NEW YORK – TOKYO has more on Uniqlo’s Spring line of manga-themed t-shirts:

This is not just some token nod to the daily expanding manga phenomenon in the US, but a truly informed and deeply realized tribute to the diversity of manga straight from its native country. From Golgo 13 to Urusei Yatsura, the 50 year history of some of the manga industry’s most celebrated publishers is represented and celebrated in this shirt collection. Not only are the shirts gorgeous, but the display itself is a sight for otaku and manga fan sore-eyes.

WE WANT ONE.

Reminder: manga is the new mainstream!

• Quick Stop has the Season 3 teaser we’ve been hearing about. Does anyone know what that music at the start is?

• Gawker yells: Stop Adapting The Wrong Comics and has this idea for a LOVE AND ROCKETS movie:

Who should star and direct? Even the visual style of the Hernandez brothers fits King of the Hill creator Mike Judge, and instead he is wasting years of his life on movies like the Luke Wilson-Maya Rudolph comedy Idiocracy. Judge is laboring on another television show in the interim, and when he decides to come back to the big screen L & R should be the reason. Casting a bunch of total unknowns for this would be a stroke of genius. My office will bill your office, Mike.

• Vulture, however asks a different question: Which Superhero Movie Will Suck?:

Why Hellboy 2 might suck:
We’re a huge fan of Guillermo del Toro, but Hellboy creator Mike Mignola’s comments last week that the new movie represents Del Toro’s vision more than his own didn’t inspire a huge amount of confidence. Neither did the trailer, which is so overstuffed with Pan’s Labyrinthine creepy-crawlies that Hellboy’s trademark wit gets lost in the shuffle. Most of all, this is the superhero movie we’re most looking forward to this summer — which makes us all the more nervous that, in the tradition of past so-called sure things Hulk and Spider-Man 3, it’ll be lousy.
Odds it won’t be super? 3:1.

• What is it like inside the LOST writer’s room? Noted fan magazine Popular Mechanics tells us:

CC: The writer’s room is a very lively place where every story point is debated and kicked around. We break the stories in their totality in the writer’s room down to really the very very kind of minute details of scenes, so, you know, you’re kind of harnessing the brain power of eight people in there, and that mind hive is very helpful in problem solving. And different people know more about various subjects, so, you know, one of our favorite pastimes in the room is we play this game…ah, what’s the actual title…? It’s Geek versus Jock.
DL: We have one writer, Brian K. Vaughn, who writes comic books, and then another writer, Adam Horowitz, who’s like a die-hard sports fan.
CC: Yankees fan. He used to sell hot dogs at Yankees Stadium.
DL: We’ll ask Vaughn an easy sports question, like how many innings are there in a baseball game…
CC: Or what is the color of the Carolina Panthers or what sport do the Carolina Panthers play…
DL: And then we’ll ask Horowitz to name two of the Avengers. And they will face off, and it’s fun to watch them, you know, try to answer questions outside of their specific area of expertise.

Just a reminder: you can find my TUF Season 7 recaps over at UGO.

Confession: we’re out of gas and waiting for the weekend to chill out, sleep in and change the cat litter. So nothing on the agenda today. However thanks to everyone who sent us the news that acclaimed Mexican director Guillermo del Toro is a lock to direct The Hobbit and its mysterious sequel. Del Toro will move to New Zealand for four years to work with Peter Jackson and WETA on the films. As we mentioned before, we’re quite happy with this choice. Like Jackson himself, del Toro has the necessary understanding of evil and terror to make the films the wide ranging saga it should be, and not a cutesy tale of little furry footed fellas.

Of the greatest concern is still the mystery-shrouded “sequel” to The Hobbit, which apparently takes place between the Battle of the Five Armies and Bilbo Baggins’ birthday party. With Ian McKellen on board as Gandalf we’d watch anything, but there doesn’t seem to be an obvious moment in the history to end with a triumphant reception at the White Tower. Given the crying game of Pan’s Labyrinth, don’t be too surprised if there are some sad tear-jerking moments in between happy hobbit dancing and the wailing of the wargs.

Technorati Tags: Guillermo del Toro, Tolkien

Well, that was quite the one hour of serialized episodic television.

Let’s just put the jump here and get on with it.

SPOILERS THERE BE
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Some of your out there may remember Nina Paley, an indie cartooner who went on to create the syndicated Fluff, but has lately been pretty much absent from comics pages. That’s because she’s become an animator and her SITA SINGS THE BLUES is playing at this week’s Tribeca Film Festival. Friday’s premiere is already sold out, but tickets are still available for subsequent showings. The film has garnered praise from NPR and the like for its whimsical retelling of the Ramayana interspersed with a contemporary story of a woman following her husband to India, all told with animated shadow puppets, Busby Berkeley-style Bollywood musical numbers and other multimedia effects. Paley animated the whole thing herself. The trailer is above, but here are some stills.

As opposed to the people who had a fun time, Tom Spurgeon says NYCC 08 was “bland and pointless, the kind of event that calls into question the entire enterprise more than it makes a case for the ascendancy of a shining new example.”:

Trying to limit my time at the show to better enjoy New York forced me to make a concerted attempt to get what work I can do at a con out of the way rather than have work come to me at its own pace as I might in San Diego or at a Small Press Expo. Working the show rather than hanging out at one, I found a surprising number of booth workers and company employees to be outright unhelpful when it came to doing rudimentary things that is so easy to get people from other industries to do for you at their trade shows. You know, little things like talk to you, recognize you’re standing there, solicit a question, perhaps even agree to do something reasonable when you ask for it rather than send you to someone else. I was snubbed for photos by roughly a half-dozen professionals that chose to continue personal conversations (in a public space, badges not flipped) rather than take 10 seconds to help me cover them. I can recall three publisher representatives to whom I spoke that whiffed on basic questions like what might be coming out the next season. One benign request for help with a photo led to shrugged shoulders and a request to ask someone “in charge,” but no indication as to who that might be. I visited dozens of booths; I was welcomed and asked if I could be helped at exactly three of them. Two exhibitors picked at the legitimacy of this publication before deciding to answer rudimentary queries about future books, or, really, listen to me at all. It was a long day.

We won’t argue that perhaps there are horrible, negative undercurrents at the show that bespeak an industry in decline, but there is one message that screams out from this: People, please be nicer to Tom Spurgeon!

Big BIG report over at The Comics Reporter as Bart Beaty lays smack down on David Hajdu’s THE TEN CENT PLAGUE:

I read The Ten-Cent Plague with great avidity. Hajdu is a compelling storyteller, and his interviews with some of the key players at the time add important shadings to our understanding of the period. There are places where the book really excels, not the least of which is in the important research on the comic book burnings that began in the 1940s, an area that is often mentioned but seldom dealt with in the depth that Hajdu brings to the issue.

At the same time, however, the book has certain shortcomings, and I’d like to address these over a few posts.

Few posts indeed. Beaty is only up to number two, with more promised!

Related: Eddie Campbell comments, and Steve Bissette comments in the comments.

This particular showdown has become one of the great myths of the comic book (I’m using myth correctly to mean ’sacred story’ rather than ‘falsehood,’ the usual debased meaning given to the word these days). I saw the same thing in Eisner/Miller (Dark Horse 2005)

§ MEANWHILE, Noah Berlatsky responds to some comments by ADD in the new Comics Journal about the state of the direct market:

I think Gary Groth has made a similar argument, and I thought it was silly then as well. The problem with super-hero comics isn’t that the quality is bad. I mean, there’s *lots* of dreadful stuff that have a huge fan base (things like, oh, Scooby-Doo cartoons…or Rolling Stone concerts….or Alicia Keys albums….) Quality isn’t objective, of course, but using any aesthetic criteria, you’re going to find that sometimes quality and popularity are directly related, sometimes they’re inversely related, and sometimes they don’t seem to have any relationship at all. The problem with super-hero comics isn’t that they’re “bad” (though I agree that many of them are bad); it’s that, bad or good, they’re aimed at an audience which is increasingly insular, and that, as a result, the genre doesn’t really look sustainable in the long, or even medium, term.

Tom Brevoort approaches the same thing from a different angle:

Here’s one of the things I’ve realized about this business: it’s all cyclic. The same patterns repeat themselves again and again, from generation to generation–not the specific instances, but the overall shape of people’ reactions.

I’m still reacting in part to some of the people I spoke to at the New York Comic Convention, as well as the e-mails that we’ve been getting. But it’s really driven home this idea of cycling.

For example: it’s not great secret that there are still people upset about the changes to Spider-Man. Fair enough, But in the space of a day or two, I got five-or-so comments lamenting the elimination of Spidey’s organic webbing, and the fact that there’s been no mention of the additional powers he gained during “The Other.”

Which comes as a bit of a shock, frankly, because the overwhelming majority of the reactions we saw at the time those two stories came out were decidedly negative! Nobody seemed to like the organic webbing, and people wrote long treatises about how Peter creating mechanical web-shooters was better, because this showcased his science skills. But just a couple short years later, we go back to the mechanical web-shooters, and it’s like we fire-bombed something.

Finally, Brian Hibbs sums up DC’s current output and it doesn’t look good:

The first real signs, for me, was “One Year Later”, which was about as unmanaged and poorly fitting of an idea as anything I can think of. Virtually every DCU book took a sharp downwards spike in the wake of OYL, as the readership didn’t understand what was going on in the books they followed, and given no real incentive to pick up new ones.

That could have been managed had it not been for COUNTDOWN, “the spine of the DC Universe” — a spine that virtually no one enjoyed, and that had what seemed to be a billion-jillion awful tie ins and crossovers and “spin outs” all predicated on branding and ideas that no one (not even, it seems) the creators were especially enthused by.

One browser crash and one unexpected Scribefire update later and it’s all gone.

Added note: Pretty quiet around here as everyone is still tuckered out from the big NYCC bash. Even Dirk is sick and tired from ignoring the show.

We’re just easing along ourselves, enjoying the nice weather when we can and gearing up for the return of LOST.

Various notes and comments on various aspects of women in comics over the past few days.

§ Reminder: It’s always someone’s first convention panel!. Huffington Post’s Michelle Kung:

I began the fest with a DC Comics cocktail event at the Park Bar, where I was introduced to a slew of writers and more importantly, was given a kick-ass Watchmen movie poster. On Friday, I walked the booths, paid $5 for a small cup of gelato, and wandered in and out of various panels, many of which I found surprisingly lackluster. Sessions such as the Women In Comics panel featured writers already overly familiar with their co-panelists and audience questions, which resulted in relatively rote answers. (Said one female cartoonist: “I’m just waiting for a day when I’ll be recognized as just a comics writer, and not a female comics writer.” Yawn.) My friend and fellow Comic Con virgin Georgia had a more exciting day — when she bought her first ever comic book, she was “forced” to take a shot of vodka by the vendors.

§ At Comixology, Shaenon K. Garrity looks at The Girls of Shonen Manga:

THE DITZ: A childlike woman (often with a very adult body) who leaps all over the hero like a puppy and routinely forgets key articles of clothing. Often the Ditz is a foreigner, to explain her ignorance of concepts like “modesty” and “personal space.” Other times, she’s just stupid. The Ditz is seldom a serious contender for the hero, with occasional exceptions like Ranma 1/2, where Shampoo (an unusually aggressive Ditz) puts up a good fight. Her primary function is to provide random, unmotivated fanservice, and therefore she is essential to harem manga

§ Also at Comixology, Kristy Valenti interviews Aimie Major Steinberger:

This exploit perfectly encapsulates the flavor of Steinberger’s experiences, most of which were mediated by her (and her friends’) fangirlness[1]; but what’s refreshing about the way that Steinberger presents her geekiness is that she’s confidently un-neurotic about it: she’s aware of others’ reactions, but she never lets that stop her from playfully having her fun. There was no sense of oxymoron when she described herself to me in a personal interview as “just a normal geek girl, you know?”

§ At NYCC, DC was giving away this very cool poster by Adam Hughes of the various ladies of the DCU with the headline, “The Real Power of the DC Universe.” Online response that we’ve seen has been positive, and it’s definitely a smart take-off on the Annie Leibovitz Vanity Fair-style covers of the past year. But it still seems so…homogenous. Adam Hughes draws the way he does, so it’s no surprise that all the women of the DCU have giant boobs, identical frames and all appear to be about 5′9″. Not like, say, this:

Or even this:

§ It turns out that large boobs are such an important factor to the superhero life that their absence is cause for a breaking news item in itself:

DC is also launching several titles with an eye toward capturing a younger audience. Editor Jann Jones announced the upcoming Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade, with art that features a flat-chested, prepubescent Supergirl. The upcoming kid-friendly line also includes Billy Batson and the Magic of Shazam. DC is excited about recreating the entry-level comic experience, no doubt anticipating the the kids who will grow up to fill future Con audiences. As for Supergirl, the first to be released, it’ll have “all the fun of life in Junior High,” Jones promised, which to me sounds menacing. DiDio added, for the benefit of the room: “And no boobs.”

The new Supergirl will be by Landry Walker and Eric Jones, apparently.

§ Finally, Elayne Riggs deals with the occasional waves of low self-esteem that convention going regularly creates:

That’s when this odd feeling came over me that, after having been involved with the comic convention scene for over 20 years now, I didn’t really fit in any more. As far as Team Comics was concerned, I was the nobody I’d always suspected myself to be. Out of work, out of practice, out of favor, I succumbed to the enemy of every fanboy and fangirl, the overblown sense of entitlement. Everything I experienced was suddenly All About Me, which precipitated a dangerous downward spiral. On some level I knew it didn’t correlate with reality, but I’d managed to make a complete disconnect between “wasn’t that nice finding the pros-only curtained-off area with its own friggin’ oxygen bar on Saturday so we could catch up with Bryan Hitch during his one free half-hour” and “poor poor pitiful me nobody loves me pass the worms.”

Some little news notes that have been floating around:
Zuda news: a second chance for previous contestants to get picked up via the Zuda Invitational and a new strip by Dean Haspiel, STREET CODE which is an “instant winner.”

3. The much talked about ZUDA COMICS INVITATIONAL is on! Celebrating the one-year anniversary of our announcing Zuda at the San Diego Comic-Con we’re going to have a competition featuring comics from the previous years worth of non-winning comics. I’ll blog about this in more detail but basically if it ran on Zuda and didn’t win its eligible to participate in the Invitational. Send your picks for which comics you want to see get another shot at the brass ring to FEEDBACK (in the upper right corner there, by the login)! The Invitational will be our July competition.

§ The Same Hat kids reveal a new project, an English edition of Yusaku Hanakuma’s TOKYO ZOMBIE. The book is planned for September release from Last Gasp but may be out in time for San Diego:

Tokyo Zombie is a self-contained story featuring Yusaku Hanakuma’s two characters Afro and Hage. It was originally serialized in AX Magazine in 1998-1999, and was collected and published the year after by Seirinkogeisha. Seirinkogeisha is an incredbile indie/underground manga publisher, and publish the vast majority of Same Hat favorites including Suehiro Maruo, Takashi Nemoto, Shintaro Kago, Kazuichi Hanawa and many, many others.

§ Similarly Warren Ellis reveals a pair of new books from Avatar later this summer.

Aetheric Mechanics

and No Hero.

Technorati Tags: Warren Ellis

Just a friendly reminder, LOST returns tomorrow in its new time slot: 10:00 (or 2200 if you prefer) ET.

In preparation, here are a couple interviews with the show’s producers, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse.

A/V CLUB

TV Guide interview conducted by Jimmy Kimmel

There are likely plot points discussed in these, so be forewarned if you’re one of those “anti-spoiler” types.

Look for the usual day-after recap by the Beat’s Helper Monkey on Friday morning.

Posted by Mark Coale

[Photo above from los507.]

In about 2 hours 13 minutes and 14 seconds, any mention of last weekend’s New York Comic-Con will be thoroughly passé, as Free Comic Book Day, Iron Man and Stumptown fill the news bins, but in that tiny window I had to get this out of the way, esp. after Kiel Phegley got on my jock about my late con reports. We’ll try to tell this story via areas of the con, using field evidence, i.e. quotes from other blogs.

BIG BOX, BIG PICTURE

Dee Dupuy

BTW, the weather in NYC Thursday through Sunday was absolutely heart-piercingly beautiful. That spring smell on the breeze, daffodils blooming, cherry blossoms in drifts on the wind! The weather magic’ed up everything this trip– it made everything seem fresh and clean, and the people all eager and bubbly. Even a stinky old con hall crammed full of “classic collectors.”

Mike Gold:

Next year, the New York Comic Con will revert back to its February slot – and the first weekend in February at that. This simply sucks: walking towards the Hudson River to get to the Javis Center in winter weather is like dancing in the road show of Doctor Zhivago. Not that there’s a lot of choice: The Javits Center is what it is, and the NYCC deserves better. So does New York, a town that loves to think of itself as the greatest city in the world. If they actually mean it, they should build themselves a world-class convention center that could compete with the likes of Las Vegas and McCormick Place.

Augie De Blieck Jr.

The big talk of the convention on Sunday, though, was the schedule for next year. Someone checked the calendar and realized that it’s on the Super Bowl weekend. If the Giants make a repeat bid for a Super Bowl trophy, the con is going to take a big hit. If the Jets make it to the Super Bowl — wait, no, never mind. That’s not going to happen. What crappy timing for a convention. I guess that’s why they could get the convention center to themselves for the weekend.

So yeah, this year, despite competition from Passover, the timing couldn’t have been better. The first warm weekend of the year sent everyone’s endorphin level soaring, and it was hard to get worked up about anything. Life was good.

Next year? The show takes place not only in winter…but in the DEAD of winter.

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CBLDF PR:

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund scored a victory last Friday when prosecutors dismissed all charges against Rome, GA retailer Gordon Lee. Neil Gaiman announced that Judge Larry Salmon signed off on the dismissal on Friday evening at New York Comic Con.

“This is a victory for Gordon, and a victory for comics,” says CBLDF Executive Director Charles Brownstein. “For more than three years, the comics world has stood behind Gordon’s innocence and now we are vindicated.”

The dismissal comes after more than three years and $100,000 of CBLDF resources were spent to prove Lee’s innocence. The battle was waged against a prosecutor’s office that grossly overcharged Lee at the start of the case, and proceeded to cause multiple delays, including throwing out and refiling charges a year and a half into the case, and creating a mistrial when the case finally went before a jury last November.

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§ Via the comments: The last word in indie vs superhero.

§ Entertainment Weekly has a list of graphic novels that tie in to summer’s big comic book movies. Interesting note: in many cases there ISN’T a direct tie-in. Marvel in particular has a sprawling landscape of reprints that doesn’t necessarily easily lend itself to a table at the front of Barnes & Noble promoting summer movies. No wonder it’s easier to go with the bed sheets.

§ Gary Tyrell talks with Joey Manley and John Boeck of the newly VC empowered ComicSpace/Webcomics Nation:

Fleen: What percentage of the combined companies will be retained by the original owners, and what percentage sold to the investors? And, what was the monetary goal in the investment round?

Manley: Josh and I are individually and collectively the largest investors. E-Line and other investors are minority stakeholders.

John: We are closely held; we didn’t throw things open to a flood of investors. The majority of [ComicSpace investors] have participated here at NYCC.

Manley: The goal was to ‘break even’, which we met. Since closing [on 26 December 2007], both the top- and bottom-line numbers have exceeded projections.

§ Elayne Riggs’ photo journal of NYCC.

§ Anne Ishii takes names:

Speaking of X-Men a la 21st century film franchise…This guy. Cyclops, but with eye-shield worn over his regular wire-frame glasses. Classic. Anyway, this guy had the best of the dorkiest introductory deliveries: I’m about to ask you guys something you’ve probably never been asked before in your life. It’s a favor… Could you pin my jacket to my pants? They’re falling down. Candace obliged our young man. Later, I pinned the note from his mom with their address and emergency contact along with an inhaler, to his forehead.

§ Batman Ice Cream’s dark secret!

§ Innocent little child in Bugaboo kidnapped by Stormtroopers.

Evidently, Marvel sees some promise in this digital thing. PR:

Marvel Entertainment, Inc. (NYSE: MVL) has appointed Ira Rubenstein to the position of Executive Vice President of Marvel’s newly launched Global Digital Media Group. In this newly created position, Mr. Rubenstein will oversee Marvel’s digital distribution strategy across all media and platforms. Mr. Rubenstein will relocate to Marvel’s New York headquarters and report to John Turitzin, Executive Vice President, Office of the Chief Executive.

Mr. Rubenstein joins Marvel after more than 12 years with Sony, most recently as executive vice president of Sony Pictures Digital. His appointment reflects Marvel’s commitment to growth in the digital space. He will be responsible for developing and implementing the company’s efforts to maximize the Marvel Universe across all digital media. He will look to extend the reach of Marvel properties into the digital marketplace by maximizing the potential of Marvel’s current proprietary digital consumer destinations — Marvel.com, MarvelKids.com, and Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited – as well as through digital video, animated content, mobile games, casual games and strategic partnerships.

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“It’s so stupid to guess about the future. Biggie Smalls died before he could hear the word ‘blog.’”

–Rich Stevens