Here’s the deal. Remember the Typophile Album Cover Meme? This is much like that, requiring you to re-imagine a Marvel Comics cover from the last 70 years as an actual contemporary novel cover. Follow the steps below, and post the results on your own site or forum:
Click this link for a list of Marvel publications from a random month and year at Wikia.com: Random Marvel date*. Choose the 7th cover (if there are fewer than 7, choose the last one).
Search for the first word appearing on the cover that jumps out at you (this may be the title itself) on Flickr. Select the 7th (or last) image (as with the album cover meme, it’s best to select an image with Creative Commons rights released.
Use your favourite image manipulation app to create a new 6×9 image, incorporating the original title (and as much other original text as you like) and the new image.
Share!
Here's mine...
Remember a while back I was asking for any info about an old Batman mural painted on the side of a building in downtown Cleveland in the 1970s? Mom and Dad found it! This photo (or, rather, the photo shown in this photo) was taken by Jim Marcus, "Cleveland's photo hobo", probably sometime in the 1970s in June 1982.
It's clearly not exactly how I remembered, but the last time I saw it I was maybe ten or eleven. We still don't have any information as to who painted it or why, but it is definitive proof that a giant mural of Batman did indeed exist in Cleveland in the 1970s.
Any insights, acknowledgements or anecdotes about it would be appreciated.
This Saturday, the Friends of the Pima County Public Library will be selling about 30,000 comic books, most of which will priced at 50 cents each. Full details can be found here.
There's something interesting there about the source of the donation coming from a comic book shop that had the comics in storage for the past few years. I can't quite succinctly verbalize it at the moment, but consider:
Back issue sales in most retail comic shops has been trending downwards, thanks in part to online sales and auction sites.
The value of back issue comics has been trending downwards, thanks to increased reprint output (in the form of TPB and hardcover collections) from publishers.
The economy, as a whole, is worse off than it was a year ago.
Public library usage has gone up, but library budgets have gone down.
One possible implication of the large-scale donation is that the tax write-off is worth more to the retailer than trying and/or not being able to sell the individual issues.
Feel free to draw your own connections and write your own analysis.
There's some media traction on Burger King's recent sponsorship of Getafe, the football (or "soccer" if you're an egocentric American) team from Spain. Taking advantage of fans' traditional reaction to goals of pulling their shirts over their faces, Burger King has produced shirts in Getafe's team colors, featuring the visage of the King on the inside. Pulling the t-shirt over one's head in the manner typical of goal celebration reveals the King's face to everyone. While many are questioning whether or not this will be a successful marketing move (Getafe, after all, has been floating towards the bottom of the league for the past few years), it's the t-shirt's comic book style instructions that caught my attention... Roughly translated, it reads...
Remove the official Getafe C.F. t-shirt from your Burger King bag.
Wear your t-shirt when you feel like a star.
Shoot, and make a goal.
Prepare to celebrate.
Show everyone that you have the King inside.
In terms of functionality, the text really doesn't help the artwork much. Even though it's not very well drawn, I think the artwork is sufficiently clear that most anyone could figure out what you're supposed to do. How many of you could figure it out before I provided the translation? Goes to show that good illustration skills aren't necessarily required for good storytelling.
Also, I'm left to wonder if the text really is for the people getting the shirts, or was it written so that the marketing agency who created the instructions could charge Burger King more money because they "had" to get their copyrighters and editors to work on it?
Henry Jenkins, who's recently relocated to the University of Southern California, recently posted the syllabus for his fall course entitled "Transmedia Storytelling and Entertainment." While the course seems to focus on the ways licensed/licensable properties can transcend a single media outlet, I find it particularly interesting to note that, of the five texts he cites as being required reading, two of them are comics: Kim Deitch's Alias the Cat, and Kurt Busiek's and Alex Ross' Marvels. It's also worth pointing out that, throughout the syllabus, Jenkins specifically and repeatedly calls out comics as a legitimate and noteworthy extension of any given property.
Thirteen years ago today, we lost comic book writer/editor extraordinaire Mark Gruenwald. Ten years before that, he wrote a Civil War story for Marvel. It was much better than the one that came out a couple years ago. I miss Mark.
Some of my anti-comics correspondents claim that reading a graphic novel is not really "reading" at all. They're right. It's something else again. In the case of "Fahrenheit 451," it's more like a life-changing immersion in ideas, words, echoes, symbols, characters, lines, colors, nightmares -- and finally, daybreak.
