Paul Guinan This is a thing that happens in the opera. The Portland Opera had one of their cartoonist invitationals last week, which also meant that I got to livetweet through my second consecutive opera (you can see my findings on the first one here). The production was great as usual, although due to the […]
Comic Books
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Joe Hill’s AV Club Interview: On Locke & Key and His New Novel
Shane Leonard The A.V. Club’s Tasha Robinson has a fantastic interview with Joe Hill. He’s the son of Stephen King, effortlessly carrying on the family tradition of writing horror and weird-ass short stories. He’s also the writer of the best comic book that has ever comic booked—the intensely scary, suspenseful, and downright amazing Locke & […]
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Tomorrow: Free Comic Book Day
Tomorrow’s Free Comic Book Day, that magical day once a year when you can just walk into a comic book store and get something for free. Books like these, which cover everything from The Walking Dead to Sesame Street. Here’s a sleepy-seeming Hugh Jackman telling you about it, but mostly he wants to remind you […]
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This is How Marvel Starts Their Own Television Network
Marvel wasn’t always a media juggernaut. They’ve almost gone bankrupt before, and the ’90s weren’t kind to them, just like they weren’t kind to DC, or market speculators, or anyone who ever had a foil-stamped variant issue of grimdark crosshatched bullshit with swords poured into their eyes. That was a lot of people, as such […]
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Stumptown Post-Mortem
Stumptown didn’t offer press passes to the Mercury this year—or send out a press release, for that matter—but apparently they did see fit to put up one of comics journalism’s hotshots. (Cough, bitter? Not us!) Over at the Comics Reporter, Tom Spurgeon has a massive recap of his Stumptown Comics Fest experience—in addition to a […]
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Re: Stumptown
So much for Stumptown getting out of the convention center. From an interview with Festival Director Kaebel Hashitani: But I can say that next year’s Fest will be moving to a larger hall at the Convention Center (double the space), and that the dates are April 12 & 13, 2014. And we’ve already got a […]
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Win Tickets to the Stumptown Comics Fest
Star St. Germain The Stumptown Comics festival is this weekend—I’ve got an article about it in the paper this week, but the gist is that the festival has done some great stuff over the years, and that there are some organizational and institutional issues that need to be addressed moving forward. I came close to […]
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First Trailer for Thor 2: Asgardian Boogaloo
Riding the trend of “Well, people liked those Dark Knight movies, so they must like their movies tonally dark and literally dark and also with the word ‘dark’ somewhere in the title” (also see Star Trek Into Darkness), Thor: The Dark World put out its first trailer this morning, and the movie—directed by Sopranos/Mad Men/Game […]
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Go See Gilbert Hernandez on Sunday!
Don’t sleep on this chance to see amazing comic book creator Gilbert Hernandez! He’s reading from his new all-ages comic book Marble Season (here’s my article about it). Here’s a short Q&A that I didn’t cover in my piece—mostly about the fantastic, epic Palomar stories from Love and Rockets. Reading at Powell’s City of Books, […]
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Weird, a Superman Trailer That’s Actually Something Resembling Super
The buzz around Hollywood—hey, there’s a phrase it’s impossible not to feel like a douchebag typing—is that Man of Steel is good. Like, really good. Like, Warner Bros. reportedly thinks its going to be a massive, huge, maybe-even-a-bigger-hit-than-Dark Knight hit. Which is weird, because none of the film’s trailers so far have reflected that. At […]
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Apple Bans Comic Book That Features Gay Sex Scenes
Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples’s science fantasy comic Saga is the best ongoing comic book series in the business right now. The first trade paperback, which you really should be reading, is selling like crazy. Readers are jumping on board all the time. And Apple refuses to release tomorrow’s Saga issue number 12 on […]
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Val Kilmer Is Back! As Batman!
Nothing would make me happier to report than Warner Bros. deciding to reboot Christopher Nolan’s doom-and-gloom Batman series by recasting Val Kilmer in the part—preferably due to some sort of time-travel plot that would let Kilmer replace Batman’s secret identity of “Bruce Wayne” with, say, “Mark Motherfucking Twain.” But alas, that’s not the case. (THANKS […]