The Sunday Spotlight: The ‘I Was Inescapable’ Edition
by Richard Bruton
‘Sunday, Sunday here again in tidy attire,’ as Damon Albarn of Blur once sang. But don’t worry, we won’t discriminate if you want to wear your ‘jamas while reading a little bit of the news stories that piqued my interest this week … yes, it’s The Sunday Spotlight …
Elizabeth Sandifer’s Last War in Albion continues, charting the imagined magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison — the mid ’90s and Moore’s magical origin story …
Always an excellent read, Elizabeth Sandifer puts up the latest chapters of The Last War in Albion, chronicling the imagined battle between Moore and Morrison, and providing an extensive overview of their works through the years.
These latest chapters include essays on Moore in the mid 90s, where he embraced his newfound role as magician, established The Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels, and undertook magical workings as performance pieces, alongside Morrison’s ’90s Vertigo work, including Flex Mentallo, and Moore’s debut novel, Voice of the Fire.
Steve Lieber’s Mistakes I’ve Made That You Can Avoid…
All excellent advic e…
INQ!, London’s Queer Comics Fair returns for 26th & 27th September …
Held at the London LGBTQ+ Community Centre in London, INQ! promises another festival of delights in comics form, inclusive and family friendly, a great show packed with plenty of new and wonderful self-published comics and zines for you to find your next favourite creator.
Details here.
Cartoon Crossroads Columbus, happening April 2027, but plenty going on before then…
The annual, free, multi-day comics and cartooning celebration that is Cartoon Crossroads Columbus will be happening again on 15th-18th April 2027, all taking place in Columbus, Ohio. Definitely one to mark your diaries for if you’re in the area.
But that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing going on in between the comics festival. Oh no, far from it.
They’ve got Derf Backderf talking The Dissidents on 23rd September at Wexner Center for the Arts (tickets); Nate Powell at Bexley Public Library talking about his new book, Diana, on 8th October (tickets); and veteran New Yorker cartoonist Liza Donnelly appearing at Wexner Center for the Arts on 29th October (tickets).
Additionally, there’s Space 2026 II, a Small Press & Alternative Comics Expo happening on 14th November from 10 am – 6 pm at the Makoy Event Center in Hilliard, Ohio. Details here.
Oh yes, so much going on with CXC.
Finally, what happened to Mark Gruenwald’s Captain America shield?
It was the Emmy Awards a week or so back. One of the big winners was Stephen Colbert, whose late night US talk show was pulled by the network back in May. Financial concerns they said. Balls, we say.
But anyway, Colbert was on fellow talk show host, Jimmy Kimmel‘s show a day or so after the Emmys, where he presented Kimmel with the Captain America shield he’d been given by Marvel Ed-in-Chief Joe Quesada back in 2006/2007. According to Colbert, they’d had this Cap shield on the wall since the ’60s and they sent it to him to uphold patriotism (it was one of those times when Cap had been killed). Colbert hung it on the set of first The Colbert Report and then Late Night with Stephen Colbert. But now that’s been taken off air, he decided to pass it onto Kimmel, himself doing a good patriot’s job, criticising and telling truth to power.
So far, so good. A very sweet tale indeed. Except, as pointed out online (the first I saw of this was in a Facebook post by Ty Templeton), the problem with it was that it doesn’t seem to have been Marvel’s shield to give away in the first place. It was actually a custom-made shield commissioned by the late Mark Gruenwald years back, and it had remained hanging in the Marvel offices as a tribute to Gruenwald since then.
I mean, it’s not Quesada’s fault, nor Colbert’s, nor Kimmel’s. Everyone seemingly assumed it was Marvel property — and why wouldn’t they. However, it would be nice if there’s some credit given by Kimmel to Gruenwald. And they either return it to Gruenwald’s widow, Catherine or, should she want it, maybe Kimmel/Colbert/Quesada could chip in to send some money for the shield to her.
