Creator Roundup

This week Dan Hipp would like to know more, Jeff Smith, Jeff Lemire, Brian Wood and Jamie McKelvie tells us where they’ll be this weekend, Sara Pichelli draws Siryn for charity, Mike Mignola draws Jesus for his greyhound, Warren Ellis discusses all things digital, Jeremy Bastion draws just as good as Rafael Grampa, Dan Clowes had a rough childhood, Joe Hill talks endings and beginnings, Rafael Grampa draws as good as Jeremy Bastion, Michael Alan Nelson is outcast and Alan Moore is good old crazy Alan Moore.



- Here’s this week’s Dan Hipp:


- A ton of creators (well 4, and 2 of them are called Jeff) shared their NYCC schedules, so I’ve taken the liberty to combine them into one awesome schedule of creative goodness:
Friday:

1:00pm-2:00pm – Jeff Lemire signing (DC Booth 1254)
1:30pm – Brian Wood @ Dark Horse Comics Panel
room 1A15

3:30pm - Brian Wood signing at Dark Horse table w/ Kristian Donaldson

4:00-6:00pm – Jeff Smith booth signing
5:00-6:00pm – Jamie McKelvie signing (Marvel Booth 654)
5:00pm - Brian Wood signing at DC Comics w/ (hopefully) Riccardo Burchielli 

Saturday:

11:00am - Brian Wood signing at DC Comics w/ (again, hopefully) Riccardo Burchielli

11:00am-1:00pm - Jeff Smith booth signing
12:00pm - Brian Wood signing Oni Press w/ Ryan Kelly

1:00pm-2:00pm – Jeff Lemire signing (DC Booth 1254)
3:45pm-4:45pm - Room 1A23:
Celebrating 20 Years of BONE with Jeff Smith! Speakers include: Cassandra Pelham, David Saylor, Dr. Katie Monnin, Jeff Smith and Tom Sniegoski
4:00-5:00pm – Jeff Lemire signing (Top Shelf)
4:30pm - Brian Wood signing at Dark Horse Comics w/ Becky Cloonan 

Sunday:
11:am-12:00pm - Jeff Lemire signing (DC Booth 1254)
11:00am-1:00pm – Booth signing with Jeff Smith, Tom Sniegoski and Steve Hamaker

3:00pm-5:00pm - Jeff Lemire signing (Top Shelf)
3:00pm-5:00pm- Jeff Smith booth signing

- Sara Pichelli posted her artwork for the 1st Annual Charity Art Auction at New York Comic Con to benefit the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.


- Warren Ellis writes an awesome article about webcomics and digital comics, what the difference is and where the mediums need to go. Here’s a tasty morsel:
Way back in the day, in fact, people talked about how what the medium needed was an iPod for comics.  I, and probably others, countered that what was in fact needed was an iTunes for comics.  The delivery system, not the device.  Comixology, Graphic.ly, iVerse and all the others are in the business of trying to provide the iTunes for comics.  But, of course, with the iPad, we got the iPod for comics, too, the perfect device for reading them. 
(I am, for the purposes of this thought, ignoring the Kindle, and also Android tablets.)

But no-one seemed to have cracked the Season Pass yet.  I’ve talked to a few digital-comics services about this: if your service doesn’t allow you to buy a subscription that has your favourite comics automagically download to your device or your in-service locker, then I think you’re missing a huge piece of potential.

It occurred to me today – and my mind’s mostly been elsewhere – that digital comics and webcomics are not the same thing at all, and are not the same thing in ways other than the obvious.

The focus is off webcomics right now.  People are looking at how to get into the digital comics services.  And quite rightly: they offer the possibility of bypassing the zero-sum game of serialising new and original material into the direct sales comics store market, a market that’s frequently been quite adamant about how it doesn’t want to sell new and original material.  If I had the ability to go into digital comics right now and attempt to access a paying audience for new work, I absolutely would.

- Jeremy Bastion posted some new art, including this:


- Patch.com interviewed Dan Clowes about his new book The Death Ray:
Q: You take great pains to separate yourself from the work. In The Death-Ray there are panels with these intensely personal details. Can you give me an example of that?

Daniel Clowes: Well, I mean, the whole thing. The main character looks very much like I did, or at least has the same hairstyle and wardrobe that I did back in 1977. And I lived with my grandparents, and the kid’s grandfather looks quite a bit like my grandfather.


All of the kids in high school are sort of unintentionally based on kids I went to high school with. I was just sort of trying to draw kids that seemed real or seemed like they had some kind of resonance to me personally, and so I think, “Well, that kid should be similar to this kid that was in my science class in 11th grade.”
I was sort of approximating them the way I remembered them. I was thinking, “Oh, they don’t really look anything like the actual kids. They’re sort of vaguely similar.” But then, when I looked back at it, I really got them almost exactly. A few of the caricatures are uncannily perfect. They could actually sue me probably. [Laughs]


Q: Do you have close enough relationships with anybody from high school where that even would be a problem?

Clowes: I don’t. I have one friend from high school that I still talk to occasionally and that’s it.


Q: You’ve talked about getting harassed as a kid and your daily ritual to protect yourself. Can you elaborate?

Clowes: Yeah, my entire childhood was in Hyde Park. I used to get hassled or beaten up or had my bike stolen almost weekly on my way home from school. So I used to devise this really elaborate, complicated route to get home without having to cross paths with any other kids.
In school, I was very, very shy, and I didn’t want to interact with anybody and I wanted to just blend into the background. So over the years, I learned many strategies to become invisible to other kids — which I think served me well as a writer because I think kids would often forget I was there and talk freely in front of me, and I was paying close attention.

- Rafael Grampa posted this AWESOME artwork for his exhibition at Comicon 2011 RIO:


- CBR catches up with Joe Hill to talk about his Scream Awards nomination, wrapping up Locke & key, The Cape and the Locke and Key pilot. Here’s what he has to say about finishing Locke and Key:
But that process of serialization comes with its pitfalls, as Hill said, "In terms of winding up, I had some tension when I was about six or seven issues in. When I was just starting 'Head Games,' I started to worry about whether or not I could stick the landing. I did a lot of thinking about how to wind it up. And now that I'm here in the home stretch, I've really enjoyed it. It seems like all the parts are there. Even though it'll probably be another six months before readers have gotten a chance to finish 'Clockworks' – which is our second-to-last arc – every issue of that series is written. And I feel like we've plugged all the holes and answered all the major questions that remain. This is not like 'The X-Files' where mysteries would get solved, but then that would just open up more mysteries underneath. After a while, it began to seem like this tremendous circle jerk. It was real frustrating because there was no resolution, and they had no resolution because they just did what was cool and they didn't worry about the explanations until after the fact. I think David and I have avoided that trap. I hope the readers will feel that way when we're done.
In the meantime, fans of Hill's writing can dig into IDW's "The Cape" – an ongoing twist on the superhero paradigm that started as a one-shot adaptation of a story from the writer's "20th Century Ghosts" collection. While that adaptation – written by Jason Ciaramella – was the first thing his publisher ever pitch to Hill, he was surprised when it finally came to fruition. "It's interesting because this is really the first thing of mine ever that's been adapted into another medium by someone else. The only time that's ever happened otherwise was with the TV pilot for 'Locke & Key.' And that was my story with some other very creative people running with it onto TV."

- Michael Alan Nelson talks about his new series Outcast and shows off all 6 #1 covers. Here’s my favourite:
I don’t think it’s possible for me to express to you just how epic this series is going to be.  Think about it.  An undead king with only a massive sword and a grudge in his possession, searching for his stolen soul across a land that no longer wants him?  I was BORN to write this series. 


- Metro interviews Alan Moore and always, he has some crazy things to say:
Which of your comic works are you proudest of?
At the moment I feel an awful lot of my comic career is behind me, particularly all of the superhero stuff – the stuff that’s owned by American corporations. I want to distance myself from that, so the stuff I’m proudest of is what I own: From Hell, Lost Girls, The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I don’t read my earlier work because there are too many unpleasant associations with it. I don’t have a copy of Watchmen in the house. I’m glad the work is out there in the world, having an effect, but it’s like I’ve gone through a messy divorce.

Have your bad experiences with publishers put you off the comics you enjoyed when you were younger?
To a degree. I’d kept comics I had a fondness for but they’ve all gone now. I still respect the writers, artists and their work but I’ve had an unusual career. I was at least partly responsible for changing people’s attitude to comics in the 1980s. There are other things I’m relatively good at apart from comics that I’m concentrating on. It’s a shame but I’m a thousand miles away from mainstream comics now.

- Mike Mignola is running an auction to help his greyhound Sonny have treatment for lymphoma. Here’s the artwork his auctioning: