Evidently, there's been some angst coming from corporate executives that trailers that were shown at Comic-Con of Deadpool and X-Men have surfaced online. That they were supposed to be exclusive for con attendees.

My first reaction to this is: what the hell century are you living in? Almost literally every person at Comic-Con has a video camera with an internet connection in their pocket. Not only is every piece of footage going to be captured, but it's going to be disseminated online almost immediately, if not in real time. Even if you asked every person entering Hall H to sign some kind of non-disclosure agreement (which is not at all practical) at least one of the 6000 people in that room is going to break said agreement. And there's almost no way you could enforce any sort of punishment. Even if you could track the leaked footage to the indivdual before the panel ended, there's no way you could single them out in that crowd before the panel was done, and probably no way to catch them on the convention floor afterwards. Which means that the only punishment you could really inflict would be, at most, to somehow cancel their badge. But that would only work IF there were a substantial technological upgrade to the badges themselves and, even then, it would be a completely useless punishment for the last day of the show, where no one is coming back anyway.

Which is to say that every person going into any convention HAS to go in with the assumption that everything that happens at the show WILL be posted online.

And it will spread around online faster than it will at the convention itself! Do you recall that pen-stabbing incident from a few years ago? That happened in Hall H. Those of us sitting at home were seeing Tweets and photos about the incident from the people sitting right there in real time. The people at the back of the room, because they were looking for the panel to start and not staring at their phones, did not know what was going on. People on the other side of the planet were more knowledgeable about the events going on in Hall H than most of the people actually sitting in Hall H!

This is the 21st century.

It used to be that conventions were a gathering place where publishers could make major announcements. And what happened was that the handful of media outlets there would report on things, and we would all look to Comic Book Resources or The Beat to read up on all the news. But since everybody is reporting the news now via social media (including the publishers themselves!) the convention as a venue for making major announcements is diminished.

And with the convention's value in this regard diminished, there's no need for it to be a deadline to have promotional material completed. That's great if you want to show you awesome new trailer (for a movie, or a new graphic novel, or whatever) to fans at a convention, but if it's not ready to go by convention, then you shouldn't show your half-completed thing. Wait until it's done to a level you're satisfied with and THEN release it. Tell the fans, "Yeah, we wanted to have it ready for San Diego, but we need three more weeks to get it right." Not only to you not have to deal with crappy bootleg cell phone videos of your not-quite-ready material, but you're also not competing with every other thing that's coming from the same convention!

Look, I get that you want to give the people at the convention itself a positive and personal experience and, just by virtue of being at the event, are already primed to respond very positively to help generate the buzz you want your thing to have. But having to go back after the fact and issue take-down notices, and try to put a positive spin on why you're trying to put a lid on a project that's already been openly discussed online just makes you look bad and kills whatever buzz you were trying to generate in the first place.

The reason fans go to conventions is for the first-hand experience. Trying to place embargos on what they see/hear is not only a fool's game, but one that you will inevitably lose. You can try to play by 20th century rules if you like, but it's not going to work and not going to make you look good.

I haven't read Strange Fruit #1 and the reviews I've read have all been less than flattering. Not so much that it's poorly written or drawn, just that the very concept is flawed. I was in a discussion about it with writer David Gallaher and former DC editor Kwanza Johnson that stemmed from a reading of J.A. Micheline's review here. Johnson put together a string of terribly on-point and elegant Tweets on the subject that, with his permission, I'm copying here, rather than try to crudely craft the same points myself.

First I haven’t read Strange Fruit yet, but it concerned me because of the background of the creative team. I’m not biased to non-Black authors writing stories about Black experiences, but Strange Fruit makes me wary. J. A. Micheline has an axe to grind here, but makes similar points about Strange Fruit written elsewhere. It’s a contention similar to mine in these matters which is; perspective. Strange Fruit seems to lack it. Perspective can be an elusive thing for a writer, and often requires thorough research to mitigate. That research can help develop strong enough empathy to write from a knowledgeable perspective. From what’s quoted, Strange Fruit seems to cadge from elderly White people's stories of the segregated US South. It also seems to cadge from the current trend of race and gender diversity in comics publisher's IP catalogs. Yet we know, the creative and editorial pool in comics lacks gender and race diversity – hobbling perspective. In superhero comics, we can pretend no one would freak out that Sam Wilson is Captain America but in the real world today, people still call the sitting US President a "Muslim." Strange Fruit seems to be commodifying race issues sans a balanced perspective on the era of US history. I make that claim boldly, as I know @DavidGallaher to be a writer who does thorough research for his stories. Point being I would trust @DavidGallaher to do his homework. I trust him to know he might not get perspectives right without it. There’s hubris is telling as story of this era where there are contrast perspectives to relay. But Strange Fruit also highlights another problem in comics... publishers have to cadge off notable creatives to sell, and as previously stated the industry lacks diversity. So comics are mired in a sort of austerity that leads to these misguided efforts. I believe there is a sincerity in creating Strange Fruit, but also a jarring obliviousness. A lot of good stories about Black experiences have been told by White writers, in part due to lack of opportunity. We need more diversity everywhere, but that requires actual diversity more than a fictional superteam lineup.

Of course, you're not reading this because you've all got your attention focused on San Diego right now, but on the off chance that see this...

• The Huffington Post has a short human interest story about two brothers who've been exchanging the same birthday card for over four decades. I saw the interior first and immediately recognized the familiar handwriting style of the printed message, hence my linking to it here.
• PBS spent some time with Jack Urbont -- who wrote the theme songs to the original Marvel Super Heroes cartoons as well as the M.M.M.S. march -- who looks back on all of them.

Today's post is a call out to the collective hive mind to see if anyone can help me track down a book/artist from my youth. I've only seen the one book by this artist, and I'm more interested to see what else he (I think?) did than just getting the book to relive any childhood nostalgia.

The book in question was a wordless children's book, probably from the mid-to-late 1970s. It didn't have a story at all; it was just a series of double-page spreads, each featuring a scene of chaos/mayhem. I recall one was a ship-to-ship pirate battle, another was a horde of army ants rolling over a mass exodus of jungle inhabitants (animals, explorers, and some unfortunately stereotyped natives), yet another was some kind of outer space scene. I think there maybe have an Eygtian-themed spread as well. In each spread, there was very much a sense of disorder overall, but it seemed to unfold in front of you as you absorbed everything that was drawn on the page. There were maybe 12-15 scenes all told. The artwork was cartoony, and it reminded me a little of Sergio Aragonés both in terms of the style of illustration as well as the level of detail/complexity. (Though it was definitely not him.) You could study each spread for ages and keep finding little jokes and gags throughout.

The book was wordless, as I said, and the artist had an Italian-sounding name to my recollection. (Though my knowledge of Europe was pretty limited as a child, so it might have been Greek or French or something.) I recall having the impression that the book was originally published in Europe, and just ported over to the U.S. since it didn't have to be translated. The cover was mostly black with a portion of one of the interior illustrations inset under the title.

For the life of me, I can't recall the name of the book or the artist, and the copy of the book I had as a kid has long-since vanished. The book in question probably would not be considered comics by many people, but there was so much going on in the single illustration that it became a sort of narrative unto itself. It was both a snapshot of a chaotic scene, but also a set of small, sometimes sequential, narratives. As I said, I'd be interested to see this artist's work and study it with more of an eye towards comics (rather than the sheer entertainment value I placed on it as a child) so I'd welcome any ideas anyone has on who this might be based on my absurdly vague description.

Last week, I visited a comic shop that I don't normally go to. It's just out of the way enough that it's a tad inconvenient for me, but I happened to be out that direction anyway. It's a decent shop, though; I've visited it more than a few times before.

This day happened to be a Wednesday, new comics day. It was the busiest I've seen this particular shop outside of Free Comic Book Day. The other customers were all regulars, judging by the casualness of the ongoing discussion. Which was impossible not to hear.

I was in the shop for maybe 20 minutes. I came in, looked through the new releases, checked my phone for a list of anything I was looking for, rifled through the back issue bins a bit, browsed the trade paperback and hardcover bookshelves, picked up some bags and boards, and headed up to the counter to check out. The conversation was going on in the background the whole time.

Well, I say "background" but it was really much more than that. The volume these people were talking -- one guy in particular -- struck me as obnoxiously loud. It was the kind of volume you would have to use if you were at a party trying to talk over the music. Except there wasn't any music. Captain America: Winter Soldier was playing on a TV near the register. It wasn't muted, but the volume was so low that I could barely hear the dialogue from the movie even when I was standing right under the TV.

The actual conversation itself wasn't especially offensive. There was one joke made about 9/11, but when no one laughed the person asked if it was still too soon these twelve years later. Which everyone else siezed upon to mock him for his lack of basic math skills, and then went on to explain that it wasn't funny in exactly the same way that jokes about the Holocaust aren't funny. But there was nothing I heard that might be construed as sexist or racist or homophobic or anything. Even so, I was still pretty uncomfortable.

There was nothing expressly said that really bothered me. (The 9/11 joke was a little off-putting and struck me as in poor taste, but it was pretty quickly corrected by others.) But the general boorishness of the customers still felt kind of oppressive. Not in a "I don't feel like I'm part of this club" kind of way, but in "Wow, this one guy's presence is so loud and overbearing that I just don't want to be here" way. He wasn't doing anything wrong per se, just going out of his way to make himself the center of attention.

So what I'm wondering is: how much responsibility does the manager/owner have here for one of the customers being disruptively loud? I mean, ultimately, it's the owner's store and he (in this case, it's a "he") is the going to set the tone for the store. But he doesn't have direct control over every single customer who might walk in. I mean, if he wants things loud, that's certainly his perogative and he could simply crank up the volume of whatever music he wants to pipe in there like you might do at an Applebee's or Chile's. At the same time, if you'd prefer things at a more typical volume, what're the pros/cons of trying to curb a regular customer who is (at least, it seemed to me) naturally and obnoxiously loud? You don't want him to alienate other cusomters, but you probably don't want to alienate him either. Particularly since some people (the other customers I observed at the shop) didn't seem to mind and, in fact, tended to match his volume themselves.

I don't know. As I said, it's not a shop I hit super-regularly and I've never had expressly bad experiences there, but I'm a little more inclined to give it a pass the next time I'm in the area.

Back in 1947, Orrin Evans published a single issue of All-Negro Comics. It was the first comic book whose creators were all African-American. With a cover price of 15¢ (a full nickel more expensive than everything else available at that time) and contents that featured Black characters, it's little wonder why it didn't sell well enough to warrant a second issue, despite promises of one in the comic itself.

Like nearly all comics of that time, this issue had a variety of features in it. There was action/adventure, long-form comedy, single panel gags, a prose piece... The locales shown ranged from the inner city to the "African Gold Coast" to a rural American farm to an idyllic Greek-style garden. The issue had a little bit of everything.

Only the two adventures stories clearly identify the creators, John Terrell and George J. Evans, Jr. The rest of the pieces are either anonymous or signed with a single, ambiguous name. Of all the creators in the book, Terrell is clearly the one with the most talent. While the illustrations in all the stories are good, his Ace Harlem story is easily the most cohesive and has the strongest plot. It's obvious why it was chosen as the lead feature.

The book seems to be aimed squarely at African-Americans. While that might seem obvious based on the stories, there seems to be no attempt to even consider that anyone else might be interested. Evans expressly notes in the introduction that the Lion Man character, for example, is a deliberate attempt to "give American Negroes a reflection of their natural spirit of adventure and a finer appreciation of their African heritage." And I think that's why it's worth taking a look at.

The book is notable, of course, for the first to be completely created by African-Americans. But in also depicting almost exclusively Black people for an audience of exclusively Black people, it provides something of an insight into what they were wrestling with. That the only two white characters to appear are shown as violent villains trying to impose their will on African land suggests that even though Blacks felt collectively isolated in America (there are no white people shown anywhere else) there were still white men out there trying to impose their rule over Blacks in even the farthest reaches of the globe. That we see primary characters ranging from hard-boiled detectives to African tribesmen to wandering minstrels suggests that African-Americans were still wrestling with who they were now, and how they should fit in to contemporary culture. How far back to their roots should they be looking, or should they instead embrace the cities they now found themselves in? The Civil Rights Movement was still almost a decade off, and there was still seemingly a question of how Blacks should fit in and what role(s) they should play in society.

The original printing is pretty rare, but since it's fallen into public domain, Kari Therrian has an excellent reproduction available. The book itself somewhat awkwardly printed on 8½ x 11 paper, allowing a fair amount of extra space on all sides of the art (hence the black border on the cover) but the scans of the original comic are excellent and the printing is pretty good quality. You're not likely to find an original All-Negro Comics but Therrian's reprint is well-worth checking out.

• Carrie Jung looks at a rise in Native American comic book creators and characters, although it's primarily focused on Canada.
• Tom Heintjes attended the 2015 Reuben Awards a couple weeks ago and just posted scads of photos. Mike Peters is always fun in a picture.
• Sohail Rahman files this report from Seoul, South Korea that webcomics are apprarently a thing. (Seriously, I double-checked the date on it because it seemed like a report that should have been filed 10-15 years ago.)
• Lastly, Convo profiles recent Center for Cartoon Studies graduate, Carlisle Robinson, in their Beyoutiful series.