The Sunday Spotlight: The ‘Fangy-Faced Freak’ Edition
by Richard Bruton
Welcome to a quick Sunday spin around comics news… it’s The Sunday Spotlight
.
Friday by Ed Brubaker, Marcos Martin, Muntsa Vicente available as a pay whatever you want at Panel Syndicate…
All nine issues of Friday by Ed Brubaker, Marcos Martin, and Muntsa Vicente are now available as one volume at Panel Syndicate for whatever price you choose to pay – including $0, but please, don’t be that person, if you can afford it, pay some cash for it.
Here’s what it’s all about… and yes, it’s very, very good indeed…
‘Friday Fitzhugh spent her childhood solving crimes and digging up occult secrets with her best friend Lancelot Jones, the smartest boy in the world. Now she’s back to find that something very strange and dangerous is happening in their little New England town…This is literally the Christmas vacation from Hell and neither of them may survive to see the New Year.’
.
Gosh & Broken Frontier Present 10 Years of Six To Watch… 31 August…
Two stalwarts of the UK Comics Scene come together on 31 August as London’s finest comic shop, Gosh Comics London, plays host to Broken Frontier, the comics site in the UK that’s championing the next generation of the medium like none other.
For the last decade, Broken Frontier and Andy Oliver have been putting together their ‘six to watch’, where they chose six creators that they believe will be the future of the medium. And let me tell you, they have a fine record of being very right, picking the likes of Abs Bailey, Ed Firth, Josh Hicks, Manon Wright, Mereida Fajardo, Shanti Rai, Anna Readman, and many more.
All of the chosen six across the years have gone on to make some wonderful comics, and, although by no means a metric of what’s a success, there’s also plenty who’ve gone on to be published by the likes of 2000 AD, Avery Hill Publishing, BOOM! Studios, Dark Horse Comics, Faber, Fantagraphics – and that’s just going from A-F.
So yes, if you have chance, head to Gosh on the 31 August. There’s free drinks and plenty of great comic makers to hang about with and talk comics – you really couldn’t ask for better than that, right?
.
Marabout’s Hergé – Hopper gets to feel the wrath of Moulinsart/Tintinimaginatio…
Back in 2021, I put up a story about the French artist Xavier Marabout being taken to the French courts by Moulinsart (The Hergé Foundation), the company in control of Hergé‘s estate, who were a touch upset about the artist’s Hergé – Hopper mashup series. Marabout had created 21 pieces from 2013-2017 in the Hergé – Hopper series that imagined the boy reporter and other Tintin characters inhabiting the lonely, isolated world of Edward Hopper’s landscapes of American culture.
Well, now a French Appeals Court Appeals has ruled in favour of Moulinsart (under it’s new name of Tintinimaginatio). He’s been ordered to withdraw the series. The works were originally ruled as parody works and thus protected under French law. However, the company appealed and not only are the works to be withdrawn but Marabout is liable for $21K+ to Tintinimaginitio after they appealed. Unless of course, the artist takes this to France’s Supreme Court. More here at Artnet. Unsurprisingly, the works aren’t up at Marabout’s site anymore, but a quick google should find them for you. Here’s his take on Nighthawks…
.
Elon Musk reckons Judge Dredd would drive a Cybertruck…
Well, Bruce Wayne without the compassion or mental stability tweeted last month that he reckoned everyone’s favourite Judge would be happy hopping into one of his company’s Cybertrucks (which always put me in mind of The Simpsons episode where Homer gets to design his ideal car)…
Well, the responses were, as you could expect, plentiful amongst the comics community. Pretty much all of them really roasting good ol’ Elon, who’s never had an idea for a business he hasn’t first bought from others. Perhaps my favourite couple…
And David Bishop…
.
Meanwhile, not unrelated… Mike Molcher wins a first Eisner Award for I Am The Law…
This month, Britain has seen the outbreak of right-wing fuelled rioting on the streets – where showing their anger and shock at the horrific knife attacks in Southport that left three children dead somehow finds expression in looting phone shops, shoe shops, and libraries. In the midst of this, we had the Prime Minister promising a new ‘standing army’ of specialist police officers ready to be rolled out onto the streets in the future to deal with this sort of thing.
And if all of that doesn’t immediately have you thinking of Judge Dredd, then I’m obviously not doing my job.
Anyway, it’s a perfect time to remind you about Michael Molcher‘s book, I Am The Law, a really essential book on comics and society that looks at how Judge Dredd has predicted, scarily – terrifyingly even – the changing face of policing in Britain. Did we mention it recently won 2000 AD’s first ever Eisner Award, for Best Comic-Related Book at the recent SDCC?
Molcher was, to say the least, rather happy:
‘From thought to publication to Eisner. I started writing I Am The Law four years ago last month. It is a surreal experience to see the project’s first notebook alongside the finished book (second printing) and the Eisner I never thought in a million years it would win.’
.
First Elon, now Colin Kaepernick’s AI comics – Heavens, two assholes in one Sunday Spotlight…
Colin Kaepernick, former NFL Quarterback, unfairly pilloried and essentially run out of the sport on his controversial move to take the knee (well ahead of many others, yet only he really paid the price) has managed, in one utterly ignorant and dumb move, to wipe away any good associated with his name.
He’s just announced that he really, really, really wants to help people make comics. And how’s he going to do that? Is he going to fund free comic workshops? Nope. How about donating to libraries to encourage readership and creating? Nope. Creating bursaries for talented young artists. Nope, nope, and once more nope.
No, Kaepernick is going to be launching Lumi, a company that will allow creators ‘to create, publish, and monetize your stories all in one platform.’
And he’s going to do it by using AI to create comics.
So, yes, Colin’s big idea, his way of making comics accessible is to fund a platform that actively steals images from the Internet, ripping off many wonderfully talented artists, and mashes it all together in a nightmarish art soup to bring you a new computer-generated image.
Loads of responses about this from comics folks, none more enlightening that from Khary Randolph, who had this to say on Facebook…
‘To be clear, I was one of a number of artists that had meetings with Colin a few months ago. He told me broadly what his AI platform was about. He mentioned that it was about removing “gatekeepers” and how he wanted to benefit people from underserved walks of life. I told him that while I was a fan of his, I couldn’t support this because those “gatekeepers” were people like me who had put our blood, sweat and tears into our craft. Hard work, a pencil, and paper is all you need to make comics. I let him that his product was going to hurt us longterm. So if anyone is asking whether Colin Kaepernick is aware of the misgivings artists have with AI, please believe that he has been made aware. And I know for a fact that I’m not the only one who did so.’
And Colin, like so many others espousing the benefits of AI art turned on his heel and decided that, no, I’m going to screw over the artists.
Again, AI is art theft. You want to be an artist, you want to be as good as the artists you see on Comicon? Pick up a damn pencil and draw.
