Update: Stephen Colbert interviews Editor-in-Chief of Marvel Comics, Joe Quesada.

Ich hätte kaum gedacht, dass ich mich je wieder im Leben für eine Superhelden-Serie begeistern könnte, aber Marvel Comics macht mit seiner schwer politischen Mini-Serie "Civil War" derzeit alles richtig.

Das schwer moralische Mainstream-Amerika hat sich unter Bush ein gewaltiges Problem eingefangen. Eine Nation, die propagandafreie Informationen nur noch aus Comedy-Sendungen bezieht. Ausgerechnet die Ikone Captain America wird zur kritischen Stimme im Kampf der Supermächte. Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, New Orleans, Osama Bin Laden, American Idol, Jon Stewart und der Krieg im Irak - Marvel hat keine Berührungsängste mit den Themen, die den Amerikanern das Gewissen belasten. Eine Nation, die von unrasierten Superhelden die Welt erklärt kriegen muss. Einer muss es wohl machen.

People's Daily: "Brazil's government started on Monday a National Anti-Drug campaign called 'Say yes to Life'. The goal is to educate and empower youth to reject illicit drugs.

Several comic books featuring Ronaldinho as a character will be distributed in schools throughout the country. The comic books were created by Brazilian designer Mauricio de Souza. Their goal is to 'help send kids an anti-drug message through their idols".

ComicBookDB.com is the fastest-growing comic database on the web. The first goal of this project is to catalog every comic, graphic novel, manga, creator, character and anything else that could possibly relate to the field of comics.

Via Typolad

Create your own kids! Perfect for a rainy afternoon.

Via Buchstabenpolizei

Comicon.com: "Avi Arad, one of two entrepreneurs who helped rescue Marvel from the depths of bankruptcy, has left the company to form his own production company."

Arad bleibt weiter irgendwie beteiligt und darf weiterhin so tun als hätte er sich Erfolgskonzepte wie Spider-Man oder X-Men persönlich ausgedacht. Der amerikanische Comic gebärdet sich derzeit sowieso mal wieder schwierig. Immer diese Autoren mit ihren Ideen... Ja, ja....

Arad bleibt uns erhalten und wird mittels seiner depperten Finanziers weiter raushauen dürfen.

In Amerika nennt man Geld aus Deutschland übrigens "silly money"! Siehe z. B. so Produktionen wie den "Straight to video"-Formel 1-Film mit Sly Stallone und Verona Feldbusch...

BBC: Comic book heroine Batwoman is to make a comeback as a "lipstick lesbian" who moonlights as a crime fighter, a DC Comics spokesman has confirmed. (...) The new-look Batwoman is just one of a wave of ethnically and sexually diverse characters entering the DC Comics universe.

Regular characters Firestorm and The Atom, meanwhile, have been reinvented as black and Asian heroes respectively.

Tags: lesbian, Batwoman

Neil Gaiman at wired.com: "The specific stories we tell about Superman – the what-happened and what-he-did – don’t matter that much. Superman transcends plot. We retell his tales because we wish he were here, real, to keep us safe. (...) Superman’s true enemies are disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes, jet planes tumbling from the sky, enormous meteors that would crush cities. Superman stands between humanity and a capricious universe."

Doonesbury still rocks!

Marvel's new series has your favourite superheroes fighting George Bush and the Patriot Act (...) Today, Marvel Comics is releasing the first in its miniseries Civil War, which can only be described as a gutsy comic-book series focusing on the whole debate over homeland security and tighter government controls in the name of public safety.

Check out this video prequel that catches everyone up on the events of the last two years. VIDEO TRAILER TO CIVIL WAR #1

Wer endlich einmal ein paar Originale vom schauen Fil schauen möchte, dem sei die große Austellung des Berliner Lokalheroen im Shining Labor (Kastanienallee 79 / 2. Hof, D-10435 Berlin) empfohlen.

Eröffnet wird die Schau am 29. April gegen 20.00 Uhr und im Anschluß legt der Meister sogar selber auf. Für wahre Fans von Sharkey, Didi & Stulle und Fil himself gibt es ausserdem noch eine limitierte Anzahl handsignierter Teelichter (sic!) zu ergattern. Die Ausstellung ist bis zum 3. Juni 2006 jeden Samstag zwischen 14.00 und 18.00 Uhr geöffnet.

Edition Panel

Great comic by Patrick S. Parley!

From the podcast show Geek-Week.net, a bunch of dorks dress up like superheroes and re-enact the Marvel comics series "Secret Wars"....

Watch the Secret Wars Re-Enactment Society!

Fun for the whole family. Via Wired

Nice archive of early newspaper-comics!

"While several well-known titles such as Krazy Kat, Gasoline Alley, and Peanuts are being given their proper due in published form, there is still much of the rich history of comics and cartooning that will more than likely never see print again and worse, fade away with time."

DIGITAL FUNNIES

Alan Moore, that bearded hippie from England who thinks he's a "magician" wont shut up. Uhhh, the eccentrical Englisman living in his own "magical" sphere has a problem with those nasty, nasty movie-people again. That's so lame, that's so pathetic, that's so 1962 and you just don't get it. You had your 15 minutes in 1986. You're history by now.

You're just a comic writer and nobody has ever heard of you outside the world of comics. You're writing genre-fiction for a minority of idiots who think that a new version of "Aquaman" could be great if only they could get YOU to write it. Why don't you write a real book for a change? But no more of that crappy poetry please! It's almost as bad as the films of your magikal brother Kenneth Anger.

And what is your problem with "V"? Didn't you read the contract? So, just stop all that whining. You've been crying enough after that horrible movie "League of extraordinary Gentlemen" came out. It's getting boring and it's not like you wrote "War & Peace" or the bible. Most of your stuff after "Watchmen" was pure trash anyway. ("Supreme"? You gotta be kidding! Or the other one about, well, superheroes...?) And they will have to change little things when they turn your stuff into movies all the time, you know? Right, you don't watch movies and you don't have a telephone. But didn't you get a lot of money anyway?

Quote: Mr. Lloyd, the illustrator of "V for Vendetta," also found it difficult to sympathize with Mr. Moore's protests. When he and Mr. Moore sold their film rights to the graphic novel, Mr. Lloyd said: "We didn't do it innocently. Neither myself nor Alan thought we were signing it over to a board of trustees who would look after it like it was the Dead Sea Scrolls." (New York Times)

Meanwhile there is a lot of talk on the net about "V for Vendetta" going on. Revolutionary, terrorist, superhero or none of the above?

Here are some reviews:

• MTV
• news.scotsman.com
• Newsweek
• The New Yorker

More...

Tagged "Propaganda" and "Banned Cartoons"

One of the wisest cartoons around just announced to return soon...!

Via Panel Online

This is my favourite comic cover of all times, I think!

"The new art of illustrated blogs, illustration used as a means of blogging, illutrated by the blog owners." Ein neuer Ring von handgezeichneten und mundgeblasenen Weblogs hat sich organisiert und schickt sich an, den autobiographischen Comic in ein sequentielles Internet-Format zu transportieren. ->Blogs Illustrated

Americas most popular icon Superman used to support the United Nations "World Refugee Year". That ad seems to be so retro by now!

Mal ganz kurz, die Homepage des Comicmagazins "Panel Ambixioux Comix" wurde gänzlich neu gemacht und das ist auch gut so.

It took me a while to find a program to do this. Unrar wont do the job. Try this: "Jomic is a viewer for comic book archives. It can handle both CBZ and CBR archives and has a two page mode. Supported image formats are PNG, JFIF/JPEG, TIFF, and GIF. It is Open Source software distributed under the GNU General Public License."

Also works for Linux.

Superfrankenstein found them!

"‘It is 2021, tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of 9/11. America is under oppression by ultra-liberal extremists who have surrendered governing authority to the United Nations. Hate speech legislation called the “Coulter Laws” have forced vocal conservatives underground. A group of bio-mechanically enhanced conservatives led by Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy, Oliver North, and a young man born on September 11, 2001, set out to thwart Ambassador Usama bin Laden's plans to nuke New York City.'"

Sick! Have a look!

Tags: cartoons, comics, Muslim Cartoons, Mohammed Cartoons, media, Medien, Propaganda, Zensur, War

Haven't checked superdickery.com in a while, but they have an amazing new collection of propaganda comic covers like this one! Lots of stuff I haven't seen before. Oh, no!!

Tags: cartoons, comics, Propaganda, War

George W. Bush is Bizarro!

"When news broke in July 2003 that Thomas Pynchon would lend his voice to an upcoming episode of The Simpsons, it seemed so surprising, wacky, and surreal, in other words, so trademark Pynchon, that it simply had to be true."

I must have missed this episode!