eschergirls: Charlie submitted: “Yawn! What an amazing and refreshing nap I just had!” I mean, seriously? Found this gem while looking through comic book previews. Cover for Dynamite’s Red Sonja: Unchained series by Mel Rubi. I honestly don’t know how to properly tag it, since “WTF did I just see” isn’t an option here. I think it’s time for another caption contest!  And for this contest, I’m happy to announce there will be a prize for the winner courtesy of Girl In Four Colors!!! :D  (The artist behind the Escher Girls Centaur Badge.) The winner will get a free greyscale small sketch commission (normally she charges $15) and can order a print, canvas, etc of it from society6.  (That part you’d have to pay for, because it’s an external service, but it’s still 50% off the total price.) Check out her commissions page here for her regular prices if you’d be interested in commissioning her for other things, or to check out her work to see her style. :) So that’s pretty cool! :D  It’s really awesome for her to be willing to do this. :3   And hopefully will make the contest a bit more fun.  The winning caption will be chosen by me and her. Anyway, onto the caption contest! What do you think is going on? TO THE VICTOR GOES… a free commission. Not to oversell myself, but that’s pretty cool.
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eschergirls:

Charlie submitted:

“Yawn! What an amazing and refreshing nap I just had!”

I mean, seriously? Found this gem while looking through comic book previews. Cover for Dynamite’s Red Sonja: Unchained series by Mel Rubi. I honestly don’t know how to properly tag it, since “WTF did I just see” isn’t an option here.

I think it’s time for another caption contest! 

And for this contest, I’m happy to announce there will be a prize for the winner courtesy of Girl In Four Colors!!! :D  (The artist behind the Escher Girls Centaur Badge.)

The winner will get a free greyscale small sketch commission (normally she charges $15) and can order a print, canvas, etc of it from society6.  (That part you’d have to pay for, because it’s an external service, but it’s still 50% off the total price.)

Check out her commissions page here for her regular prices if you’d be interested in commissioning her for other things, or to check out her work to see her style. :)

So that’s pretty cool! :D  It’s really awesome for her to be willing to do this. :3   And hopefully will make the contest a bit more fun.  The winning caption will be chosen by me and her.

Anyway, onto the caption contest!

What do you think is going on?

TO THE VICTOR GOES… a free commission.

Not to oversell myself, but that’s pretty cool.

And that’s the most frustrating thing about depression. It isn’t always something you can fight back against with hope. It isn’t even something — it’s nothing. And you can’t combat nothing. You can’t fill it up. You can’t cover it. It’s just there, pulling the meaning out of everything. That being the case, all the hopeful, proactive solutions start to sound completely insane in contrast to the scope of the problem.


It would be like having a bunch of dead fish, but no one around you will acknowledge that the fish are dead. Instead, they offer to help you look for the fish or try to help you figure out why they disappeared. 
(x)

(via coooode)

blackfolksmakingcomics:

I wish I knew Zachi Teleshia before I heard about his passing because at such a young age, he gets it.

He understood the power of comic books to somebody like him. Zachi was a fan of comics, loved them, grew inspiration from them, and wanted to make his own. And he did. He created and wrote his own comic series, Hero Up! all before the age of 10.

Then you see what Zachi has gone through. His birth mother murdered by his birth father was one thing. In 2008, he was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a cancer that affects the bones.  Zachi created a character as an alter-ego for himself, Venom-Transporter, the leader who could gain strength from any toxin.

From what I read about him, he seemed like a typical kid, a happy, fun-loving individual who loved to create and help out anybody that he could.  

Zachi Telesha died on April 29, 2013 at the age of 12. It’s not  He may have found inspiration in comics, but as a comics fan and creator, I’m finding a lot of inspiration in him.

Rest in comfort and peace, little man. 

This is something that my kids and I do together, when I’m with them at work. I work as a counselor in a shelter for homeless teenagers, and every so often we sit together and talk about how important heroes are to us. Then we make our own heroes, versions of ourselves that can take on the problems we might not always be able to. We make little comics to tell their stories, for ourselves and for each other.

They get it too. They know just how important comics can be when we’re at our worst, because they show us what we can be when we’re at our best.

And then they inspire us to go out and be that, like Zachi did.

So I second all of this. Rest well, Zachi, and know you were just as much a hero as anyone you wrote about.

I Believe “KLANSMAN NO MORE!” Was the Working Title For THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #50

sushigrade replied to your post: The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is Filming Now in Rochester
ASM disappointed me (and actually made L angry) because the only POC of note was a mustache-twirling caricature and the female characters were just props for Peter’s male teen power fantasy. Also, “lizards don’t regenerate. That’s salamanders.”

Yeah, that’s a pretty big problem with all of the Spider-Man films, but The Amazing Spider-Man is pretty egregious.

Like, it’s fucking Queens. My family is from there, I know the racial makeup of that part of New York pretty damn well. Like, you’d have to deliberately send your kid to the David Duke School for Melanin-Deprived Youngsters to end up in a high school as White as the one Peter Parker attends.

Maybe that’s the “terrible secret” from Peter’s past that the film hints at? And by “hints at,” I mean deliberately leaves out of the narrative so that the sequel can fuck up my morning commute.

monotremata:

The long awaited.. PRINCE AND THE PRINCESS…

My final project for my book arts class. Hope you enjoy ;o;

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is Filming Now in Rochester

The production team has selected my humble city to stand in for Spidey’s home turf for several chase scenes in the film, due to the fact that Rochester, NY will let them get away with certain vehicular stunts that the city of New York won’t allow. I don’t know if it will be at all recognizable after editing, but it’s kinda neat, and it will bring a lot of money into a city that seems to be perpetually poor.

I am experience nerd guilt about it, however, because I wish I was more excited about it.

First of all, I didn’t much care for the first Amazing Spider-Man film. It’s not that I was the biggest fan of the Sam Raimi-directed trilogy that came before. Those films have a lot of plot issues (especially once you get to the third one) and the leads (Maguire and Dunst, specifically) are just weird choices in those roles with little chemistry between them. But they’re all very watchable and re-watchable. Aside from Peter Parker and Mary-Jane Watson, the rest of the cast is fantastic, especially the villains. Raimi does a really good job of capturing the fun, colorful nature of Silver Age Marvel stories, and as many issues as there are with Spider-Man 3, it does NOT shy away from Raimi’s camp sensibilities and I LOVE it for that. (Sorry, fanboys, but “Saturday Night Fever” Symbiote-Spidey is FANTASTIC.)

But The Amazing Spider-Man was just a garbled mess of a plot mechanically driven forward by characters with incomprehensible motives. There’s a lot that’s just missing from the film, and honestly, I can’t even remember what’s there well enough to give you a proper critique right now. That’s bad, because if there’s one thing I have any kind of memory for, it’s films.

Plus, like… Downtown Rochester at noon on Tuesday is a place where teenagers skip school and hang out until the cops show up. It’s a place where lawyers and businessmen scurry between buildings, like they’re scared as hell of having to make eye contact with the aforementioned teenagers. It’s where smiling men and women who are way too uncomfortable to still be smiling serve up some of the best street food you can find in a city this size. It’s where all the poor folks wait to catch their busses and exchange pleasantries and hugs and scowls and curses and just whatever up until five minutes after your bus was supposed to be there. Then all that gets dropped, and we’re all united in our anger toward our less than optimal public transportation system.

But none of that’s there today. Today, it’s filled with cops. Lots and lots and lots of cops. Rochester’s cops have gotten national attention in the past for being a particularly nasty group of cops. I don’t like to think of what they’re like right now, when they’ve been given an excuse to be nastier.

It’s also filled with white kids, come in from the suburbs to try and get on camera with Spider-Man. Kids whose parents write to the paper every time one of our kids gets murdered, to remind us that their suburban neighborhoods aren’t “savage” like ours. “What do you expect, living there?” as if “there” weren’t someone’s home, as if they had no part in creating “there.” Kids who take to YouTube to harras our city’s kids whenever they accomplish something. Kids with their camera phones and their smug sneers for us lowly bus riders, crowding the streets to get a glimpse of that Hayden Christensen looking kid who probably isn’t even here cuz I’m guessing they just need his stunt man for this shoot.

I guess what I’m saying is, if I have to put up with all this ridiculousness, I wish it was for a movie I actually wanted to see.

But whatever. It was kinda neat riding past an OSCORP armored car on my way to work this morning.

Goodnight, Comics Alliance.

daviduzumeri:

I don’t think it was only for those of us contributors that Comics Alliance was far, far more than a comics news site.

I came into comics blogging almost as a mistake. I wrote on the Batman’s Shameful Secret boards on Something Awful for a very long time, and that — and Identity Crisis — were what got me back into reading comics. Discussion of them was part and parcel of that deal; I can’t imagine simply reading comics in a vacuum. 52 was fun because it was a great comic, but it was really fun because it was so goddamn enjoyable to debate about, to speculate, to discuss. In a way, that’s always been the real monetary value of comics for me; $2.99 an issue for Grant Morrison’s Batman was a steal not just because it was a great read once, not just because it was a great read ten times, but because I could talk about it for hours and never get bored. The entertainment value per cent was immense, for me.

So I talked, and talked, and eventually a bunch of us on the forum — Pedro Tejeda and Chris Eckert included — started Funnybook Babylon, where I basically ran my mouth off about whatever the hell I felt like, picking fights and taking shots. It was an irresponsible but incredibly fun time, and we made friends with fellow BSS dudes David Brothers and Gavok Jasper, and the creative frisson was huge. I learned the mechanics of writing in high school, but really, at FBB I learned how to write. It was a big surprise when Brian Hibbs invited me to join the Savage Critics, but a very welcome one; being on a roll with Douglas Wolk, Graeme McMillan and Joe McCulloch, to name a few, was a huge honor, and provided me a greater sense of belonging in the comics community. Especially at the time, I didn’t really feel a part of the Toronto comics scene — I kind of still don’t — but that recognition was humbling. I didn’t think I could go much farther.

So when Laura Hudson invited me to join the burgeoning blogging supergroup, how I could I say no? I was busy at work, had an active social life, and really had no excuse to take up a second job, but shit, how could I refuse? I was walking into a group of total unknowns — this Caleb guy had cool hair and some pugs, I guess, and Doug Wolk was there, and also that kind of abrasive Chris Sims guy who I was pretty convinced hated me. (Now I know it for a fact. ;))

But Laura whipped us into a team, by God. She got us working together, and she built way more than an outlet for writing. She built a group of friends, of people who could trust and rely on each other, and one that kept growing. Brothers, Khouri, Wheeler — the more people were added, it didn’t dilute the site, it broadened its reach and made everybody better. We were like Wu-Tang, or Odd Future, and I’m glad for that since now I know David Brothers is going to jump in here and call bullshit on that metaphor as soon as he can. (I’m probably Matt Martians.)

Comics Alliance will never die as long as any of us are still writing, as long as we’re talking, as long as we’re trading ideas, and as long as there are still people out there in the comics community willing to be passionate about what they love, hilarious about what they don’t, and fearless enough to speak truth to power and call bullshit.

Extra special thanks to Joe Hughes, because I was just rereading the draft and leaving him out is a fucking crime. He carried the torch brilliantly, and while I didn’t write as much due to various personal bullshits in the past few months, I kept reading CA because it was the same fearless site it always was. Thank you, Joe, for always making me feel welcome, and goodnight.

Goodnight, Laura Hudson talking me out of making stupid, life-altering romantic decisions.

Goodnight, trying to comment on superhero movies on my laptop while drunk and tethering on Toronto Island.

Goodnight, Hilton Bayfront bar in San Diego.

Goodnight, impromptu, incredibly personally fulfilling interview with Grant Morrison in the Omni lobby. (Grant, thanks for the support.)

Goodnight, Pink Taco beers with Andy Khouri. Goodnight, Pearl the Pug.

Goodnight, Comics Alliance.

I’ll see you when the morning comes around.

-David Uzumeri, the Cloak and Dagger, Toronto

April 29, 2013

Dear Comics Alliance,

postcardsfromspace:

Fuck.

I pieced together the news a few days ago, via vague e-mails and canceled convention appearances, crossing my fingers the whole time that I was mistaken, and that even if something was clearly terribly wrong, it wasn’t that.

You’ve been my favorite comics site since your start. You set the bar for reporting. You covered comics and the surrounding culture with insight and humor; you held publishers and consumers accountable and inspired and challenged us to be better.

This shouldn’t be happening. Not to you.

In an ideal world, someone’ll snap you up wholesale—some fans have suggested Vox Media; others, Rock Paper Shotgun. In an ideal world, the people who value your coverage will find a way to crowdfund you ‘til you’re back on your feet.

(Of course, in an ideal world, AOL would never have pulled the plug in the first place.) 

But whatever happens:

Thank you.

You made me think about things I’d never thought about, as a comics fan and as a professional. You changed the way we talk about comics, and what comics journalism means. You’re an amazing team of amazing people—writers, critics, curators, and friends. And I am so grateful for that, and so unbelievably proud to have gotten to be even an incrementally small part of it.

Love,
Rachel

This hurts.

Comics journalism and comics criticism are two terms that can so often be read as oxymoronic.

The journalism side of things often acts as little more than a mouthpiece for the corporate interests behind comics. How many times have you read an article on a comics news site that was literally nothing more than an announcement that a company released an ad for an upcoming comic?

The critical side of things tends overwhelmingly to be based entirely around “likes” and “dislikes,” “buy this” or “don’t buy this,” and while there’s nothing wrong with that per se, it does nothing to advance the artistry of comics themselves or the critical thinking skill of their readership.

The recent death of Roger Ebert has driven home how important and how rare it is to see public discourse on the artistry of pop culture. On how little true criticism we’re exposed to in a mass of what amounts to free advertising.

Comics Alliance was more than that, and Rachel expresses that better than I think I can right now. It’s made me expect a better class of comics journalism. It’s made me expect a better class of comics.

So as someone who was never involved, but wishes to hell she could have been, I’ll miss you Comics Alliance, and I hope everyone on staff finds good, rewarding work as they move on. You all deserve the very best. Thank you so much for giving it to us.

sushigrade replied to your photo: The Trinity stands guard over my home workspace. Batman’s got kind of a sentai-esque pose going. You should do all three that way! :D Something like this? Take a good look, that’s a literal balancing act going on right there. These figures are designed more for capturing an artist’s design work than they are for dynamic poses.
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sushigrade replied to your photo: The Trinity stands guard over my home workspace.
Batman’s got kind of a sentai-esque pose going. You should do all three that way! :D

Something like this?

Take a good look, that’s a literal balancing act going on right there. These figures are designed more for capturing an artist’s design work than they are for dynamic poses.