Pay Attention! Comics News Round-up 07/26/10

-Comic-con Hangover Are you guys as tired of SDCC as I am? I posted around sixteen times over the course of four days, so to say that I'm burnt out would be underselling it. I don't even really know what happened, other than what I personally covered. My man Jamaal Thomas sifted through all of the news, though, and came up with this pretty thorough post on what was worth paying attention to.

-Do the Knowledge Chris Eckert, also of Funnybook Babylon, does some number crunching on Vertigo's recent cancellations and manages to debunk a few myths in the process. There's this weird, paranoid train of thought running in certain parts of the online comics community that genuinely believes that DC is targeting Vertigo for elimination and imposing all kinds of new rules on their mature readers line… but I haven't actually seen anything that even so much as suggests the barest minimum of that sort of thing. Books get cancelled when sales get low–that's common sense, right? While there is undoubtedly some kind of infighting in comics on some level, suggesting sabotage is something else entirely. Vertigo seems to have worked out very well for DC Comics, as the legions of Sandman fans demonstrate.

-This Man… This Moebius Matt Seneca takes a look at Stan Lee and Moebius's positively ancient collaboration, Silver Surfer: Parable. I read the first half of this story as a kid. Some twelve years later, after I was grown, I finally found the collection and got to finish the tale. Seneca digs into the various tricks and influences that are present in Moebius's art, and particularly into how Moebius was doing, for lack of a better phrase, a cover version of superhero story. There are very specific rules that go into your standard superhero comic, and it's interesting to see Moebius bump up against these rules and either do them better or just demonstrate the clash in his style vs the superheroic style. As an aside–what a weird book this is, isn't it? Maybe they can collect it with the similarly weird, though a bit more understandable, Chris Claremont/Milo Manara X-Women. "The Unlikely Marvel Collaborations: Buy Us For The Art, Volume One."

-I Can Relate to the Bread One Jennifer de Guzman shares a few great convention moments from her past. The con was really weird for me this year, a bizarre combination of surreal highs followed by catastrophic lows, but the highs were pretty good. I like posts like this, where people point out the (sometimes absurd) things that happen at cons that brighten your day. I definitely had a few of those this year, including a monster 4+ hour karaoke session in a bar.

-Ughhgh This is Fantastic Rafael Grampa shares his cover for Strange Tales II. Somebody back a truck full of money up to this guy's doorway and get a series of really nice hardback OGNs out of him asap, please. I'll read almost anything he's willing to draw.

-When's This Coming Out? That's Too Far Away JH Williams III, rather, the Eisner award-winning JH Williams III, shares some art from his upcoming Batwoman #0. He's working with a writing partner on this one, and Amy Reeder Hadley is drawing the second arc, so it'll be interesting to see how this turns out. JHW3's original run on Batwoman with Greg Rucka was monstrously well-received, and I honestly expect the second series to have around the same impact. The last time JHW3 wrote, or co-wrote, for another artist was for Seth Fisher on Batman: Snow, I believe, which was kind of a version of Mr. Freeze: Year One. It was a cool story, and Fisher's art was off the charts, which gives me hope for Batwoman.

-Hey, Maybe I'll Buy A Deadpool Comic Now Kyle Baker posts some horribly violent panels from his upcoming DEADPOOL MAX with David Lapham. This is one of those books I'm torn on. I love both creators involved, mainly for their creator-owned work (Baker's brutally funny Special Forces, for example, or Lapham's Stray Bullets), but I'm pretty apathetic toward Deadpool. It pays their bills, though, and the art looks good… so maybe. Maybe I'll go for it.

-TED x The 99 The Black Comix blog posts a TED chat from Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa about The 99, a group of Islam-inspired superheroes. I only really discovered TED talks last year, I think? But the ones I've watched have been really very interesting, and this one is no different. I like how Dr. Al-Mutawa makes a number of very basic points that illuminate the political and religious nature of several superheroes. It's something that's easy to lose sight of, as our heroes spend months fighting aliens from space and magic whatevers, but every superhero means something. There is a huge dose of Moses in Superman (though recent writers are much more in love with "Superman as Jesus" as a metaphor), Batman and post-Miller Daredevil are about coping with loss, Spider-Man is about wisdom, Donna Troy is about being so boring it hurts to read about her… that kinda thing. Dr. Al-Mutawa goes in-depth on his ideas with building the series up from nothing, the various languages it has been translated into, and the fact that there's already a theme park based on the property. This is all pretty clever, I think, and well worth watching.

David Brothers blames the light news week, and his extreme hunger, on San Diego Comic-con. He writes for 4thletter!