Thomas Jane talks About Dave Stevens and The Rocketeer Graphic Novel and Movie

You Can't Hold Back The Red Tide

JH Williams had a post today linking to this analysis of Steranko's noir masterwork RED TIDE (which should be reprinted for those of you in a position to do something about it). The articles in the analysis go into detail about the process Steranko used to create this comic book... excuse me, a "powerful Fiction Illustrated novel."

Excellent stuff that should be poured over by all you comic book and writer types.

Format affects the Design affects the story.

Tomorrow! May 30th, 2009 --- 8 AM

If you're in the Los Angeles area and want to come by - please do! Lots of stuff to clear out of my shelves before I move. Here's my Craigslist ad (with a Google Map).

Priced. To. Move. (pun intended)

Permanent Damage Brings the Pulp

From Steven Grant's PERMANENT DAMAGE column on CBR:

"Anyway, we never did talk much about the nuts and bolts of "doing" a graphic novel. (The phrase evokes thoughts of soft pore corn, dunnit?) It's a short answer anyway: the way to do it is to do it. Period. Everyone's looking for "The Secret" but there ain't no secret. The way to do it is to do it, and every story, particularly if you're creating your own work from scratch and not working with an established, formulized franchise, generates its own needs. Those are the needs you have to serve. Rules are for schmucks and businessmen. A few people were looking for "the secret" to putting together a comic story/graphic novel " someone asked a question about structure, but, as someone on the panel mentioned (not me; I basically just grumbled about the word because you can have the greatest grasp of structure in history and still churn out totally crap stories " see: George Lucas) structure is something you learn, internalize and forget about. Like a lot of elements of storytelling. It's worth familiarizing yourself with them and putting them in your toolbox " less so that you know what rules to break because, let's face it, you don't have to know rules to break them, but if you don't know what's already been done you're far less likely to break the rules that to waste a lot of valuable time reinventing the wheel, and that's strictly a mug's game, know what I mean? " but the moment you let any one element, even structure, rule your life you're done. Look at Hollywood: it's been obsessed with structure for the last 30 years " prior to that the town spoke not of acts but of reels, though technology has obsolesced that term anyway " and look at all the crappy, well structured films it has produced in that time. The best you can say about them is that without structure they might have been crappier, but in most cases it's hard to see how.

Bottom line, they may not get Oscar noms, but Hollywood has always preferred the crappy, badly-structured film that makes gobs of money to the impeccably-structured, meticulously crafted and intelligently presented film that doesn't. And it always will."

Read the whole thing to find out what happens next. It speaks to what we try and do here -- that is - just do it.

Grant's latest work 2 GUNS - a graphic novel published by BOOM STUDIOS -was recently optioned as a motion picture.

Digital Comics Now

Daily Bits has compiled a list of links for 17 completely free graphic novels you can read or download.

(Hat tip to The Beat and Wired for the referral)

But the cool thing is this:

What if every week you received an email reminder that said your comics were waiting for you to download... for free. These are new comic stories by the pro creators you've come to know and loathe in the fan press (oh come on! You know you flame the fanboys turned pros!) , but whose books you buy anyway.

The books would be a PDF or similar format book with ads with links. It would be big - about 48 pages a week with several different characters in each issue... and yes, it was free.
If you wanted a print version it would be available in different editions separating the characters and stories into separate books. Yes, I said books. Not trades. Not magazines.

Books. Collections. Each containing extra material and available exclusively in comic book shops and finer bookstores.

How do you feel about that?