#comics editorial

[davidmariottecomics]

New Job, Boom!

Hey friends, 

Going to be a short one this week, but I definitely didn't want to let it pass without saying a little something. If you haven't heard otherwise yet, I'm now working at BOOM! Studios! Once I can say more, I'm sure I will, but it's early, things aren't really announced beyond that, and there are other matters to turn your attention to. 

Announcements: It's the Global General Strike for Palestine! For the next week, people all over the world are striking from all sorts of regular activity to disrupt the economic systems supporting the destruction of Palestine and to put that time and energy into active protest movement. This is a pretty basic explainer of what you can do and know that doing anything is better than doing nothing, right? If you have to go to work, be visible. If you have to shop, be visible and thoughtful. If you have to rest, enjoy the things you already have. If you want to post, make it about what is happening. Current reports are estimating over 25,000 people have been murdered, with the death toll just going to keep rising between continued bombardments and the lack of resources. Over 60,000 people are wounded, 85% of the population has been displaced, and roughly 1 in 4 people is facing extreme hunger. No hospital is fully functional, for the ones that are still left standing. The IOF (Israeli Occupying Force) has admitted to exhuming graves, and have claimed it's to "find the hostages", but in the face of the other war crimes they've committed, it's hard to believe it wasn't vengeful malicious behavior to psychologically wound Palestinians as much as anything else. While we wait--possibly years--to find out if the International Court of Justice rules that Israel is in fact committing a genocide, people are going to continue dying from this. And so, hopefully, with a bit of concentrated disruption and pressure, this destruction that's already lasted 100+ days may finally find an end. 

In terms of using your power and time, I've mentioned it before, but you could call your representatives. Fax their offices. Email them. Contact the White House. Join actions from organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace, American Muslims for Palestine, the Democratic Socialists of America, and be sure to focus your boycotts (during the strike and generally) on the businesses called out by BDS. You can take some time to read through Verso's Solidarity with Palestine reading list. Make signs for if you're going out protesting, to put in your windows, or coordinate outfits in Palestinian flag colors that show your solidarity. Make sure you're keeping an eye out for local events. If you see art installations, share them, and, yeah, that includes graffiti that bears the message. Let Palestinians take the lead in the global conversation on social media and if you see, say, your reps talking about other things, flood them with calls for a ceasefire in the replies. 

If spending money brings you any comfort and you feel a need to put something into good practice, the Cartoonist Cooperative's page still lists a ton of resources for E-Sim cards.Bisan mentioned today that E-Sims are helpful, but their use is becoming more limited as the overall infrastructure has been so damaged that you need to be in a high place to use them. 

Again, do what you can.  

What I enjoyed this week: Nancy (Comic), Yu-Gi-Oh: Duel Links (Video Game), Baldur's Gate III (Video Game), Blank Check (Podcast), Dungeons & Daddies (Podcast), How to Read Nancy (Book), Ted Lasso (TV show), my new big Taschen Ads of the 80s book, Movie Flick Chick Vol. 1 by BonerBob (Adult Comic), The Traitors Season 2 (TV show), The Floor (TV show), having a new phone and slowly getting back up to speed with it, seeing some stuff I had been working on at the old job get announced.

Pic of the Week: As I've been wont to do recently, I've made a little promo image with my announcement, so that's here, but my real pic of the week is this amazing photo of Nadja. She was in the chair sleeping and I went to move the Hello Kitty and I put it on top of her and she didn't move at all! It was very cute. 

[taimanzano]

Never posted this one here, so it's now time.

My comic for the 2017 MegOp Zine, "Equinox". It was a project I really loved and I'm humbled that so many great artists participated on it. Forever grateful! The edition turned our pretty neat and I still cherish it on my bookshelf :>

[tjmsteph]

thinking once again how, in stephanie brown’s last moments alive, not her mom or her boyfriend were allowed to be with her and the only person to ‘keep her company’ was the man that hated her so much he didnt even dare remove his cowl before her passing. thinking about steph alone in africa reimagining all she would have said had somebody else sat by her side in those moments and held her hand instead of him.

[damian-lil-babybat]

"My Anatolia" & "My Alexander"

If DC remained truthful to their own canon, and let Talia lied about the miscarriage/abortion instead (like before the retcon, which the author admitted to have misremembered details for iirc), then my OTP since "Batman: The Animated Series", would have not crushed and burn like the city of Alexandria, rendered to ashes and dust that it could never be fully revived in canon.

Based on this panel from Boy Wonder (2024) by Juni Ba.

Headcanon: This is the rose of taif, you cannot convince me otherwise 😭

[fantastic-nonsense]

I'm sorry. I have to laugh. this man is SO petty and SO bitter that everyone loves Dick Grayson enough to keep him alive against his wishes

[ayy-ayycaptaiin]

When they still look so utterly beautiful despite being in worlds where they don't end up together..

I'm gonna be SICK. They're THE star crossed soulmates.

[halorocks1214]

reed and namor's interactions in the game are so unbelievably funny. the writers really just went

[papaiyatree]

if i ever work in dc, i'd make a story where babs has a nightmare and the nightmare is that she's still batgirl and that she hasn't moved on yet

[webshood]

the way Selina is canonically 5'7 and in heels, but this nigga is out there towering over her while slouching.... only 6' my ass they're lying to my face

[incorrect-green-lantern-quotes]

As much as I love Hal and Guy and John, sometimes I wonder what Green Lantern comics would've looked like if they never came back to their old roles. Like if instead of Geoff Johns's epic saga that begins with Hal's return, Kyle was allowed by editorial to succeed at restarting the Green Lantern Corps and became the leader of a new generation of GLs?

I think that would've been the natural progression of Kyle's character. For years he was called the last of the Green Lanterns and he carried that weight like Atlas holding up the sky. He tried so many times to rebuild the Corps that he'd only ever heard about from others, and so many times failed because he trusted the wrong people.

But what if instead, Kyle's faith in others was rewarded? What if his search for worthy ringbearers led him to the unlikeliest of candidates? A car thief suspected of terrorism, and a hermit too terrified to leave her apartment? The Guardians of old would have looked at Simon Baz and Jessica Cruz and found them utterly unfit to wear the ring. Many of the Justice League probably would too.

But Kyle Rayner was chosen by sheer, desperate chance in a dirty alleyway. He remembers the toll that unyielding demand for perfection took on his predecessors, how it broke Hal Jordan in the end. He remembers how he was just given the ring with no explanation or training or support and how that cost Alex her life. So Kyle chooses to help.

He helps Simon track down the real culprit behind the bomb. He helps Jessica find the men who murdered her friends. He teaches them that there is no shame or disgrace in fear, so long as they overcome it. And for once, Kyle Rayner's trust and optimism wins out.

The Green Lantern Corps is reborn. There may be only three of them now, but it's more than Kyle ever had before. He takes his partners (for all that he taught them everything they know, he considers them his equals) to the Watchtower. He introduces them to the Justice League, and then breaks the news that the two new Lanterns will replace him when he ventures out to the stars to continue recruiting.

But before Kyle leaves, there is one last thing to do. He brings Simon and Jessica to the Warriors bar in New York to meet their elders. John, Guy, and Alan already know of the new recruits, having heard through the grapevine (Oracle puts out very fast newsletters), but it's another thing entirely to see with their own eyes the small spark that Kyle had carried alone finally growing into a fierce blaze.

And unseen by all of them, Hal Jordan watches as the family he nearly destroyed begins to rise from the ashes. The Spectre feels a little more at peace because he knows that Kyle Rayner is not the last of the old Green Lanterns. Instead, he is the first of the new.

[davidmariottecomics]

You Can Always Restart

Ahoy hoy!

I've mentioned a few times over the past couple of weeks (mostly in the "What I enjoyed" section) that I've been reading David M. Willis' Dumbing of Age. I'm all caught up on over a decade of webcomics! Woo! There are a lot of reasons that I like it. I find the characters compelling. I'm a big sucker for slice-of-life type stuff that occasionally gets spicy and that tracks multiple groups of folks all just kinda living their lives and the ways they intersect with comedic and dramatic effect. Lots of Beast Wars references and acknowledgement of how great IDW TF comics are (and the occasional nod to TMNT and Sonic and stuff too). A cartoonist with the initials DMW when I'm DWM. It's great! 

But now that I am somehow caught up, I've also decided to check out their earlier comics. I've just finished the original run of Roomies! now. Roomies is a proto-Dumbing of Age in a lot of ways and that's a big part of what has inspired this week's blog about revisiting and revising your old work. 

You Can (Always) Redo

Yes, that is a riff on the Rebuild of Evangelion titles which are also a pretty good example of what I'm talking about today. 

Sometimes, as a creator, you have a good idea. Sometimes, you have a great idea. And sometimes, you do not have the ability to properly execute your big idea. There are a million reasons for it, right?

Just to look at Evangelion. The original TV series, somewhat infamously, always had a very small staff working on it, was running up against tight deadlines the entire run of the production, had various curveballs thrown at it by both the creator and the studio that would significantly change the overall plot and focus of individual episodes while in production, and ends in a couple of really weird episodes that may or may not have had budget problems and/or time problems of being created in a major crunch. The last couple episodes weren't too well received, and so the ending got rewritten in a pair of films. And then a few years later, Hideaki Anno and Gainax decided to do the whole thing again over almost 15 years with the Rebuild movies.Plus manga and light novel adaptations/reimaginings. Plus this that and the other thing (not to mention Anno's Shin Godzilla, Shin Ultraman, and Shin Kamen Rider, which are a similar, but different thing).

All of these versions tackle the same basic material, but due to different sized budgets and teams and Anno's shifting interests and feelings as a person, they can get pretty different. One of the things I really like about it is seeing how each iteration and even just escalations within each version feel like they're usually trending toward something truer to who Anno is at the moment of creation (even if I think most of the endings are bad). 

If you have an idea you like, roll with it. Chances are, you've got something, otherwise why would you be interested in the first place. But in recognizing your limitations--be they budget or time or skill or editorial interference or whatever--know that you can also keep an idea in your back pocket to try it again, but better. 

The Walkyverse If you haven't taken the time to read all of Willis' webcomics, that's probably fine. They've been at it for like 25 years at this point, so it's a lot to catch up on. The long and short is there was an initial series: Roomies! about college roommates. That ended and some plotlines were refocused/retconned into a new series, It's Walky! That then spun-off into two other series: Joyce and Walky! and Shortpacked! And a ways into all of this, David looped back around to the initial concept of a story about college freshmen trying to acclimate to their new circumstances (and being semi-autobiographic, but now with the clarity of hindsight) and started Dumbing of Age. Most of the cast are folks from the various previous series, but reimagined and tweaked to fit the college plot. Some personality traits remain pretty true. Some ideas that just got touched on waaaaaaaay back in Roomies! are refined and actually executed deftly. 

There aren't a lot of ideas I had when I was young that I revisit and see if I can't make work better now with my expertise and skills, but there are definitely some things that I've poked at here and there. And for some of my more recent ideas, there've been lots of things I've revisited. Sometimes it's a concept that I feel like I'm getting to the 95 yard line on but can't quite get across to the goal, and so I see if I can't run a different play and break it. Sometimes it's a particular script that I look at and even if it is recent, I feel isn't terribly representative of how I write. But when I go through these things, I always try to make it a new doc so I can still go back to the old and see just how and what I've refined that might make it's way back or that might make itself into yet another revision. 

I think there's sometimes an assumption that live performance is the only medium in which you get a different variation of a work every time. But you can absolutely revisit your older comics works and ideas and find some new angle on them or reason to bring back something that never quite clicked when you did it in the past. 

Wrap It Up 

In some ways, you can even do this in licensed or corporate comics. Brian Cronin has a fun series over at CBR called Wrap it Up! Each entry looks at two comic series wherein the plotline of one series ultimately had to be resolved in another. I think the most recent--at time of writing--was about Adam Warlock's series getting canceled and some of those plots getting resolved in Hulk. I bring this up because while obviously starting from scratch is an option, sometimes you'll be given a chance to finish your story in another way: be it a different series or a one-shot or OGN. I've even occasionally seen stories more-or-less wrapped up across universes by using similar characters (I swear one of the Wrap it Ups is about a Namor story that gets "resolved" in Aquaman because it was easier to do a light retelling and then resolve the story there than it was to get new Namor stuff going at Marvel). 

A good idea shouldn't go to waste, and there's often going to be some way to circle back around to it. It's just a matter of keeping those ideas in sight so they don't get lost. 

And, as an extra little note: I have said before, when I'm scripting, I tend to practice bad habits. I do a lot of one-and-dones where I take a single pass and then have someone else read it and only make revisions after I've had someone else do a pass. I also do a lot of batch scripting with rewrites--which is where I will write say the first 5-10 pages of the script, leave it for a bit, plot out the back half, reread that first section and do my first round of rewrites, then finish the script having sometimes almost completely rewritten the first batch of pages. Unless something is actually egregious, I tend to believe you shouldn't revise until you've finished a draft and can see the thing in it's entirely. And, no, you probably shouldn't just get stuck revisiting and rewriting the same script or redrawing the same page again and again until you get it right. But maybe down the line, you'll get the chance to truly do it all over again, the way that reflects you now.  

What I enjoyed this week: Blank Check (Podcast), Craig of the Creek (Cartoon), Honkai Star Rail (Video game), My Adventures with Superman (Cartoon), The Broken Room by Peter Clines (Book), Crime Scene Kitchen (TV show), Dumbing of Age (Webcomic), Solve This Murder (Podcast), Cruel Summer (TV show), Praise Petey (Cartoon), The Loveliest Time by Carly Rae Jepsen (Album), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (Movie).

New Releases this week (8/2/2023): Nothing from me!

New Releases next week (8/9/2023): Nothing from me! Couple of slow weeks, but lots coming up the pipeline! 

Announcements:  I've mentioned it a couple of times, but I'm largely done with the con circuit for the year. There might be a thing in a couple of weeks, and if so, I'll be letting folks know ASAP! We're not going to be at Tucson Comic-Con this year. Love that show, but just didn't work out right. And at the moment of writing, I don't *think* I'll be at NYCC. 

This is kind of a soft announcement following them mentioning it on their Twitch stream, but Becca and I are working on a comic. We're co-plotting, I'm scripting, they're drawing, and their friend Duke who has lettered a bunch of their smutty stuff is on-board when we get to that part of things. If you're curious to learn more...

...Maybe join my Patreon! You get to see developmental stuff from this, and other work-in-progress projects. Plus this same blog, but without the part plugging my Patreon! And even more extra stuff! ORRRRR... join Becca's Patreon because they're also going to be sharing some of this comic developmental stuff! 

Pic of the Week: The neighbor's cat was chillin in our complex's courtyard and I managed to sneak some pets. The kitty is pretty nice, but often doesn't let people approach, so it was a nice treat. Or maybe it was the kitty's way of apologizing for frequently coming and hanging out on our landing and driving my cats wild. 

[bearforceone3]

kyle and donna

[batboopp]

what nooo these girls who have hallucinated the other when they were eaten alive by doubt and the urge to give up just to use those sweet, fake words the hallucinated image of the other said to get up and keep on fighting aren’t dating at all!!! in fact there’s no chance they’ll ever do that!!! you’re crazy the things you say are crazy

[thelaughingmagician]

Red Robin #5

[notmoreflippingelves]

A Timeline of Dick Grayson's Unrelenting Trauma Era (circa 2004-2006 in comics)

So as I was coincidentally reading the Outsiders (2003) and Teen Titans (2003) runs, I became gradually aware that some of the events were overlapping timeline with the Batfamily "War Games" arc. As I had previously become aware that "War Games" overlapped both the Blockbuster + Tarantula arc (Nightwing) AND Under the Red Hood, I became shocking aware of how many new traumas were rapidly piling onto Dick Grayson in very quick succession across multiple ongoing series.

So I did a lot of reading of both specific comics that I had read--and summaries of a few that I hadn't-- to do my best to make a definitive timeline of this absurdly stressful period in Dick Grayson's life. (Most of which seems to have occurred with around 6 months or less).

(I am no expert so feel free to add/clarify anything that I may have overlooked or misinterpreted).

[fantastic-nonsense]

one of these days I'm going to do a whole thread that is specifically screenshots about all of the New 52 era editorial mandates re: Barbara Gordon and Batgirl/Oracle so I don't have to hunt them down every time I get into arguments with people about the racism/sexism/ableism inherent in the Oracle->Batgirl switch