We interview Carly (Obsessive0514 at the Girl-Wonder forums) about her experience at the DC Nation panel, discuss new developments on the state of Steph, Countdown Arena, the new Johnny DC lineup, Supergirl, answer the newest Stupid Question, and recommend our Favorite Books of the Month.
Discuss this podcast here.
Topics of the day for Episode 1 include the Citizen Steel Neutering and our first Stupid Question of the Day: Plastic Man versus Deadpool. See an up-close Citizen Steel crotch comparison.
There are some audio kinks to this episode, due to sound file issues. However, this shouldn’t be a problem with following episodes as I get more used to the finer details and keep better backups. Kimberly had to perform a last-minute save with the second half of the podcast, which I’m very grateful to her for.
If you feel the sound level is too quiet or loud, please leave a comment to let me know.
It can be assumed most people have read one of those media navel-gazing articles in traditional news media on the ‘new media:’ blogs and podcasts. They can be dismissive or supportive, treat the topic as serious or frivolous.
But one distinction I feel they often forget is how blogs and podcasts represent different sections of the new media spectrum.
A blog is, by and large, one person. Each post is a person’s expression and opinion, their filtered perspective on a topic. A blog can be interesting or boring based on the writer’s talent with the written word. Spoken eloquence is immaterial.
A podcast takes multiple people. It takes topics and expresses them with sound. There are laughs, sighs, the changing pitch of the human voice. Where humor has to be translated through text, one can hear everything in a podcast. Confusion of tone is eliminated by the reality of audio. Podcasts take the written expression of opinion and make it tangible.
A podcast is not a blog.
And Four Color Heroines will not be a blog. It will not be like reading Karen, Rachel, or Stephen. There will be several people, each with their own viewpoint and experiences. It will be a combination of specialties. It’s going to be interesting, hopefully funny, definitely enlightening, and maybe a bit rough in the beginning.
But most importantly, it will be different.
But that doesn’t mean that the quality you’ve come to expect from a Girl-Wonder hosted blog won’t be a part of Four Color Heroines.
One of my biggest commitments is to quality interviews that treat topics with the seriousness they may (or may not) deserve. Interviews on Four Color Heroines will not solely be individualized public relations trips to advertise a creator’s next project. Nor will they be fifteen minutes of four people agreeing on a topic. Interviewees will be challenged without being attacked, and given a chance to respond to criticisms they might face. Possibly sensitive topics will not be steered away from.
It’s going to be journalism. The real kind.
So, if you’re interested in these things, feel you’ve got the commitment, put in an application. Try out audio for a change. You may find you like it.
For the Episode 0 of Four Color Heroines, I’ve got a little rant I put together concerning Joe Quesada: Still an Idiot in Public, Only This Time He’s Dismissing Female Fans To Their Faces. The Ian Churcill art that sparks my ire can be found here.
In this episode we discuss webcomics, webcomic demographics, webcomics we like, and answer two stupid questions: ‘How can The Thing have sex safely? Does he ejaculate?’ and ‘What’s your favorite sound effect?’ See Wally Wood’s comic here. This month’s guest is Kel McDonald, writer and artist of Sorcery 101. Unfortunately, due to a technical mishap a large section of our discussion with Kel was lost to the ether of the internet. I’ve attempted to reconstruct as much as I can.
Kel’s recommendations: Bayou, Dark Horse Presents, Dice Box, Family Man, GunnerKrigg Court, Kukuburi, Nobody Scores
Hannah’s recommendations: I Was Kidnapped By Lesbian Pirates From Outer Space, The Tower, The Non-Adventures of Wonderella (which I forgot to mention during the show, but is a witty, topical, and hysterical parody on superhero comics)
Kate’s recommendations: Sugarshock, Penny Arcade
Kim’s recommendations: General Protection Fault, PvP, Planet Karen
In this episode we discuss When Fangirls Attack!, the women in comics linkblog, artists’ depiction of women (link to the page mentioned), the imaginative scope of Green Lanterns, and answer two stupid questions: ‘How many Bat mites does it take to screw in a lightbulb?’ and ‘How did Marvel Comics mercenary Razorfist dress himself, or go to the bathroom?’ This month’s guest is Lisa Fortuner, also known as Ragnell of the Written World, Blog@Newsarama, and When Fangirls Attack!
Look for the continuation of our discussion with Lisa on religion in comics and our favorite holiday specials later this month!
Let us know who you would pay to screw in your lightbulbs.
This (late) month’s episode focuses on the New Avengers Tigra Fight, Rob Liefeld’s thoughts on Alan Moore, and Benel R. Germosen’s Stupid Question: Why don’t superheroes just offer supervillains Hostess fruit pies like they do in the ads? Our guest is Kadorienne, who has presented panels at Anime USA on the Takarazuka Revue and Joho Manga.
Give us your reason why they’ve not yet revived the Hostess ad for a new generation of readers.
In this episode we interview Elizabeth McDonald (Betty on the Girl-Wonder forums) on the beginning of G-W.org, their philosophy, and the future of the organization/site, including the upcoming Art Et Cetera Auction. Images and prices of all the cool stuff Kate and Hannah bought from Dragon*Con can be found here.
*With apologies to Nicole Hollander.
Yes. You can even be a queer feminist who likes, loves, and fucks men, because being a feminist and queer activist is all about fighting for the right to be who you are and love whom you love without apology or shame. On the same premise, you can be a queer feminist geek who spends her queer feminist comics column writing about her very favorite straight guy in the whole world.
Which is what I’m going to do right now. I was going to write about the whole mess with the Buffy PDF, but I’ve already ranted my rants about that, and I’d kind of like to take a break from righteous indignation and write about something that makes me happy. So, today, I’m going to write about Miles.
Miles is going to turn twenty-five on Wednesday. He looks a whole lot like the prayer-card-style illustrations of Jesus, but with darker hair. He’s a radical feminist, a die-hard gamer, and a big damn geek. He’s also indirectly responsible for my career, because he’s the guy who got me into comics.
It’s not so much that Miles got me into comics as that he got me into superheroes. I had grown up reading Tintin and Sylvia (I love my liberal academic parents); by the time I was sixteen, I had worked my way through half of the Vertigo lineup (one of the advantages of being a teenage geek in the nineties was that it was all relatively newI read Sandman before they sold Death shirts at Hot Topic and then got to feel smug when it became a fad). But I was also a pretentious, artsy bitch, and superhero comics were well outside the very narrow scope of my fandom.
Miles had grown up reading his father’s collection of silver-age Marvel: Alpha Flight, X-Men, The Mighty Thor. His mom’s refrigerator was papered with drawings of Cyclops and Iceman. In junior high, we had bonded over Lloyd Alexander and Susan Cooper; early in high school, we had done the awkward-kids-dating thing, which mostly involved holding hands in movies and carefully ignoring my boobs. In the following years, we awkwardly split, became friends again, and eventually tumbled first into bed, and then into another, more nebulous relationship. By our second semester of college, we were living together, and the next summer, he brought his longboxes back from Florida.
Miles got me into superheroes by being into superheroes (people wondering how to get your partners into comicshere’s where you’ll want to take some notes). The comics he lent me weren’t the ones he thought would be most girl-friendly; they were the ones he loved most. I broke my teeth on Walt Simonson’s run of Thor; on The Age of Apocalypse and The Raven Banner and the Sienkewicz era of The New Mutants. We chased down backissues of Excalibur and the Longshot special. And even if superheroes weren’t my first love, Miles’s enthusiasm was contagious. By the end of college, I could recite the Summers/Grey continuity and genealogy and had occasionally been known to yell ‘KRACKADOOM!’ upon completing a particularly sticky term paper.
So, dude, this one’s for you. Because it’s your birthday this week, and because you were okay with putting a picture of Rogue and Gambit’s first kiss on the fronts of our wedding programs and because you are proud to be married to a dykey punk chick and moved cross-country so I could make comics for a living, and most of all because you know better than to fuck with my action figures.
Click here to discuss my love life.
March 5th, 2007
Categories: Uncategorized . Author: Rachel Edidin
I didn’t go to New York Comicon, so I didn’t get to see the panel on ‘Capturing the Female Reader.’ It’s probably just as well that I wasn’t there: it would have been awfully hard to resist making a loud, snarky comment about bear traps (I mean, seriouslycould they have given it a sillier title if they’d tried?).
But I did read the synopsis on Newsarama, and I have to admit that it leaves me a little cold.
According to the Comicon panel, what women want are comics with pretty pictures and sympathetic characters. Stories should focus on character interaction and relationships. We’re more interested in story than in action, and we like stories with male casts because it eliminates the competition (other girls) and allows us to focus on the details of friendships. Wendy Pini observed that ‘Girls don’t just like cotton candy or foo-foo or fluff.’ How insightful.
Yes, it’s nice to see the industry acknowledge female readers. And I agree with many of the points the panelists made. But with all their generalizations about what women and girls read and why, I have to wonder how many of them have bothered to listen to what actual female readers are saying.
Of the panelists, I think that Karen Berger came closest to the point when she noted that most teenage girls ‘read up’that is, they seek out fiction that’s written for older readers. It’s true, and there’s a reason: the stuff written for teen girls is often the worst sort of contentless tripe focused on shopping or fashion, with characters who are scarcely shy of stereotypes.
And that’s where I see one of the biggest holes in the net these companies are casting. They’re relying on the same set of stereotypes that prevented them from focusing on women before.
Here’s my advice on Capturing Female Readers:
Last week, I asked you, my four or five loyal readers, to tell me what you wanted to know. In addition to those of you who wrote to express your doubt that there’s actually more than one queer woman working in comics or your disappointment that I do not, in fact, look just like my forum avatar, several people asked what, exactly, a comics editor does.
I know for a fact that the answer to the first question is ‘Yeah, there is,’ and the discrepancy between myself and my avatar should be pretty obvious, in that my avatar is ‘Girl’ of Cat and Girl (one of my favorite webcomics), and I have a nose (Ha! Take that, Roald Dahl!).
As for the third question, I’ll do my best to answer it here. I would guess that the details of this stuff vary from editor to editor and publisher to publisher, so please don’t make major career decisions based on the information below. I’m going to go into some of these in more detail in weeks to come, but for now, here’s an overview of what comics editors do while the rest of you are earning your money the old-fashioned way:
Editors choose projects.
They don’t choose projects unilaterally, and they don’t choose all of the projects they work on, but editors have a lot of say in what projects publishers pick up. As a rule, the more experience and seniority an editor has, the more influence she will have on whether a book makes it to press.
Editors choose creators.
On ongoing series, editors are often responsible for selecting, soliciting, and hiring the creative team. Again, they rarely act unilaterally here; often, licensors or series creators will have approval rights. But it’s generally up to the editor to assemble a comic’s creative team, and even when licensors and series creators have input, the editors are often the ones who make the final decisions.
Editors maintain continuity.
This is probably a bigger deal at publishers with shared universes, but it’s up to editors to be intimately familiar with the world and continuity of their comics and to make sure that those remain consistent from issue to issue and story to story. Sometimes, this is as prosaic as double-checking dates; sometimes, it’s as abstract as requesting a script rewrite because a character is presented in a way that the editor believes conflicts with a previous portrayal of the character. For licensed comics and comics based on other media, the editors also need to be conversant with the original material.
Editors are also responsible for making sure that creators have all of the visual and factual reference material they need, from backissues of a given series, to photo references, to factual material.
Editors organize and coordinate.
Editors connect and balance creative and practical concerns. They coordinate creation, marketing, production, and design; they’re responsible for generating and maintaining the creative budgets and creative and publication schedules. They track and maintain licensor approvals, supervise creator contracts, and make sure that vouchers are submitted and paid. They create and maintain comp lists, write work orders and indicia, and request reference material. On books with more than one creator, editors are responsible for coordinating and maintaining communication with the creative team.
Editors listen.
It’s the responsibility of an editor to pay close attention to media and fan responses to the comics she edits and to track sales. She gauges public reaction, which in turn influences her editorial decisions. Depending on the publisher for which she works, she may also interact more directly with her audience, via both private correspondence and public forums such as letter columns and online communities.
Editors write.
Most editors have some creative experience, and those who don’t when they begin to edit will likely accumulate creative credits before their careers end. If an editor can’t find a writer for a series, he will often step in and provide fill-in issues or even ongoing scripts himself. Even when they’re not credited as writers, editors can have tremendous impact on story decisions. On a more pragmatic front, they also write credits, indicia, ‘story so far’ blurbs, and solicitation copy.
And finally, editors edit.
When material comes in, from pitches, to scripts, to artwork, the editor is the first one who sees it. She is responsible for evaluating and responding to material: requesting revisions, making corrections, and communicating constantly with creators. Editors fix grammar and tweak syntax; they make sure that the artwork and the script mesh, and that the dialogue fits in each panel. The editor’s desk is often the first point of intersection between word and image.
A bonus fact about editors:
Editors are fans.
The comics industry is not a glamorous place to work. The hours are long, they pay is notoriously low, and outside of the comics community, we don’t have much standing or prestige. Many of the people I work with have advanced degrees; many are skilled writers and artists in their own rights. We work in comics because we love comics; because we know how lucky we are to be part of the process of creating them. Even the most knuckleheaded editorial decisions are usually made with genuinely good intentions.
Of course, that’s no reason not to take us to task when we screw up. We may be fans ourselves, but we know we have to answer to the rest of you, too.
Speaking of taking editors to task, please keep the questions and feedback coming. I’m still finding my footing here, and hearing what you’d like to get out of thiswhat questions you have, what you’d like me to address, and what you think of what you’ve seen so faris a huge help!
February 19th, 2007
Categories: Editing, Questions . Author: Rachel Edidin
