Tom Russell: November 2006 Archives

Jerry Bails, universally acknowledged as the Father of Comic Book Fandom, passed away on November 23.

http://www.newsfromme.com/archives/2006_11_23.html#012470

As Monitor Duty's Official Marvel Contributor, it occurs to me that I should, perhaps, write something about Marvel Comics. :-)

For decades, there was a weird kind of brand loyalty among comic book fans, and people would get into heated discussions as to which universe was better, Marvel or DC. This reached its apex, I think, with the Marvel vs. DC and Amalgam events during the mid-to-late nineties.

I think the rivalry has died down today; brand loyalty (and, to some extent, character loyalty) has been replaced with Creator Loyalty. I know, for example, that I would never have given Superman and Action Comics a try if I hadn't seen the names of Kurt Busiek and Pete Woods on the cover. And though it's too soon to tell, I think I might enjoy the Johns-Donner-Kubert story arc more than Busiek and Pacheco's over in Superman. (I know: blasphemy!)

The fact is, there's such a diverse number of creators working today that you simply can't dismiss or endorse one universe over another, at least not wholesale. You can't really sit down and say, this is what a DC Comic Book is like, and this is what happens in a Marvel Comic.

It wasn't always this way. So, sit down, children, and let's go back to take a look at the Greatest Comics Ever Created: let's look at the Silver Age and what it meant for both of the Big Two.

Snap!: The Comics Arts Festival is Metro Detroit's only small press show, and it spotlights not only Michiganders, but also indie comics from Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin-- to name a few. The second annual show was held in my hometown of Dearborn, MI, on Saturday, November 4.

We talked to several comic book creators, and from that footage, culled five mini-documentaries. These five can be watched in any order, or by themselves-- they're meant to be independent works, as well as parts of a larger whole.

Also included in this playlist is the three-part interview with William Messner-Loebs, and a short interview with nonfiction comics creator Jim Ottaviani.

Update: it looks like Youtube is only allowing four videos to play from this page, before referring you to youtube's homepage. Which I think is extremely lame. How lame? It's so lame, only Lamey Lamerton can be behind it.

I'll make the individual videos available in the extended entry once I have a chance-- I only put it together as a playlist because I just didn't want to clutter up the front page with video after video after video.

==Tom & Mary Russell

Yesterday, Mary and I attended SNAP!: THE COMIC ARTS FESTIVAL. We brought our camera along to document the only small-press comics expo in Metro-Detroit. We interviewed several creators, and most interviews lasted between two and eight minutes.

Among these creators: William Messner-Loebs (Journey, The Flash, Impulse, Wonder Woman). That interview ran forty minutes, and it wasn't until we got home to look at the footage that we realized that I never asked him any questions that really pertained to SNAP! Instead, as a long-time fan of Mr. Loebs, I asked him about his work in comics, particularly his creator-owned frontier character piece, Journey.

With any project, you're only going to use a small portion of each interview. But I'll be lucky if I can jerry-rig even a whole minute of the forty I spent with Bill Loebs into the SNAP! Documentary Series that I'm producing for youtube (and which will eventually find its way to Monitor Duty).

And so, I've cut together three videos just of Loebs, totalling just over eight minutes.

In this first video, Bill discusses his creator-owned Journey in general terms.

In the second video, Bill delves a little more deeply into Journey, how it came about, and the nature of research in storytelling.

In the final part, Bill gives us some writerly advice about plotting, "educational" stories, and genre expectations. In the example he gives of his three challenges, he's referring to Journey protagonist Wolverine McAlistaire, not the X-Men mutant. :-)

All in all, I found him to be a marvelously accessible and frank person who was very generous with his time, very entertaining, friendly, and engaging. His wife Nadine was similarly personable, and it was a pleasure to meet them both.

==Tom (Mary says hi!)