Miller said. “I have my own ideas about what the characters are like. I mean, I can’t watch a Batman movie. I’ve seen pieces of them, but I generally think, No, that’s not him. And I walk out of the theater before it’s over.”

When asked if that includes Christopher Nolan’s acclaimed Batman trilogy, Miller replied, “It includes all of them. I’m not condemning what he does. I don’t even understand it, except that he seems to think he owns the title Dark Knight. He’s about 20 years too late for that.”

Oh yes, that's interesting history too. I can't recall now if Nolan ever made use of any noticeable allusions to Miller's writings in his screenplays, but years later, when Nolan produced a woke adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey, which unfortunately grossed quite a bit at the box office, one could wonder if Miller would change his mind. There's another writer, more Hollywood-connected, however, who also had what to say about this:

Longtime Spider-Man comic book writer, J. Michael Straczynski, also had some praise for Brand New Day, writing on X: “To be clear I’ve enjoyed all the Spider-Man movies. But for my money, this latest iteration feels most authentically Peter, and Spider-Man. So many comic movies have fallen into MacGuffin plots, looking for the code, the stone, the box, the sword…this one is all about what William Faulkner called ‘the human heart in conflict with itself.’ It’s a very human story, emotional without being slow or dull or self-indulgent. It feels like stepping into a really good Spidey comic. Well done to all concerned (and even those unconcerned).”

As Toy People News notes, both Miller and J. Michael Straczynski are credited in the film's special thanks listings, "suggesting their comic work may have served as inspiration for the movie." But as the latter's presence makes clear to me, anybody as overrated and contemptuous of Spidey's world as JMS turned out to be is reason enough to skip this film for a long time. He played a part in the dissolving of the Spider-marriage 2 decades ago, and no matter what defense he employed at the time, it was just inexcusable. Also, Miller seems to think he owns the Dark Knight as well, so why complain about Nolan, regardless of where he's been going lately?

Here's also a review on Quillette of Push the Wall, which while mostly behind a paywall, offers the following visibly:

Even outside of comic book circles, Frank Miller is known as a gifted artist and writer who made comics grown up and gritty. From his damaged version of Bruce Wayne to Marv in Sin City (whom Miller pithily describes as “Conan the Barbarian in a trenchcoat”), Miller has created stories that resemble a strikingly original blend of film noir and dark Wagnerian opera. But the Miller who emerges from this memoir—part autobiography, part primer for aspiring graphic novelists—is as much a romantic as a gung-ho rebel.

It's always sad how earlier scribes like Dennis O'Neil and Steve Englehart are obscured in regards to whomever made comics "grown up". And why do they think a scribe who originally lucked out with the Robocop sequels is truly a "gifted" creator? Let's also not forget his only solo directorial effort to date, the cinematic adaptation of Will Eisner's Spirit, which was dreadful.

More importantly, New York was the home of his first great love: “Sure the city was violent, but it was also the hub of comic books and had been since the beginning. Marvel and DC were there, and all my real-life heroes were either still there bent over their drawing boards or they had spent formative time in the city, honing their skills and learning the lessons that only New York can teach you.” Miller was a childhood fan of the medium, and developed a particular fondness for EC comics, which were geared towards adults and “explored forbidden themes such as environmentalism, nuclear disarmament, and the miseries of war.” From EC comics, Miller “learned to always push the walls that others constructed, to challenge the strictures others put in place to stifle and smother.”

How does he feel about the mainstream moving away to Hollywood, apparently because that's how to truly manage a live action adaptation? One could argue the comics industry won't have as much impact as it used to, when DC/Marvel have been taken away from where they began.

Part of EC’s appeal no doubt rested on the reproaches it earned from the Comics Code Authority, which Miller describes as “a crusty remnant of ‘Red Scare’ censorship and the prim morality of postwar America.” The attempt to drum up a moral panic about comics will be familiar to those who have followed similar media and public campaigns to ban and censor video games and “video nasties” in the name of child protection:

And on this, one can only wonder how he feels about modern censorship, which made a comeback in the past decade, and the industry still hasn't recovered from it? Moral panics as we know them turned up again 15 years ago, with video games some of the primary victims, and Miller, unshockingly, seems oblivious to all that, as does the book reviewer.

Next, more recently, the BBC also interviewed Miller, and they perpetuate the whole notion only he succeeded in convincing everybody Batman was more than just kids stuff:

A deadpan do-gooder who wears underpants over his tights, and always carries a can of shark repellent spray.

For a long time, that was Batman – or, at least, Batman as the general public saw him, thanks to the camp 1960s television show and film. In his DC Comics adventures, he was depicted as a more serious and even sinister character, but the average person still saw him as Adam West in a self-mocking comedy with an infuriatingly catchy theme song.

Then came the graphic novel that changed everything – not just Batman, but superhero comics, and the many Hollywood films those comics would inspire.

I guess they too are just too lazy to do any research about Englehart and O'Neil's work in the 1970s. It's just like such an otherwise awful news network to be such favoratists. What's so special about Miller's work that isn't about most other Batman writers? Wasn't Chuck Dixon's creation, Bane, adapted for either the 2nd or 3rd Nolan film? Miller also told them:

"We do not have a Superman in the real world, but we do have huge military forces which can be used for good or evil. We do not have Batman out there, but we do have people's own desire to resist the use of force against them, and so on. I wanted to use the machinery and iconography of a children's story to tell a story for an older audience."

Back at the time, it was sadly intended to feature negative right-wing metaphors, and Miller doesn't seem troubled by how it all went from bad to worse, or that his very own 1986 miniseries was exploited by the editors by the turn of the century for depicting Batman as a mindless control freak. With the biggest irony being that Miller didn't apply the characterization wholesale from the miniseries to the ongoing flagship series when he scripted those.

As he recalls in his newly published memoir, Push the Wall, Miller was still in his twenties when he was commissioned by DC to "breathe new life" into a character who was at the time "emasculated" and "a second-class citizen in comics".

No kidding! That could easily describe what's gone wrong with a lot of portrayals of heroes in recent times: they're either emasculated and even depicted as cowards. Does it also sit well with them if Superman was transformed into a 2nd class citizen in comicdom, all for the sake of the Masked Manhunter? Such balderdash the BBC wrote up.

The idea was that while Batman was absent, Gotham City had crumbled into an urban hellhole, overrun by murderous gangs. The setting was based in part on Miller's own experiences. He moved to New York in the 1970s after a childhood in idyllic rural Vermont, and while he adored his new metropolitan home, "it was really a city in pretty serious decay".

Luckily for Gotham, the Batman of The Dark Knight Returns is no longer a gentlemanly sleuth, but an intimidating, ultra-violent vigilante who takes a grim satisfaction in breaking criminals' bones. He's so brutal, in fact, that it's almost incredible that DC's editors didn't object.

When you notice how ultra-violent modern entertainment's become, their acceptance of even a stand-alone tale set in a future era could be considered a precursor to modern problems. As for what Miller thought of NYC in the past, does that also sum up what he thinks of it today, when it's easily worse?

Most radical of all, Superman became a government stooge, loyal to a president who happened to resemble Ronald Reagan. And the Joker became a monstrous sadist. When the mini-series was first published, these revisions seemed iconoclastic, but Miller maintains that he was looking back as well as forward.

One can only wonder if the Joker was written as a metaphor for conservatives too, and IIRC, Marvel published a story featuring the Red Skull in the past decade that depicted him as one.

Numerous articles were written about how superhero comics weren't for children anymore. And the influence his work had on the comics industry was "pretty obvious fairly quickly", he admits – as were the shameless imitations. "But that's the nature of the beast. If something succeeds, there's a natural inclination by not just the publishers but the talent as well to imitate it. It's certainly nothing to resent or deplore."

At least they admit there's blatant imitations, not the least being some of Miller's own. I'm sorry, but when one looks at how bad entertainment's become today, it is what to resent and deplore. One more reason I'm not wasting time and money on Sin City.

His influence on the film industry was clear, too. Every single modern Batman film, from Tim Burton's 1989 blockbuster onwards, has taken some of its toughness and noirish style from The Dark Knight Returns.

Christopher Nolan's second and third Batman films took their name from it. And Zack Snyder's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice lifted whole sections directly from its pages. Beyond those, it could be argued that Hollywood's current understanding that superhero stories can appeal to all ages, without being dumbed down, can be traced back to Miller.

But he stresses that he was only one of several writers and artists who were revolutionising the genre in the 1980s. And he isn't losing any sleep over the many films that owe their existence to him. "It's better for sanity's sake and blood pressure's sake to take it all with a good nature," he says with a cackle.

Unfortunately, much of modern comicdom's been dumbed down, and all the while, Miller doesn't care about anything but his own writing and art. Also, Snyder's Batman v. Superman film wasn't that successful, so what's the big deal there? At least Miller and the BBC admit he's not the only scribe who "revolutionized" the mediums 40 years ago. Even so, they still insult intellects by refusing to give other artists and writers a spotlight for people to judge, and as a result, it all comes down to another mediocre puff piece that doesn't add anything new to what perceptions we could have of comicdom in general.

Postal video game being adapted to a comic

Go Nintendo reports one of the most violent video games ever produced is being adapted, sadly enough, to the comics panels:

Running With Scissors, creators of the (in)famous POSTAL series, in partnership with the renowned artists at Roditeli Productions, release an official digital preview for the first-ever POSTAL comic book series, giving fans a 19-page preview of the diabolical action arriving in late 2026.

With tens of millions of copies sold across the POSTAL game franchise, the greater POSTAL universe has expanded through sequels, spin-off games, a documentary film, and a movie. Now, the POSTAL Dude will make his comics debut in a series produced/co-written by Kevin Roditeli (SWAT Kats, X‑O Manowar, Bad Omens: Concrete Jungle) and co-written by Rob Cannon (Freak Snow, Anime Animay).

The POSTAL Dude makes his way through what appears to be a normal Monday until his fragile peace of mind is shattered once again – this time by an ad for a sinister dating app that sends him into a spiral of conspiracy-fueled madness.

I looked at several pages from the preview, and what a surprise, it does feature bloody acts of violence not all that different from what the game could feature. And the publishers of this tommyrot actually believe this is normal and acceptable?

On top of that, must virtually every video game of this sort be adapted to the comics medium? Of course not. Yet these wastes of trees keep getting made, regardless of how many people even buy them to begin with. I wish more people would wake up and stop plunking their money into even the video game itself, because this is getting very irritating already if and whenever anybody just buys these comics unquestioned, as though it literally must be done. Let's be clear. Nobody has to buy these kind of comic adaptations at all, and a game as jarring as Postal shouldn't have to matter to anybody.

San Diego artist attends Comicon for 35th year

ABC 10 News reports a California artist named Erik Arreaga is attending the SDCC for the 35th time:

Chula Vista comic book artist Erik Arreaga is drawing attention at Comic-Con this week for his 35th year in attendance.

Arreaga is hoping his new projects will keep San Diego comic book artists on the map.

Arreaga's said he's draws his inspiration for his comic book characters from the 1990s.

"So I feel that I carry that era here. My artwork has been known to be very gritty, dark, but with some great motion," Arreaga said.

And wouldn't you know it, this guy even runs the gauntlet of making me wonder if darkness is what he specializes in. I just don't understand why quite a few of the scribes who've made headlines like these always seem to care more about darkness than light. Then again, maybe I do understand - because the press favors those who do. And that's appalling.

But he is not staying in the past. He is creating characters that live beyond the comic book page — including one who exists exclusively on social media.

"I have a character that is not really in the book. You have to follow her on social media," Arreaga said. "I feel we have to move forward with creativity in our books and just bring in the new generation who are all on social media into comic books."

Well I hope he doesn't think his writing should be made to resemble social media. In the past 2 decades, I'd noticed at least a few stories where the writing was described as resembling a message board argument, such as a story Geoff Johns wrote in the Flash, and he's one of the most pretentious, overrated writers to have ever littered comicdom.

And if he really believes creativity matters, why did he turn to cliches like darkness? Any creator who can't be more open minded about brightness is not being seriously creative. I would hope there's a lesson in this, that modern creators who really want to prove they're creative will be willing to prove they're ready to work in optimism even more. Food for thought. Superman, for example, has been all but marginalized in terms of vision today, and that's something that has to be mended.

Indian cartoonist's work nominated for Eisners and Harveys

Scroll wrote about Charbak Dipta, an Indian cartoonist whose self-published comic was nominated for Eisner and Harvey awards:

West Bengal-based Charbak Dipta was nominated for the Best Digital Comic category in the 2026 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards for The World of Lublu (published in Bengali by Book Farm as Lublur Prithibi). Named for the pioneering comics creator and graphic novelist Will Eisner, the Eisner Awards are considered the “Oscars” of the comic book industry. The winners were announced on July 24 at the San Diego Comic Con International.

“Charbak Dipta is not the first Indian to be nominated,” scholar and cover designer Pinaki De remarked about the Eisner Award nomination, “but the fact that his work is done entirely in India, originally published in Bengali for a regional market, makes it so special. To think that anyone here can also make it without extensive ‘foreign’ connections augurs well for the future of Indian comics. In that sense, he is a trailblazer.”

The World of Lublu has also been nominated for this year’s Harvey Awards for Digital Book of the Year. This prize is named after pioneering American cartoonist Harvey Kurtzman, and no book-length, creator-owned work from the subcontinent has been nominated for either before, let alone both. Dipta hails from Bongaon – a town near the Indo-Bangladesh border, two hours from Kolkata. [...]

He started out as a cartoonist at The Times of India in Kolkata. He has, since then, worked as a commercial illustrator for tabloids, magazines, and publishers like Scholastic – book covers, cartoons, children’s picture books, and work-for-hire gigs ranging from Nordic mythology to Malgudi Days-esque tales to gangster narratives, while also committing to rigorous online outreach for each of his works, public appearances, and curated exhibits.

This is the daily bread of the commercial illustrator: a figure with a long and under-recognised history in India who has always worked across formats, languages, and markets with a versatility that does not easily lead to publishing boutique graphic novels. Dipta grew up on Indrajal Comics, Chacha Chaudhary, and the Bengali stalwarts, Narayan Debnath and Mayukh Chowdhury. The former designed cosmetic labels before becoming a one-man comics industry, while the latter moved fluidly between illustration and adventure serials. The tradition continues into the present in figures like Debashish Deb, Onkarnath Bhattacharya, and Uday Deb – commercial artists who straddle children’s illustration, political cartooning, graphic novels, merchandising, and branded work with the same promiscuous dexterity their predecessors mastered.

His later western influences and encounters with the Bengal School of Art and folk traditions aside, Dipta understands that survival in this ecology means taking on every role simultaneously. The mass market that could move hundreds of thousands of a single issue per month has fragmented considerably. What remains is a precarious ecosystem in which the aspiring cartoonist must also be the illustrator-for-hire, colourist, letterer, cover designer, and even publisher and translator of their own work in order to move across national boundaries.

This is certainly interesting background history, and what's additionally impressive is that Dipta helped develop the translation for one of the most famous GNs produced by the guy who founded one of the aforementioned award ceremonies:

The most satisfying loop in this story is his recent translation of Will Eisner’s A Contract with God (1978) into Bengali, completed almost simultaneously with his own nomination for an award bearing Eisner’s name. Dipta pursued the Eisner Estate himself, driven by what he saw as a structural parallel between Eisner’s Dropsie Avenue and his own Kolkata.

“The raw pain, resilience, and daily struggles of the Jewish immigrants in Eisner’s work resonate perfectly with the lived experiences of East Bengal refugees settling into the colonies of West Bengal post-Partition,” Dipta explains. “The damp, congested tenement living on Dropsie Avenue mirrors the narrow alleys, centuries-old decaying mansions, chaotic street noise, and tightly knit human relationships of North Kolkata.”

Translating Eisner also meant contending with Eisner’s lettering, blocky type that weighs on the images in very idiosyncratic ways. For a cartoonist of speed such as Dipta, who also letters his own work, one imagines this to have been both a technical challenge and a philosophical one. How does one carry the visual texture of a voice from one script to another without losing its grain? The artist always precedes the critic. Let’s leave it there.

We must also give the guy a lot of appreciation for recognizing the value of Eisner's most notable GN from the late 70s, at a time when he'd resumed comics development after working in the army and businesses more often during the 50s and 60s. Of course, it's a shame the Eisners have been abused as an award event in past years, recalling they nominated DC's offensive Identity Crisis from 2004 for awards 2 decades ago. I can't recall if it actually won any, but if it did, that was wrong, plain and simple, and explains perfectly what's gone wrong with even award shows nowadays. We have to hope their board of directors has moved away from associating with such atrocities, but that doesn't mean they aren't still heaping awards on other bad mainstream and conglomerate-owned comics that don't deserve them. It's good if they're now providing appreciation for indies that're hopefully in better taste, and Dipta's work looks like just what those seeking better taste could be looking for.

So congratulations to him for finding wider recognition for his art career, and good luck to Dipta in the future on comics illustrating.

A new franchise titled "New-Gen"

Variety announced there's a new comic being turned into a multimedia franchise called "New-Gen", which is reportedly distributed by Marvel:

New-Gen Universe, Inc. is launching its first consumer products initiative at San Diego Comic-Con, debuting an exclusive collector’s trading card set made with Cryptozoic Entertainment to celebrate its Marvel-distributed comic series.

Just 300 convention exclusive boxes exist worldwide for the July 23–26 event, making this among the rarest “New-Gen” collectibles released to date. Designed solely for the convention, the set also builds momentum for the upcoming 3D CGI animated series “New-Gen Nanobot Heroes.”

In the comic, twin brothers Sean and Chris learn their bodies have been enhanced by nanotechnology, thrusting them into a fight against the villain Deadalus within a futuristic world where nature and technology exist side by side.

“New-Gen” was created by J.D. Matonti, Julia Coppola and Chris Matonti and has grown from its Marvel-distributed comic book origins into a transmedia franchise spanning publishing, animation and consumer products. The Comic-Con cards give fans a tangible link between the source comics and the animated series still to come.

While I think it's great somebody wants to create their own franchise, and turn it into animation to boot, why must they rely on a publisher as unreliable as Marvel's become for distribution? They're being very foolish there. I wish the creators good luck in selling New-Gen, but would appreciate it much more if they found a different distributor instead. And perhaps if they focused foremost on the comics writing/illustrating, and not get carried away by turning everything into a whole franchise relying on toy merchandise, because that hasn't done many favors for comicdom in the end.

An Indian comic building on imagery from a film

The Times of India announced the production of a concept art comic based on a film titled Ramayana:

Team 'Ramayana' has fans counting down the days to their big trailer launch this week. While kicking off the countdown to July 24 when the official trailer will debut online, fans have been busy turning the film's concept art into impressive first looks.

Following the grand event in New Delhi on Saturday, the makers unveiled a special comic book that offers an in-depth look at the mythology-inspired world of the film. The illustrated book showcases detailed concept art for key characters, kingdoms and locations, giving fans a closer look at the ambitious adaptation. Soon after images from the comic surfaced online, social media users began transforming the illustrations into real-life depictions using AI image-generation tools. [...]

The comic, unveiled during the film's promotional event also offers readers a detailed introduction to the kingdoms of Ayodhya, Mithila and Lanka, while also revealing character illustrations accompanied by brief biographies and mythological backgrounds.

If you think there's a good side to AI, then moviegoers having fun producing AI-generated imagery based on the comic panels that could resemble real life is indeed a better example of how to make use of the concept that's been gaining traction in the past 5 years or so. And a comic emphasizing concept art for the movie is certainly a great idea too.