If this is true, my father (who honestly probably knew this, as he did everything) just shat himself in his grave.
Well, you learn something new every gorram day….
The true identity of Ludwig van Beethoven, long considered Europe’s greatest classical music composer. Said directly, Beethoven was a black man. Specifically, his mother was a Moor, that group of Muslim Northern…
It’s pretty much impossible to find a creative person, particularly a storyteller, who is without influence. We all have the works and the creators and the teachers that inform what we do. Speaking for myself, I can think of a dozen creators and films and books and comics that have left a lasting mark on my style. Sometimes, I try to reach beyond or away from my influences, as a challenge to myself…but the fingerprints of those who came before me are always there. I’m starting this particular heading of blog posts because of the last few pages that we’ve posted on Hunter Black, and because of the first few pages of Planet Pantheon. Stylistically, the only real commonality between these two segments is their lack of dialogue…but both sets of pages owe an enormous debt to Scott McCloud and the things that I’ve learned from his particular brand of comics. Indeed, his “text-comics”: Making Comics, Understanding Comics, and Reinventing Comics have all proven to be invaluable to me as a creator, and the aspiring comic book professional that I was would never have shed himself of the “aspiring” tag without these books. Scott McCloud taught me that we as comics creators are using a language, and that I’d been speaking in baby-talk. I learned the value of setting from him. I learned to stop loving the sound of my own voice from him, and to let the art speak for the story when possible. I learned to set tone and mood through panel progression. I learned how to lead the reader’s eye, and how to engage the reader’s imagination. (All of this sounds like I think more of my writing than I do. Suffice it to say that I’ve decided that my brain and my writing need a fresh infusion of Mr. McCloud’s work.) I could honestly go on and on about Mr. McCloud’s work, but if you like to create or to enjoy comics, his books are required reading, and he explains his own value far better than I could. I’ll say this for sure: I WOULD NEVER HAVE CHOSEN TO PURSUE ONLINE COMICS WITHOUT SCOTT MCCLOUD. And my life would suck a wee bit more as a result.
Wednesdays are a day wherein I do not update any online comics.
They are also a day when new print comics are available in your Local Comic Shop. You should go and buy some. There are some great books out there from the Big Two…but you should also try at least one independent book a week. You might make someone’s rent. If you don’t like it, you only have to check it out once. if you do, you have something you can like forever.
So, the news broke the other day about the people at Wizards of the Coast beginning work on a new edition of Dungeons & Dragons. I greeted this news with mixed feelings. I’m in a D&D group right now, Will Orr (the artist on Hunter Black) and I alternate DMing duties in a game set in the Eberron campaign world. The only thing is, we play D&D 3.5, and the game is on its 4th Edition. We bought the 4th Edition books, some of them, anyway…but after a few times playing, I decided that I didn’t really like it. It IS easier to run, that much is true. But I found that, in their efforts to make the game more palatable to the Worlds of Warcraft crowd, they had dumbed the game down. It had lost a great deal of customization. The best way for me to describe is this: if I made a thief/rogue character in 3rd Edition (or even 2nd Edition), there were ways for me to create a pickpocket, a con artist, a thief-acrobat, a burglar, etc. Indeed, both editions had a VARIETY of ways for me to make such tweaks. That seems to be gone in 4th Edition. Anyway, the point of this blog isn’t to bash 4.0…we still had DOZENS of 3.5 books and supplements at our disposal, and so we’ve run two separate 3.5 games since 4.0 debuted. (I should have considered trying Pathfinder, but at the end of the day, I liked 3.5 and Eberron so much that I didn’t want to bother.) Suffice it to say that for WotC to be working on a 5th Edition so soon (4.0 came out in 2008), 4th Edition has to have been a bit of a flop. Wizards of the Coast is reaching out to gamers to be involved in the development of 5th Edition, at least as beta-testers. All of the members of my D&D group, and a few people who I used to play with but don’t have compatible schedules with, have signed up to be involved. We want to have our say. I LOVE D&D. I’ve been playing since I was in the second grade, and there’s something that I still love about getting new hardbound books with new rules and new monsters and new spells. I was kind of heartbroken when it turned out that I didn’t enjoy 4th Edition. I’m very happy that they’re going back to the drawing board. Here’s a secret, one of my ultimate goals with both Hunter Black and Planet Pantheon is to license them to be adapted into campaign settings for Dungeons & Dragons. I get giddy at the thought. So keep reading, and tell your friends about us! Help us become popular enough to make this a reality someday!
Ah…genre fiction and what it has to teach us about love.
I have been blitzing the social media, as I do twice a week, about Hunter Black’s latest page, and it occurs to me that since there are a whopping four of you following me on tumblr, I should share the big news with you.
I have two free online comics currently in production, the aforementioned Hunter Black, and the brand-spanking-new Planet Pantheon. There are only two pages up, so it’s not exactly a rousing read yet; like Hunter Black, it’s a long form serialized comic.
Hunter Black updates Tuesdays and Fridays.
Planet Pantheon updates Mondays and Thursdays.
On Wednesdays, you should go to your local comic shop. You might even find some of my work there, if you dig a bit: I’m the scripter on issues #3-#6 of Volume Two of Eternal Descent, published by IDW.
Frankly, I don’t enjoy spending this much time on promotion and marketing, but I also want to make a real living at this…so check out my works!
Since I am currently writing TWO web…I mean, writing two COMICS online…this is some useful stuff for me. It also bears out some recent research of mine.
Andrew Sullivan is one of my favorite political analysts, precisely because he puts truth before party.
Cassandra Cain my boo, a woman of color with disabilities, outsold Green Arrow, Aquaman, Catwoman, Stephanie Brown, and whole slew of white characters and note how nearly all of them have been given reboot after reboot after reboot, no matter how many times they have flopped.
We’re talking about the SAME Cassandra Cain that is DC brass has admitted is the most asked about character at conventions.
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http://arsmarginal.wordpress.com/2012/01/16/just-in-time-for-mlk-day/
While I don’t agree with the idea of the cancellation of Mr. Terrific as a bad thing (bad book, bad writer), this here I felt was important to point out.
(via fyeahlilbitoeverything)
When it’s true, it’s true.
(via gailsimone)
(Source: fyeahlilbit2point0, via gailsimone)
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Dr. Cornel West (via newwavefeminism)
There are a lot of folks who want to forget that MLK wasn’t well regarded by the majority of this country in his lifetime. It’s easier to remember that these days than it was twenty years ago.
(via bernardin)
