INTERVIEW OUTTAKES: RYAN OTTLEY

There's a lot of stuff that gets left on the cutting room floor when you do an interview. A lot of it is for good reason, though. Most of the time it's because it just doesn't fit with the narrative.

Ryan Ottley, Utah native and artist of the comic book Invincible, and I sat outside Nobrow Coffee one evening this past summer and talked about a lot of things. The crux of the article was Salt Lake Comic Con, but we barely got into that. I was more interested in everything else he was up to - mainly since he was only going to be at SLCC for the first day.

We talked about how he got into the business, why he doesn't jump ship for Marvel or DC and about that art burning party that he had with Derek Hunter that set comic book message boards on fire.

Very little of that made it in to the actual article, but he still gave some great quotes. Figured it was high time you got to see them.

You can check out the original article that I wrote for SLUG's August issue first, then come back here for the stuff that didn't make the cut.

You can keep up with him at his own site, the art blog he does with his friend James Harren called The Bog, and of course you should be reading the fantastic Invincible published by Image Comics.

Enjoy the stuff that didn't make it!

On Becoming a Full-Time Comic Artist:

I didn’t do any school or anything. I used to work at a warehouse and I’d always had that dream of being a comic book artist since I was 14. I was working at the warehouse and I got fired from that, and I thought ‘sweet, I’ll just live off these unemployment checks and try to get in to my dream job.’

That’s what I did and it worked, I think. It took about a year and a half of just doing short stories for DigitalWebbing.com - they had an anthology back then. I was doing it for free. I would just find a writer that I liked and I would say ‘send me this and if I like it, I’ll draw it and if I don’t... sorry.’ I’m not going to draw something for free that I don’t like.

On Working for The Big Two:

Mostly at conventions people will come up and give me cards. I’ve had offers to do stories at Marvel and I’ve turned them down. Marvel was the most recent thing and I said, 'I’ll do this as long as I get to do my own covers. And they said no to that.’

I think that’s really weird. They’re really picky about that. I think if I’m going to draw the interior, I’m going to draw the cover, too. That’s just the way I roll. I don’t mind some covers here and there by other artists. Every once in a while Invincible will have guest artists, but most of the time it’s me doing the covers.

When I go into a comic shop, sure I see these beautiful Marvel covers everywhere, then you open up to the inside, and I’m not saying the inside is terrible, but it’s different. It’s like different actors and I hate that.

Sometimes it feels like the interiors are more for the story and the cover is more for the art and I don’t like that. All of it needs to be about the art and the story.

My favorite artist isn’t just the kind of artist that’s a great storyteller. It’s gotta be a good story, but it’s also got to have that really good artistic thing that's good enough to be a cover. You can do interesting things all over the place instead of just telling stories.

There’s a bunch of artists that are mainly just there to tell the story. They’re not flashy, they’re not over the top.

On Burning Old Art:

I don’t do that anymore. That was really Derek and I having a burn party. I burned 10 pages. 10 terrible pages that I just wanted to get off the planet. It’s funny, I guess I shouldn’t have shared it. It’s fine to do it, just don’t share it. I got called the worst names and people told me I should have given it to charity. Why would I give shitty art to charity? That’s kind of a dick move right there. ‘You won’t make any money off this, but here you go.’

If I wanted charity to make money, I’d send them the good things I’ve done. Which I have! Do I need to go out and shout 'here are the good things I’ve done and here are the burned things I’ve done?'

WAR IN THE SUN

I’m a “glass half-empty” kinda guy. That’s just the way it is. I try to judge things by the finished product and not do the typical Internet thing where I hate a project before it’s even started, but sometimes I just can’t.

PREACHER is a project that I’ve hated pretty much since its live-action inception was announced almost a decade ago.

Let’s back up a bit. PREACHER is a comic written by Garth Ennis and drawn by Steve Dillon. It’s about a Texas preacher possessed by a supernatural creature named Genesis. Genesis is the product of the coupling of an angel and a demon, making it the most powerful thing in existence. Once this power is manifested in Jesse Custer, God quits ruling Heaven and goes into hiding. Custer goes looking for him. Along the way, he picks up his old girlfriend Tulip and brings along an alcoholic vampire named Cassidy. Oh yeah, he has to avoid the Saint of Killers, too. He’s basically the angel of death out to get rid of Genesis and whatever form it’s become.

It sounds ridiculous on paper and it’s a little ridiculous in the comic, too. But it’s also fantastic. I re-read the entire series last winter and it still holds up really well. There are a few filler stories to pad the run because Ennis wanted the final issue to be number 66, but overall it’s brilliant, crazy, sweet, heartbreaking and just flat out awesome.

But the chances of it being anything other than a great comic were slim to none. I’m a firm believer that anything that spends over a decade trying to get made doesn’t need to be made. There’s always a reason that it hasn’t worked and most likely won’t work at all, no matter how hard you try. See: GANGSTER SQUAD, RUM PUNCH, etc.

Mark Steven Johnson was the first guy tasked with taking it from a comic to TV. You remember Mark Steven Johnson, don’t you? He wrote classics like GRUMPY OLD MEN, GRUMPIER OLD MEN and directed great, legendary films like SIMON BIRCH, DAREDEVIL and GHOST RIDER. That was the guy that was supposed to bring PREACHER to life. No one held their breath and after a few years the project died. It kept bouncing around and everyone from James Marsden to Kevin Smith was attached at some point. Eventually it landed in the lap of Sam Mendes and while I didn’t get excited, I was a little bit hopeful. Mendes made AMERICAN BEAUTY, ROAD TO PERDITION and SKYFALL, so there was a little bit of promise. But he’s pretty committed to a couple more James Bond movies, so that fell apart.

Things were pretty quiet on the PREACHER front until a few days ago when AMC announced that they were taking the series to pilot. Just like that. No other information was provided.

When I saw that, I didn’t really know how to feel. AMC aired amazing shows like BREAKING BAD and MAD MEN, so that was a plus. But AMC executives are also fucking morons. They almost cancelled BREAKING BAD after the fourth season because they didn’t want to pay anyone. They panicked at the last minute when FX stepped in and said, “If AMC doesn’t want you, come over here. We’ll let you do whatever you want.”

They also don’t own either of those shows. Sony owned BREAKING BAD and Lionsgate owns MAD MEN. AMC is just the network it airs on, so they don’t really have much say in what happens within the show. The two shows they own outright are THE WALKING DEAD and LOW WINTER SUN. I still watch it, but for every good thing it does, THE WALKING DEAD does two or three other things that I absolutely hate. It’s just not very good, but has the potential to be great. All AMC cares about is the numbers it gets. They couldn’t care less about the actual quality. And LOW WINTER SUN got such bad reviews that I deleted it from my DVR without watching a single episode.

So if it was going to be a full-on AMC enterprise, I was preparing for the worst. Then more details started to come out and I started getting a little excited.

Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg were the guys behind it. Sony is the studio producing it, AMC is just the network it’ll air on. I was already hopeful with two guys like Rogen and Goldberg (they wrote SUPERBAD, THIS IS THE END and THE GREEN HORNET) on board, but then I read that Sam Catlin was also on board. That’s when I got more excited.

Sam Catlin was one of the main writers and executive producers on BREAKING BAD. He wrote and directed the Season 5 episode “Rabid Dog” where Walt has to try to convince Skyler that he had a pump malfunction when Jesse tried to burn down their house. He wrote a bunch of other great episodes throughout the series, too.

With those three calling the shots, Sony picking up the tab and AMC relegated to simply airing the episodes, it might actually work.

Then again, there is the little question about how you market a show that boils down to one man’s quest to tell God to go fuck himself while talking to the ghost of John Wayne and being chased by a guy in a duster and cowboy hat that can’t be killed – even when a nuclear bomb is dropped on him. Also, let’s not forget the vampire, the inbred, mentally challenged child with the last pure bloodline of Jesus Christ and a guy that makes sex toys out of raw meat.

If they can get over those hurdles, anything is possible.

NOVEMBER 18, 1985

On this day 28 years ago, Calvin set his tiger trap and Bill Watterson kicked off one of the best (and by far my favorite) comic strips of all time.

If you haven't picked it up, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes is something that everyone should own. Seriously. Grab it. If you have kids, get them started on it and if you don't, skip out on Netflix for a night and read that instead.

SALT LAKE COMIC CON - POSTGAME

Well that escalated quickly.

Let me give you a rundown of the past couple of weeks, real quick.

I work every day except Saturday and do a double on Wednesday. I’m not complaining about it, because those two extra shifts each week are my choice and I could pretty easily make a few cuts in my budget and do without them, but I just don’t want to. All the extra money I make goes into a savings account in case I someday decide that I hate my job and want to quit, leave the country for a while and go on an awesome adventure to Norway, visiting Viking museums and then venturing down through Europe. Sounds like something I’ve been thinking about, doesn’t it? It also gives me a little capital to make stuff and things for events like Craft Lake City and Salt Lake Comic Con.

Anyway, the month of August was pretty hectic as it was trying to get ready for Craft Lake City and as soon as that was over I had a couple of breathing weeks to do things like clean my apartment, wash my car and catch up on sleep. But it wasn’t too much of a vacation, because I worked pretty much every day.

The last week of August, I worked Wednesday day and night, worked Thursday, went to a wedding Thursday night, worked Friday, went straight to Tamerlane practice, then went directly to my brother and his wife’s “Announce the Sex” party for their new baby (it’s a boy). The next day, I woke up, had a tattoo appointment, a baby shower/diaper party for a different baby, then the Tamerlane/Mick Morris benefit show. I waited tables all day Sunday and all day Monday (Labor Day), worked Tuesday then went home to get all my Old News Records stuff organized. Wednesday morning I went to work until 5, drove immediately from work to the Salt Palace to meet Casey and unload all the tables and racks for Salt Lake Comic Con. We left, I drove to my parent’s house and spent the whole night pulling out and organizing the comics I was going to sell that weekend. I left my parent’s a little after midnight and headed home.

The next morning, I picked up Casey from his house at 6:45 AM. We drove to The Park Café, had breakfast and then picked up a U-Haul at 8. We made our way out to Spidey’s house in Draper, stopping at Office Max along the way. We loaded Spidey’s comics, drove back to U-Haul to exchange the truck because the “check engine” light came on, and moved everything from one truck to the other. Casey and Spidey headed to Casey’s house and the toy store to grab all his stuff and I went to my parent’s house and started bringing everything outside. About 11:30, Casey and Spidey showed up at my parent’s house and we loaded all my stuff into the truck. The two of them headed down to the Salt Palace and I headed out to Midvale to pick up my more “Long Live Sloan” shirts and the new tank tops I designed for the show. We got everything set up and the doors opened at 3 PM for people holding VIP passes.

From there it was pure chaos. Well, controlled chaos was more like it. No one really knew what to expect from a first year event like Salt Lake Comic Con, but the bar was set pretty high with all the tickets they’d sold already. Casey, Spidey and I were ready and excited. We’d had plans of vending at San Diego Comic Con and Emerald City in Seattle, but never actually made it so we wanted to bring our best effort to this – whatever it was going to end up being.

People started swarming our booth, checking things out and looking through all of the stuff we decided to sell because we felt bad storing it at our parent’s houses. We had a pretty great system going and we were all ready for the night. Casey thought he was going to leave in the middle of things to go to the gym, but once he saw how busy and crazy things were getting in the hall, he changed his mind.

The rest of Thursday was packed, and Friday and Saturday were both the same, too. It was an awesome weekend and our Old News Records/Grudge City Comics (yeah, that’s what we’re calling it from here on out) shop did really well. We were pretty tightly confined to a 10x10 space and every once in a while things got pretty cozy in there, but it was all worth it.

We sold a lot of comics last weekend and I mean A LOT. Casey and Spidey brought more books Friday and Saturday and I had to bring a second round on Saturday. There were surprisingly few booths actually selling comics at the show, which I thought was kind of weird, but I guess it makes sense.

The other, actual brick and mortar shops in Salt Lake all had a presence, but Dr. Volt’s mostly focused on gaming stuff, Black Cat brought mostly quarter and dollar books and I have no idea what Night Flight had. Blast from the Past Comics, which was next to us, brought a lot of older comics that were worth some serious money. There was another shop from California that came by our booth every morning to pillage through our stuff and, I’m sure, turn around, mark it up and sell it at their booth. After I figured out what they were doing the first day, I stopped letting them go through the new stuff I brought. I hid it under the table while they looked through the boxes and told them that I hadn’t brought anything else. It was for no real reason other than spite. They just hovered around like vultures waiting to look through things while we were trying to get our booth set up and organized. I just started ignoring them instead of telling them to get lost like I really wanted.

But since we were selling most everything for about a dollar a book, people kept coming back over and over again. I even heard one guy say, “Oh this is the booth they were talking about.” I had no idea who was talking about us or what they were saying, but I was thrilled that people were talking and that word was getting out.

Between doing Craft Lake City two days and vending at Salt Lake Comic Con for three, it’s made sitting behind a computer writing IVR (Interactive Voice Response) copy and wireless Internet tips really, really hard.

All in all, it was a lot of fun and I’m very much looking forward to next year. There are already some wheels in motion for how we can do things better and how we can expand our little operation. Thanks to everyone that stopped by to say hi, actually bought some stuff or just wanted to look through our comics. You guys made it all worth it.

Now that it’s all over and I don’t have any other vending shows coming up, I’ll be updating the ONR store and probably doing a little spotlight on some of the stuff I had this summer – most notably Mike Farfel’s novel Tulip. I’ll have a little write-up on Filler Issue 2, the HP tank top and the new mini-comic that Candace and I finally got printed on Friday night of the convention.

If you missed out, you really missed out. It was an awesome time from start to finish and I can’t wait until next year. You should probably start planning your cosplay costumes now. And if you can top the Princess Leia, I'll be impressed.

Also, if you actually know the Princess Leia, send her my way. I'll be her stuck-up, half-wittet, scruffy-looking nerf herder any day.

RYAN OTTLEY: DRAW LIFE

I like Ryan Ottley. He's an awesome dude and a really great artist. I might have a slightly biased opinion, because INVINCIBLE is a great comic and one that I love reading. When Esther (SLUG Mag managing editor) gave me a list of options to interview about SL Comic Con and he was on it, I didn't even let her finish the list.

He and I met up at the Draw Night thing he does with his artist friends, sat outside and chatted for a bit. It was a good time and we talked about a lot of stuff - including a good chunk that I couldn't even get close to fitting in to the space I had. Luckily for you, that's what the Interview Outtakes feature is for. I'll throw that up later this month, but until then, feast your eyes on Ryan Ottley's Draw Life.

SLUG Mag -- When Rob Liefeld, Jim Lee and Todd McFarlane (among others) founded Image Comics, they revolutionized the comic book industry. The artists were treated like—and acted like—rock stars everywhere they went. It was that attitude that put the creator-owned mindset of Image on equal footing with Marvel and DC.

Twenty years later, Image Comics is still a force led by some of the most famous creators working today. Its continued success is thanks, in large part, to books like Invincible—illustrated by local artist Ryan Ottley. Ottley may not have the bombastic, rock star personality of some of his Image peers, but he is every bit as talented. His line work is some of the cleanest and most detailed in the industry, and the level of gore he reaches at times is a stark contrast to the personality of the mild-mannered Utah resident.

Read the rest.

MONSTER MASH

I'm stealing this idea.

In the future, anyway. I mean like way in the future. There are A LOT of steps that need to happen before I get to a point where I can successfully steal this idea, but still. It's going to happen.

Matt Fraction (Hawkeye, Fantastic Four, Cassanova), one of my favorite comic book writers, got his kid into monster movies this year. Then his kid became obsessed with them. So for his birthday party, Fraction used cardboard boxes and spray paint to build a small city in their backyard. Then all the kids in attendance dressed up as monsters and trashed the city.

He posted a bunch of pictures on his Twitter feed the day he did it and so did a few of the other people in attendance. He lives in Portland, where a ton of cool comic creators live, so a lot of them were there with their own children. Fraction's wife, Kelly Sue DeConnick (Captain Marvel, Avengers Assemble) posted one or two and in the background of one photo, you can see Brian Michael Bendis (All New X-Men, Ultimate Spider-Man) with one of his kids. It took probably a week to build and all of two minutes to destroy.

It's probably my favorite kids birthday party idea of all time. And I will steal it one day.

Wait! I just remembered that I have a nephew now! Stealing this idea just became a lot more feasible. Now I just have to find out when his birthday is and convince his parents that this is as awesome of an idea as I think it is. 

Fingers crossed.

GUN MACHINE

Warren Ellis has long been one of my favorite comic writers. His Planetary series is right near the top of my all-time favorite comics list and he's got a few more that are almost as great. He's taken a huge step back from comics in the past few years and started working pretty much exclusively on novels. I liked his first one, Crooked Little Vein, but didn't love it. However, I tore through it at a pace that can only be equalled by the first few Charlie Huston novels, so that's saying something.

I'm really excited for his next one though. It's called Gun Machine and is already on my list of things to read in 2013—as soon as I get through my pile of 2012 books that's been staring at me all year, growing faster than it shrinks. The good thing about Gun Machine is that since it probably won't be released in softcover (I hate hardcover novels but can't really explain to you why) until late in the year it may move to the 2014 list.

Holy shit that's a long ways away.

FILLER

I'm way behind on this stuff.

Craft Lake City came and went and I had a lot of fun. I wish I'd had more stuff to sell and a more coherent table, but since I didn't have any of the comics done, I kind of had to make some stuff up as I went along.

The mini-comics were a pretty good idea and we probably gave away a hundred or so. Hopefully people liked what they saw enough to check out this site (which I've neglected to update and therefor probably missed a pretty good opportunity, but oh well).

After CLC was over, I had 4 weddings over the next 5 weeks and the Salt Lake City Film Festival right after, so each one of my days off was dedicated to all that. Now that it's finally all over, everything from the last month and a half caught up with me, I got sick and pretty much been stuck to the couch for the past three days. Though I did have a chance to re-watch John Carpenter's THE THING, so it hasn't been all bad.

Anyway, here's a little bit about FILLER.

I've always loved zines. I have a little collection of the old HC and art zines I used to pick up back when they were popular and always wanted to make my own. I kind of did that with Grudge City Activities for a while, but that was the Internet and not quite as fun. I wanted to make something you could hold in your hands, throw on your coffee table and look at again and again.

Now, getting content that people wanted to look at again and again proved to be a little trickier than I'd thought.

Since I'd spent so much time on GCA writing about music, I kind of wanted to avoid that subject all together for FILLER. That, and I'm a little bit out of touch with the music scene around SLC right now, so that's kind of the way it had to be. I recruited a few of my talented friends and we put something together that, while it's not a game-changer by any means, I'm still really proud of.

I got my friend Makena to write a quick little piece about his journey to South America. and my friend Mikey contributed a section of the novel he's writing. I did a little interview with Andy from Pangea Speed and a really talented photographer named Candace Christensen. I even threw in a little poem I wrote a few years back. That's probably the thing that scared me the most, strangely.

I tried really hard to keep the content original. I toyed with the idea of taking some of the stuff I wrote on here and putting it in, but ultimately decided that it would be a lot cooler if it everything was created just for the zine.

It ended up being about 20 pages and I'm actually really happy with the way it turned out.

There were a few more pieces that never quite came together, so hopefully I can use them for issue 2. And there definitely will be an issue 2. I'm thinking December-ish and then try and keep to a schedule of one every 4 months. April, August and December sounds pretty good. The December issue might be a little easier to put together since I won't have a job after next month (more on that later).

I'm keeping my eyes open for more stuff from people I know, so hopefully issue 2 will be even better, but for now, here's a look inside the first issue. If you want a copy, just head over to my Big Cartel store and pick one up.

Hopefully you like what you see. There's more where it came from.

Mike Farfel's drawing

Candace Christensen

CRAFT LAKE CITY

Hi.

It's been a minute, hasn't it?

Sorry about that, but I've been a little busy over here. I went to Mexico for a bit (for which I'll share some pictures with you next week) at the end of June and I've been too busy putting things together for real, physical consumption since then.

Why, you ask?

Well because it's Craft Lake City this weekend.

Remember back in January when I wrote out a list of goals for 2012? One of those goals was to get in to Craft Lake City with some comics and zines that I was going to make this year. Well, I got in. I have a trevorhale.com table all squared away and now I'm on a mad dash to finish everything in time to actually have stuff to put on said table.

The comics turned out to be a lot more work than we anticipated and we're running a little behind on the full product. We've pushed the release date to Spring 2013, but they are in the works. Gardner and I are pretty far along with our space adventure, MISSION, but didn't want to rush it just for the sake of having it. So instead, we put together a little mini-comic that acts as kind of a teaser-trailer to the real thing. We'll have it at the table and just give it away to anyone that wants one. All that's left to do is fold about 200 of them between tonight and Saturday. Gardner also built some custom frames that he was going to use to hold the pages at our comic show last month (you know, the one that didn't happen because we were in over our head making these in the first place), so he'll have a few of those with him at the table, too.

I couldn't get GRUDGE CITY to work the way I wanted. It's back on the drawing board and will hopefully be ready for our spring 2013 goal. That's probably a relief for Candace (http://www.candacejean.com) because she's probably stressed out enough worrying about her own booth. It's one less thing she has to worry about this week—but I'm still going to make sure she gets it done by next year.

I've also added another book to the pile since we've got some more lead time. My good friend Sias and I will be putting together a weird sci-fi/horror hybrid, too. He's getting married in a few weeks, so once the craziness of that is behind him, we'll get to work.

The zine is a little trickier. I think I can have it done, but I'm still working away trying to get it all put together. I think I have enough content, but might not. This one will come down to the wire, too.

I'll still have a few of the LONG LIVE SLOAN shirts to sell and I had some buttons made up just for fun. If anyone wants to wear around a button of little kid me standing next to Thurl Bailey, you know where to come.

I'm keeping everything out of sight until the show (except for maybe a teaser or two on Instagram or Twitter) but next week I'll post everything I had and if you live out of state and want something, well, we can work something out.

But you should all come down to the Gallivan Center this Saturday, August 11 from noon to ten pm. I'll be there all day hanging out and slinging goods.

Hope to see you then.

ADVENTURES IN SPACE - PT. 2

See? It's a real thing. And it's getting closer and closer.

OH HOLLYWOOD

So THE AVENGERS just ended. You're sitting in the theater, happy about what you just saw and now the credits are rolling. Of course you're staying through the credits, because it's a Marvel movie and you always stay through the credits.

The credits fade to black and the mysterious figure that supplied Loki with his army is talking to someone. He cryptically says, "To attack Earth would be to court death."

That someone turns around and smiles. The credits roll again.

Seventy Five percent of the theater goes, "Who the fuck was that?"

Fifteen percent of the theater freaks out then and there.

The other ten percent, guys like me and my friend Casey, look at each other and go, "Oh, that guy. What's that guy's name again? I've gotta look that up real quick."

My guess is that most of the people reading this are either in the first group or the last group. By now, you've figured out that the guy is Thanos, the Mad Titan and he's a little bit nuts. I'm not going to give you a breakdown of who he is or what this might mean for the future of the Marvel movieverse—there are plenty of great posts that do just that—but I am going to give you a little insight as to why Marvel went with Thanos as the big bad of their biggest franchise.

Short answer: Their options were kind of limited.

Right now, Marvel is riding the wave of THE AVENGERS and its record breaking couple of weeks and just two years ago, the company was purchased by Disney for around four billion dollars. They're not exactly hurting for money right now, but that wasn't always the case.

Back in the 90s, Marvel comics kind of sucked, they were going broke and had to find ways to stay afloat. The easiest way to do that was to sell the rights to certain characters to studios to be made into a movie. DC Comics is owned by Warner Brothers, so all of their characters have always been housed under one roof for films. Marvel, on the other hand, created their own studio so they'd at least have a hand in the development, but since they had no real money, the bigger studios had most of the pull because they were the ones footing the bill.

This led to different studios all over Hollywood getting the rights to different characters. Fox bought up the biggest chunk, getting X-MEN (which means any and all characters described as a mutant), FANTASTIC FOUR, DAREDEVIL, ELEKTRA and SILVER SURFER and Columbia Pictures (Sony) owns SPIDER-MAN and GHOST RIDER. Universal owned the rights to THE HULK but had no interest in doing another one because the box office for Ang Lee's film was so bad that the rights reverted back to Marvel—who made their own version that was almost as bad. Universal also owned NAMOR at one point, but that might not be the case anymore. New Line used to own BLADE, but those have reverted back to Marvel and the same goes for Lionsgate and THE PUNISHER.

A few years ago, Marvel Studios scrounged up enough money to start independently financing their own movies and only needed the bigger studios for distribution. They used the 10 characters they still owned as a starting point to get the money they needed and went from there. Slowly, they started reacquiring the rights to characters that hadn't been adapted for films yet, starting with IRON MAN, then THOR then BLACK WIDOW until they had THE AVENGERS assembled.

Having spent so much time building towards THE AVENGERS, they didn't want to shoehorn in any old villain, so the logical move was to just put Loki at the forefront. No one really had a problem with that and it worked out pretty well. But at the same time, they wanted to set the tone for the next wave of Marvel movies, so they inserted the bad guy at the end that was probably the easiest to build up over the next few years even if he wasn't as well known as some had hoped.

Thanos works just fine in this regard but he's not even the best AVENGERS villain, let alone the biggest bad guy in the Marvel Universe. That title belongs to none other than Doctor Doom, but unfortunately, he comes with the FANTASTIC FOUR along with another great Marvel villain Galactus—who is much cooler than a fucking cloud, Tim Story (though to be fair, Warren Ellis kind of made him a cloud in the Ultimate Universe and did a much, much better job of it).

It seems that by consensus, the top two AVENGERS villains from the comics are Ultron and Kang. They couldn't use Ultron because he's a robot built by Hank Pym, a character that hasn't been introduced yet. That may change soon though, if Edgar Wright's proposed ANT MAN movie ever finally gets going. Kang is another that they would have loved but probably wanted to avoid because everyone is terrified of making time travel movies and Kang is a scientist and scholar from an alternate version of earth in the 30th century. And that kind of thing confuses people that just want to watch stuff blow up.

Other notable AVENGERS villains include the Kree/Skrull (which is what everyone originally thought the aliens were going to be), Baron Zemo (a Captain America nemesis), and the Scarlet Witch.

The last one is an interesting choice because the Scarlet Witch (and her brother Quicksilver) are the children of Magneto and Marvel president Kevin Feige has stated that both those characters are available to Marvel and Fox.

This is where it gets tricky but weirdly optimistic.

Hollywood is a stupid, stupid place and the people in charge only care about one thing and strangely, it doesn't involve making good movies. Studio executives only care about not looking like an idiot. The way these rights usually work is that if there's not a film in active development at a certain date, the rights revert back to the previous owner. That's why we keep seeing crappy GHOST RIDER movies popping up, it's why SPIDER-MAN all of a sudden started over and why they keep hiring people to write and develop new DAREDEVIL, FANTASTIC FOUR and X-MEN movies. To be fair, I loved X-MEN: FIRST CLASS, though.

The people at Fox would rather waste money "developing" a FANTASTIC FOUR movie that they have no intention of releasing rather than see the rights go back to Marvel and have them make one that fits in to their shared universe and be potentially great and a box office success. That's really all there is to it—no one wants to be known as the guy that got rid of a potentially huge movie just because he didn't know how to make it himself. It's the most frustrating thing in the world because how great would it have been to see Tony Stark mention Latveria or Wolverine stroll into the Shwarma place at the end of AVENGERS? You know Hugh Jackman would have paid his own way to NYC to do just that.

That's why the Scarlet Witch being usable by both Marvel and Fox is so intriguing. It could potentially heal a bit of a rift between Fox and Marvel which could pave the way for Reed Richards hanging out and talking science with Tony Stark or Matt Murdock showing up somewhere for a chat with Steve Rogers.

So there's always a chance, however slim it may be. It's possible that good business decisions and giving fans what they want will trump massive egos and blatant selfishness, but this is Hollywood we're talking about, so on the other hand, it probably won't.

Sources: Screenrant, BadAss Digest, Newsarama

P.S. I don't have an editor or a fact checker so I'm doing my best here. Don't rip my head off if things aren't 100% accurate. Also, it's a blog.

JACK KIRBY'S SCIENCE FICTION LAND

Now that you've all seen the trailer for ARGO and read the Wired Magazine piece about it, let's talk about the absolute best part of the article—Jack Kirby's Science Fiction Land.

If you don't know who he is, Jack Kirby was the artist responsible for co-creating the majority of the Marvel Universe as we know it today. There's been a lot of talk recently (notably here and here) about how unfairly Kirby was treated when he obviously shouldered a lot of the load right alongside Stan Lee, but was never recognized to the extent that Lee was/is.

There are people that feel so passionate about the subject that they won't even see THE AVENGERS (which I'll get to eventually with a Half-Assed Review) because Kirby isn't given the credit he deserves. It's an ongoing debate that will never, ever be settled.

But that subject aside, Kirby was an awesome genius. Some of his creations were completely off the wall and bizarre, but they were also so incredibly creative that you couldn't help but admire them. In that Wired article there's the bit about the fake movie they're using and how it was actually a real, in-the-works film that got the plug pulled. Kirby had been hired to do concept drawings and along the way, the producer came up with the idea for a theme park called Science Fiction Land based on Kirby's drawings.

According to the article, "it would include a 300-foot-tall Ferris wheel, voice-operated mag-lev cars, a 'planetary control room' staffed by robots, and a heated dome almost twice as tall as the Empire State Building."

Sounds amazing, right? Unfortunately, the reason that the CIA was able to use the script and concept drawings for ARGO to bolster their fake production for the rescue of American hostages was because the men behind the original film/theme park were complete crooks.

In an article on the Denver Westworld website earlier this year, Melanie Asmar relates the story of their embezzlement and crooked dealings in her story about Colorado's new tourist incentives. Stuntman Jerry Schafer and writer Barry Ira Gellar ended up being charged with 11 felonies and brought down a few government employees as well.

It's a real shame it never came to be. It would no doubt be laughably but lovably out of date by now, the same way Disney's Tomorrowland is, but still amazing at the same time. Yesterday's vision of the future is one of my favorite things of all time and this fits in perfectly. I can't believe I didn't know about this before today, either.

These are a few of the headlines from the Rocky Mountain News from the time all this was going on. You can see a few more at the Denver Westworld link above.

ADVENTURES IN SPACE

This is Jake Jackson. Or at least I think it is. It might be. It probably is.

Stay tuned.

WEDNESDAY WARRIOR

I used to have a problem. It wasn't a bad problem to have because I loved it. Still do, but the older I get the more I realize that it is a bit of a hassle.

Comic books.

I love them. They're fun, exciting, oftentimes brilliant and many other things. They're also horrible. Horrible in the fact that they take up so much room. I was housesitting for my parents a few weeks ago, walked down to the basement and it all came back to me. There they were, 27 boxes full of comics stacked off to the side against a wall. Most of them in order, but a few boxes that had yet to be organized.

I made the decision that it was time for some of them to go. I don't plan on giving up on comics all together, but I'm making the switch to reading more digitally and buying more collected editions. I'll still hit the comic shop every wednesday, but my weekly buy pile is down from $30 (which it was when I started) to about $10. And that's on a big week. I've stepped away from the big superhero stuff because of too many tie-ins, events, crossovers and what not to buying a lot more creator-owned stuff. No real reason than it's gotten to the point where I want to read what a writer has to say with their own creation as opposed to using Thor or Green Lantern.

The occasional superhero book still works its way into my hold every so often, so I'm not condemning the genre or anything, it's just that I'm bored with what's going on in them. There's always the chance that something will catch my interest and I'll be back in at any point, but hopefully by then the big two of Marvel and DC will have figured out a better system for digital, because as it stands now, buying a book on my iPad costs the same as buying a physical copy in the store, and if that's the case, I'd rather support the guys at Dr. Volt's and Black Cat rather than ComiXology.

My plan is to buy a lot of creator-owned books that need the support from actual shops, but that's not a great many. Occasionally, I'll double dip and buy single issues and the collected editions, provided they look as good as they can. CRIMINAL is the perfect example. I love reading the individual issues, but Brubaker and Phillips have made it a point to put out a collection that's just too awesome to pass up. More things like that, and I'll be buying a lot more hardcovers.

But I digress. This post is supposed to be about how I went through all my long and short boxes and catalogued every comic I own. The decision that I came to is that I'm trying to get rid of most of them. There are a few runs that I probably won't be able to part with because they're not collected as well as I'd like and I may want to re-read them someday (i.e. Geoff Johns' FLASH run). Other than a select few, pretty much everything is available.

And by 'available' I mean, I'm selling them. I can't just give these to you. That would be ridiculous. But if you're interested, hit the jump and check out the full list of what I've got. If there's anything of interest to you, drop me an email and we'll talk.

It's not the greatest collection ever, but it's pretty good. It's kept me entertained for the better part of ten years.

PUBLISH OR PERISH

I didn't write this. I stole it from the Trip City website, but every word of it is true and more people need to see it, so I'm re-posting it here.

Written by Dean Haspiel for Trip City -- Comics writer/artist/publisher, Jimmy Palmiotti, recently Tweeted, “Publish or perish.” Maybe it was end-of-the-year blues but I was feeling particularly bleak about my career and was struck by Jimmy’s charge and asked if we could discuss the origin behind those three ominous words and what I got was a pep talk for a lifetime.

Securing work from franchise publishers is harder than ever before and very few other publishers pay livable advance wages anymore. Most deals are made for royalties and back end rewards based on sales. Print is competing with digital and profits are questionable. Readers want archives and new stories but making money at publishing has become a challenging and schizophrenic mess. The risk for a corporation to launch something new has become greater and all the bean counters want to know before they gamble on your idea is the sales of your last three books and whether or not your comic book idea has multimedia legs and if you have a strong fan base. In other words, publishers hardly publish what they “like” and franchise publishers would rather update 75-year old icons every five years [which they've worked hard to maintain] than build and grow new ideas that inspire writers and artists today. I understand why that is but it’s paranoid, lazy, and shortsighted.

Frankly, pitching proposals sucks right now. What if you don’t have three books and your new idea doesn’t translate to a movie or toy? Worse, what if you do have three books and the numbers didn’t inform the zeitgeist and thrill Hollywood? Why does one thing need to yield the other in order to make a cool comic book? Because comic books don’t sell like they used to. I get it. While the internet leveled the playing field it also made everything a niche. However, the comix industry does have a strong fanbase. I’ve seen them and they are us.

Now is the perfect time for a cartoonist to manifest his or her own industry. We have the DIY tools. We have the social networks and viral know how. We have proof that crowd funding works and community is key. We have a cranky comedian like Marc Maron rise from the ashes of every bridge he ever burned and make his own rules with his WTF podcast, and popular acts like Radiohead and Louis C.K. making affordable, direct deposit products; offers no one in their right mind could refuse, and venues like Etsy and Kickstarter changing the ways we consume by supporting work with our wallets BEFORE it’s made so that it can BE made sans corporate fear and scrutiny.

But, what about us? Viva la Michel Fiffe for self-publishing ZEGAS, a print-only experience that reminds us why magical efforts like Los Bros Hernandez’ LOVE & ROCKETS were punk yet vital and stand the test of time. All hail Alex De Campi for recognizing the virtues of the old self-publishing model while implementing new rules with the understanding that in order to hawk your wares you must show up to the party and build sound relationships with the people who produce, distribute, and purchase your wares. Rock out with your cock out Jimmy Palmiotti for having the talent and acumen to keep your feet firmly planted in all ponds while knowing how important it is to be different.

Bottom line: I’m sharing these thoughts to rally myself, too. I count myself lucky to have been paid to make comix and I owe a lot of people my perpetual gratitude. I would love to continue to get hired and occasionally play with the toys I grew up with but I can’t allow over-worked editors to ignore me or my talented friends, anymore. It doesn’t champion creativity and it doesn’t pay the bills. Indifference only engenders ill-will and I won’t be banished to that bitter cabal of disgruntled cartoonists.

“Publish or perish?”

In 2012, I’m excited to see comix auteurs bring their A-game and step up to the plate with a hit in their mind and a home run in their heart.

–Dean Haspiel

GODLAND

Picked up this little guy today at Dr. Volt's comics. I've been moving away from buying single issues and more towards awesome hardcovers and trades. There are single issues I still want to read, but I hate storing them all—luckily, most of them are in my parents basement. I've been trying to make the switch to digital on my iPad, but it's been difficult (more on that tomorrow, I hope).

Either way, I'm excited to get going on this. It's on the list right after Patton Oswalt's Zombie, Spaceship, Wasteland and Greg Graffin's Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science and Bad Religion in a World Without God.

GODLAND

"See how the greatest cosmic superhero epic of the new century began! See Commander Adam Archer, Maxim, Basil Cronus, Nickelhead, IBOGA and more in all their oversized glory! What other book delivers the secret origin of the universe? What other book squeezes your guts like an angry Torture-Bot? Only Godland gives you everything you'll ever need!"

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN

Now complete with more brooding and teen angst. Exactly what I was worried about.

Also, another origin story just in case you didn't get it the first time.

(It takes a while to load, because God forbid Sony put it up on a site that can handle all the traffic. They don't want just anyone to be able to see the trailer for a movie they've spent tons of money on and is their flagship cash cow.)

*EDIT* There we go. Good old Yahoo!.

THE ROCKETEER

I've written about how much I like The Rocketeer before, and it'll only get more apparent in the future. That's why I loved this video so much. A team of French animators put it together to celebrate the memory of creator Dave Stevens and the 20th Anniversary of the Disney movie of the same name.

I hope Disney takes a cue and John Lasseter tells Pixar to get to work. But since that will probably never happen, this will have to do.


The Rocketeer 20th anniversary from John Banana on Vimeo.

END OF DAYS

This blog is about to get a lot nerdier.

Since the summer of 2004 I've been freelancing for City Weekly. I've done a few things for them like album reviews, band profiles, comedy writing and event previews but what I mostly did was write about comic books. For a long time it was a steady rotation of once a month, just like clockwork. At first it was strictly reviews and usually went like this - one 450 word piece and two 100 word capsules. Mostly I tried to review comics that I really liked and thought more people should be reading. I never liked reviewing shitty comics because to me, the point was to get as many people reading comics as I could. So that meant highlighting all the good stuff that was out there and I thought I did a pretty good job of that.

One of my favorite stories about this was, one week after I had written a review of the awesome NORTHLANDERS by Brian Wood (which just got cancelled and inspired another post to come) my friend Josh was at the comic shop talking to the owner. The door opened and this guy that looked like he didn't read comics came walking in holding something in his hand. He held it up and it was a copy of my review, ripped out of the City Weekly and just said "I want this book."

Hearing things like that made me happy. There's been a few other times I've gone in to the comic shop and the owner would tell me that something I wrote was selling a lot of books and it would make me feel good.

Once the rotation of my column started getting more and more irregular, I started branching out a bit more and writing pieces that were more essays than reviews. I'd pick something that was going on in the industry and write about it for a bit. It was fun, but since I never had a clear idea of when I was going to get to write, I decided to steer clear of posting comic related stuff on trevorhale.com just in case.

But last week I got an e-mail from the A&E editor, the guy who's essentially been my boss for the past 7 years telling me they'd signed a deal with Big Shiny Robot to take over the Geek Culture aspect of the paper which included comics.

I was a little bit bummed, but not shocked. Bryan Young, one of the founding editors of the site has been working hard for a long time building that site in to what it is today and he's done an awesome job of it. I can't say I'm the biggest fan of some of the writing on the site, but I do respect the guys, what they do and how hard they've worked at it.

I'll still be freelancing from time to time for City Weekly, but that also means that this site is going to have a lot more comic related stuff on it now.

Just a fair warning.

CASTING COMICS

City Weekly -- Robert Downey Jr. is Tony Stark. After two movies—plus a third one in the works and The Avengers due even sooner—the entire world recognizes that. But that’s not the case in the monthly series Invincible Iron Man. The Tony Stark of that world bears a striking resemblance to Josh Holloway—better known as Sawyer from Lost—and has since Salvador Larroca started drawing writer’s Matt Fraction’s run on the book over three years ago.

And it’s not a coincidence.

Comic-book “casting” has been going on for decades. Artists, after all, have probably the hardest job in comics. They often need something (or someone) to model the characters after in order to get dimensions, body language and facial expressions correct. When C.C. Beck and Bill Parker set out to create an alternative to Superman in the late 1930s, they came up with the character Captain Marvel. Beck stated that the character had been modeled after actor Fred MacMurray, but had been done so carefully. He used the actor’s cleft chin, wavy hair and slanted forehead, but as time went on, Beck rounded out the face to make the comparison less obvious.

Dozens of other characters have been based on popular actors throughout the years, too. John Byrne and Chris Claremont used Orson Welles, Donald Sutherland, Robert Shaw and Diana Rigg as basis for the characters of the Hellfire Club, and Steve Ditko modeled Dr. Strange after horror legend Vincent Price. However, as was the case with Captain Marvel, features were always tweaked during the process.

But while comic-book characters’ resemblance to celebrities has always been part of the process, lately it’s become far less subtle—and much more distracting. Over the past decade, artists have been moving away from using actors as a simple basis to simply using them. Sometimes artists do that for the benefit of consistency, and sometimes it’s purely for publicity. When Mark Millar and J.G. Jones launched Wanted in 2003, the main character, Wesley, looked exactly like Eminem, and The Fox was definitely Halle Berry—there were even a couple of panels in the book that looked just like screenshots from 8 Mile. Millar said the resemblance was because the actors were interested in playing the roles in the upcoming movie adaptation. Of course, the rights to the film hadn’t been sold yet, but it was a clever move by Millar to get the industry talking. It was also a bit of a distraction, because Wanted seemed like it had been created with the sole purpose of being an elaborate film pitch, as opposed to letting it stand on its own as a piece of comic art.

Alex Maleev, currently the artist of the Icon title Scarlet, usually works in the style of photorealistic art and has never been shy about letting the world know that. He hires a model to pose to make his job easier and to give the character a more real feel. With Scarlet, that model even gets recognition on the credit page. The difference is that she’s an unknown. The reader isn’t immediately taken out of the story when they see her because they never have before. That’s much different than when Warren Ellis and Mike Deodato took over Thunderbolts and Norman Osborne suddenly looked exactly like Tommy Lee Jones.

To some that doesn’t matter, and to others it’s so distracting that it ruins a potentially great story. At times, it also seems like the artist is taking the easy way out of the situation by using a specific actor. Sure, it’s hard keeping up with the pressures of meeting a monthly schedule, but that’s part of the game. It just feels like the shelf life of a trade (or hardcover) would be longer if the first thought that came to mind when flipping through was, “Oh, this was a great Iron Man story,” as opposed to “Wait, why does Tony Stark all of the sudden look like the guy from Lost?”