Josh Ryan, Dave Marquez, and Tara Rhymes talk with us about 3D comics, a bit about their history in addition to making them. We also get a great look at how they all got in as fans and readers.
Think of this as an appetizer for the year-ending #37, where John and I look back at the year 2013 in comics from our own particular angle. Back on Comic Shack #27, we did our "intro to Batman". I chose to plug this "reprint variant cover" episode here, squarely between #35, where I spoke to Neal Adams, and the interview with the equally Bat-legendary Dennis O'Neil in #37.
In what is definitely the most unique interview-focused episode of the show, I speak with comics legend Neal Adams. John and I spend a few minutes giving a primer as to who Adams is and why new readers should know, because the interview itself is off in its own solar system, barely talking about comics at all. Click on the cover art to order recommended reading material listed further down.
Rather than pepper him with the same series of Batman and Green Lantern/Green Arrow questions he's been asked for decades, I handed him the reins to explain his beliefs regarding the nature of the Earth and the universe, and how he believes they are growing (not "expanding"!).
Conducted at Dallas Comic Con's Fan Days show, I left in multiple interactions with fans who paid him for signatures at his table. I feel it adds some color in general, on top of how laser-precise Adams' mind is, such that he can pick up right where he left off from essentially every time. Mid-interview, there is a special appearance by Toadies drummer and Buzzkill co-creator Mark Reznicek.
John and I will double back on some of Adams' most prominent work in a near-future episode that will include an already-recorded interview with his collaborator Dennis O'Neil, one of the most important living legends in comics.
Green Lantern/Green Arrow
Until I read these, I didn't really care about Green Arrow. This run from the 1970's is one of the most iconic in terms of directly focusing a comics narrative on social justice issues of the day on top of intergalactic threats and so on. Some of the writing, as quoted by John toward the end of the episode, is a bit creaky now, but at the time, was extremely progressive. They make t-shirts of some of these covers, and I would wear them all.
Batman: Illustrated by Neal Adams Vol. 2
The redefinition of the character to counter the Adam West TV series' camp tone occurred on the watch of publisher Carmine Infantino, with the look coming from the pencil of Neal Adams. The reason I recommend skipping the first and starting with this one is that this is where the real gold from his Batman work begins, the stuff that is most-fondly remembered, including his work on some absolutely gorgeous issues of The Brave and the Bold (which undoubtedly is part of the creative influence on the recent Brave and the Bold animated series). Grab Volume 3 while you're at it, which picks up roughly just after the issues found here.
Superman vs. Muhammad Ali (Deluxe Hardcover)
Even if it were just for the novelty value of the Last Son of Krypton boxing The Greatest, the ~$15 you pay for this is pretty reasonable. There's some really outstanding background detail in Adams' art here, and the hardcover has extras in the form of development sketches and additional content of that sort. This is one of the coolest "X Meets Y" crossover one-shots of its kind not just due to historical significance, but because it's some of Adam's absolute best artwork.
The Art of Neal Adams (Hardcover)
If you are into art books, this is a pretty solid collection of a cross-section of Adams' work, runs under $40, and makes a good gift if there's an Adams art fan in your life. His Conan covers are still to die for.
One of the most frank, direct sources of informed news and opinion in home video has (since 1997) been Bill Hunt's The Digital Bits. Bill wrote a piece yesterday that should serve as a litmus test of anyone you follow for home video reporting. If their reaction is different than Bill's, you're reading someone more interested in screener freebies and swag than the interests of the consumer. Go read it and come back.
The problem isn't that a bizarre array of retailer-appeasing variant editions is happening, it's that it's been in process for a while and this is the big one setting new precedents that we're all actually noticing.
I've been quietly digging into retailer exclusive "variants" of home video titles for the last few weeks. I started taking notes when I noticed them growing both in frequency and the scope of their implications. Best Buy had an "Extended Action Cut" Blu-ray for G.I. Joe: Retaliation. Target has its own version of The Great Gatsby that includes an exclusive 20-minute featurette about the party scene. A year ago, Target had a version of Girls Season 1 that included an additional disc with exclusive content including commentary from the main cast on the pilot and a full SXSW panel Q&A. A few months ago, I got Best Buy's exclusive variant of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey , which only boasted just a fragment of a feature doc to be included on later editions. Well, it had that plus a lenticular cover...
These sorts of retailer exclusives aren't entirely new. Best Buy had their own versions of the Star Trek: The Next Generation DVDs back in the day, among other exclusives.
I'm all for incentivizing retailers to carry and promote, but this all reminds me far too much of a more expensive, less foreward-thinking version of the variant cover craze that hit comic books during the speculator craze of the 1990's. The thing I like most about that Wikipedia article is how it sets the massive financial success of the five different covers of the Jim Lee-drawn X-Men #1 alongside the anecdote that when Lee would go on to co-found Image Comics, his new series Gen13 had a first issue with thirteen variant covers. Comics boomed and busted on the back of the assumption their financial success could ride on not just the biggest collectors, but regular people in the hundreds of thousands or millions buying five copies of the same comic book, which were only different in their cover art , for a few dollars each.
At $1.50 cover price each, buying all five versions of X-Men #1 would only set you back around $8 including sales tax. At modern cover prices, you'd be looking at around $20. What Paramount in particular is setting as a precedent with one of their most prominent franchises is much more troubling.
The iconic/infamous Jim Lee cover for X-Men #1
The strange thing, to me, about Paramount's Best Buy "Extended Action Cut" of G.I. Joe: Retaliation is that the only version of the movie on the Blu-ray is the extended cut. The theatrical cut is not on there, and no one is under the illusion that it can't be due to space limitations. Seamless branching has been on discs since DVD. The included iTunes HD copy is, in fact, the theatrical cut, but even that seems odd. The week-of-release pricing for the Extended Action Cut version was $5 more than the regular Blu-ray...but didn't include the same core piece of content as the cheaper one that you could get anywhere. What is the value proposition for physical media when as a consumer, you're paying a premium for an incomplete package?
Surely they don't expect a super-hardcore G.I. Joe: Retaliation fan to spend $60 to get both...do they? Now that I think of it, there was a Best Buy-exclusive DVD of Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy that included the Wake Up, Ron Burgundy alternate feature and only the (massively inferior) Unrated Cut of Anchorman itself. It cost $30 on its own, which in that age of DVD was Criterion-level pricing for a much smaller package.
The way they've splayed out the extras across retailer exclusives of Star Trek Into Darkness , it looks like Paramount really does expect hardcore fans to buy more than one of these to get the equivalent of what was fully housed in just one edition of the 2009 JJ Abrams movie, which I reviewed four years ago, opening my review as follows:
...is one of the most sensibly-designed I've seen in terms of packaging and extras. They've wisely put the feature & commentary on one disc and all other supplemental materials on the second. One would assume they did this to preserve picture and audio quality, since the featurettes, deleted scenes, and gag reel on disc 2 add up to over three and a half hours of material.
I haven't gotten a review copy of STID yet (forgot to ask for one), but based on Bill's assessment at Digital Bits, combined with the listings of what features are exclusive to different editions, my pre-release expectations can easily be summed up as "how the mighty have fallen". I've condensed the relevant differences and figured out the rough picture of what one would have to do to actually get all of the content one might care about (we can't know yet, since studios never send out the retailer exclusives for review).
Walmart
Exclusiveness: $40 Steelbook case plus Hot Wheels-produced figurine of the U.S.S. Vengeance
Best Buy
Exclusiveness: $20 ($3 cheaper than the regular edition, oddly) 2D-only that has 30 minutes of exclusive featurettes (focusing on alien design, one of the Enterprise engine room sets, "and more!") and a "giant letters against black" variant cover designed by a middle schooler
Target
Exclusiveness: $30 (3D is $35) edition that has 30 minutes not found on the Best Buy edition, a more colorful variant cover
Amazon
Exclusiveness: $80 3D edition that is the same regular 3D version, but with a phaser prop replica
iTunes
Exclusiveness: $20 "HD" package (a total of around 6GB at 1080p resolution) that is the Digital Copy otherwise included on all versions of the Blu-ray, which apparently includes the only way to watch a Picture-in-Picture-style integrated commentary as part of the iTunes Extras (more on this in a moment)
Would it have killed them to do a lenticular one, or holofoil, or a sketch cover...?
In all seriousness, to get all of the extras theoretically worth having, you'd have to buy both the Best Buy and Target editions ($50+tax minimum), and to watch with the commentary on, you can only view it on a computer, since iTunes Extras does not work on iPads, iPhones, or AppleTV. There's no way to know whether the exclusive featurettes on either the Target or Best Buy versions are more or less worth it respectively in advance, so whichever one you roll the dice on may be a bust.
Oh, and if you're a slave to Steelbook packaging (or Hot Wheels mini-replicas, I guess), you're forking over to Walmart for another $40.
In the event that price is better, or you're getting some extra stuff no one else is selling, that is an incentive. In the case of the first season of Girls, the price was lower than anyone, and it had the extra disc of content. Nice choices and well-executed! More of that, please!
If you're spending two or three times as much, and not all of the content is even housed on the discs, it makes you wonder whether you're being given an incentive to keep the money you would otherwise happily part with for the content you really do want. For years, studios have seen retailers as the customers, not the people (ideally) taking their product home. This is the best proof of that notion yet.
Look at the upside: they'll certainly package all of the fluff retailer extras in the eventual trilogy box set they'll put out in five years.
For a while, there have been two comics-focused podcasts on 5by5: Giant Size and The Comic Shack.
We cancelled The Comic Shack last night, and in the same breath, we relaunched Giant Size.
I teased the cancellation/reboot on Twitter and got a pile of dismayed, upset tweets in response. Many moaned "but I liked Comic Shack better than Giant Size!"
I'm an awful person for toying with the emotions of those wonderful human beings.
The good news for those listeners is that Comic Shack is dead...so that its panel discussion format can merge into Giant Size and open each show.
This is the version of Giant Size I've wanted to do since the beginning, and it's how the show was originally developed. With my pal Jim starting 'Shack almost simultaneously to GS (which I wasn't aware of), I didn't want to step on his toes or "flood the market", so to speak.
Equally if not more problematic was that I needed more time and infrastructure to support the more complex, ideal Giant Size show format. This infrastructure included a regular co-host.
Except on rare occasion, that co-host is John Gholson, who has joined me for the final few Comic Shacks while we hammered out a rhythm and feel for the "All-New All-Different" Giant Size.
Last night, we recorded the opening of Giant Size #26, in which we discussed Man of Steel and Superman origin story retellings. The Giant-Size-traditional chat with Brandon from Austin Books and Comics will get wedged in after, and the show will close with the also-regular creator/industry interview.
The logic behind this format is that the tightly-moderated panel/jumping-on-point discussion is the welcome mat, which leads into "what's cool/new/new-to-you this week", and closes with an interview with a creator whom you may or may not be interested in at first. As often as possible, the guest will be directly tied to the panel discussion. This is a dastardly trick designed to turn you into a fan of these people before you even hear their voice(s).
Extra-long interviews will get chopped, with the overage going in the After Dark feed. Each show will be under 90 minutes, ideally hitting around 75 minutes, but this will vary as we break in the new structure.
The goal is for all segments to be open to the widest possible audience of listeners, whether you know how many times and in what issues Jean Grey died, you hate superhero comics, or have never read a single comic book. This is the comics show I've been wanting to do since day one, and it should hopefully appeal to everyone who liked either previous show.
The goal of Giant Size remains the same: we want to bring new and lapsed readers into reading, enjoying, and discussing comics. There are some fun comics-dedicated podcasts out there already, but none of them hit this precise cross-section, nor do many (if any) seem geared toward new or non-readers.
I also think we can achieve three shows worth of content in the time usually taken up by one.
No one needs one more podcast just like six others to listen to each week, especially one that runs two or three hours. This is something All-New and All-Different, and I hope you like it.
I mentioned that Screen Time is getting an overhaul too, right? More soon.
ComiXology CEO David Steinberger issues a clarification to yesterday's comic book industry controversy, but I don't see Apple as off the hook:
In the last 24 hours there has been a lot of chatter about Apple banning Saga #12 from our Comics App on the Apple App Store due to depictions of gay sex. This is simply not true, and we’d like to clarify.
As a partner of Apple, we have an obligation to respect its policies for apps and the books offered in apps. Based on our understanding of those policies, we believed that Saga #12 could not be made available in our app, and so we did not release it today.
Counter to what John Gruber implies, that ComiXology is entirely at fault here is a grossly reductive way to look at this. Had ComiXology published this comic in their iOS app, and had Apple received a volume of content-based complaints, Apple could have pulled the entire app from the App Store, including in-app purchase ability for those still with it downloaded. I'm surprised that someone like John would gloss over this or forget it was possible, and indeed, has happened.
The issue has been refused from in-app sale on "inappropriate content" grounds from all iOS apps: ComiXology, the Image Comics app, everything...except for iBooks. That's odd, and smells anti-competitive, since Apple sells an enormous pile of radically more graphic content in iBooks and iTunes.
This enraged tweet from Merlin Mann is a good indicator of where the fan base is at the moment. God, if he were a superhero he would kick some bureaucratic ass and quick.
iOS wasn't properly scaled from the outset to transform into its present state as an impossibly broad content delivery machine. Steve Jobs originally and forcefully pushed for only web apps in iOS (or was that spin?). With native apps and content, Apple becomes the judge, jury, and censor regarding acceptable content. As far ahead as they think in some areas, they actively ignore a lot until its a big enough problem to matter, to infuriating effect. If you don't make noise, they won't feel compelled to act. Send some emails to the not-hard-to-find executive team's inboxes if you don't like this. They do listen, but if there's no noise to be heard...
Have you not read Saga and think comics are a lousy place to find sci-fi? Be warned: the book is for adult eyes, and earlier issues are more graphic than the two measly panels that caused this little fracas. Listen to Merlin and I talk about the first six or so issues between ourselves and take some calls from some muy interesante listeners on The Comic Shack. Go ahead and subscribe. The show is back very, very soon.
I'm stuck on this Merlin-as-a-superhero thing, God knows why. I think there's something there. Hm.
See this update on the story, complete with more analysis.
Comics Alliance's EIC Joe Hughes has put together a really solid obit for the incomparable Carmine Infantino, whom we also lost yesterday.
His skills lead to the complete redesign and overhaul of The Flash, and, as a direct result, the revival of superhero comics. He co-created The Elongated Man, Deadman, and most prominently, Batgirl. To say that his stamp on DC Comics and comics as a whole is profound would be a massive understatement.
Here's one among many memorable pieces of Infantino art that made the rounds on Twitter yesterday:
Getting a Pulitzer Prize winning author to write backup stories for your creator-owned comic? Good job, Matt Fraction.
