It’s available in paperback here:

Horror, Humor, and Heroes Vol. 3: New Faces of Science Fiction [paperback]

And on kindle here:

Horror, Humor, and Heroes Vol. 3: New Faces of Science Fiction [kindle]

The kindle edition is only $2.99, which is a pretty good deal for 24  stories.  Please note, I’m not making a dime off the sales of the anthology, I just want as many people that might want to read it to know about it.

We will return to our (not) regularly scheduled comics rambling, ranting, and spoofing in the next post.

Part of the cast was on hand at the Disney Expo thingy this weekend, where they showed four minutes of footage from the upcoming Avengers movie. I haven’t been able to find a video of it online, but here is a good description of it, as well as an article about the event.

I’m excited for the movie, mainly because it’s being written and directed by Joss Whedon. I don’t think it’s a secret that I love just about everything he’s done and it feels like there hasn’t been much output from other than a few issues of Buffy season eight, since Dollhouse went off the air. That would be because he’s been busy prepping a major tentpole motion picture. I think it has the potential to be fantastic. In his one previous big screen work Serenity, he delivered exciting action sequences that furthered the plot,while not losing sight of the characters, while also giving them strong emotional arcs and some really fun dialog. That is exactly what I want out of the Avengers.

I havent seen any of the movies introducing the individual team members, except the first Iron Man. Which I quite enjoyed. I think it’s a shame that the core of the team has been established and cast already, I would have liked some Whedon regulars in the cast. As it is the closest we’ve got to a Whedon connection is Cobie Smulders, whose How I Met Your Mother castmate Neil Patrick Harris starred in Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog. At least as far as we know. Maybe he’ll find places for Nathan Fillion, Amber Benson, James Marsters, Summer Glau, Alyson Hannigan, Adam Baldwin, and Felicia Day. Yeah, that’s a super team I would get behind.

(the poster is most definitely not an official poster, but it the best of the fan made ones I saw.  I could not find an artist to credit it to.  If anyone knows, leave it in the comments and I’ll include it.)

Nicola Scott v. Amy Reeder

Alison Bechdel v. Posy Simmonds

Kate Beaton v. Megan Rose Gedris

Laura Martin v. Christina Strain

They are now on round two:

Kathryn Immonen v. Devin Grayson

Emma Rios v. Sara Pichelli

Marjane Satrapi v. Faith Erin Hicks

Elena “Yamino” Barbarich v. Meredith Gran

Adrienne Roy v. Lynn Varley

I really feel bad, that I only recognized 5 names out of 20. It made me wonder how many female comics creators I could come up with off the top of my head, that haven’t turned up in the tournie yet.

Here is who I could come up with, with out double checking the spelling of their names ( just to see if I know them well enough without having to research):

Lynda Berry (Ernie Pook’s Comeek, 100 Demons)

Jill Thompson (Scary Godmother, Lil’ Endless)

Dianne Dimassa (Hothead Paisan: Homocidal Lesbian Terrorist)

Rene Engstrom (Anders Loves Maria)

Jennifer Camper (Bitchy Bitch)

Jessica Abel (Art Babe, Life Sucks)

Amanda Conner (Power Girl)

Jenny Breadon (the Devil’s Panties)

Amber Benson (Shadowplay, Willow and Tara)

Jane Espenson (Buffy season

Ellen Forney (I Was Seven in Seventy-five)

And a few I’m not certain about:

Pia Guerra (Y: the Last Man)  Not entirely positive that this person is female.  I think so again was avoiding research

the creator or Girls with Slingshots, ( might be a guy, I don’t know)

Alan Moore’s daughter (not sure what her credits are, but I think she has done some comics work).

So with the five I recognized from the tournament, that means there are 16 female comics creators I am aware of, and three others I may need to research.  That seems pretty pathetic, I know I could at the very least double that, if asked to name male creators.  I guess it’s a good thing their is a blog out there highlighting the works of others.

So go out there and vote!

Post Script:  I came across the the tournament, through a link on Yamino’s blog.  She is the writer/artist, of Sister Claire.  If you haven’t read Sister Claire yet, you should, it’s adorable (there is a martial art in it, known as Nun fu)!

Also in my inbox this morning, (or, perhaps in my twitter stream) was a link to Opertoon‘s iPhone/iPod Touch app Ruben & Lullaby, which is a self-described: “digital comic/game (we call it an “opertoon”) that lets you shape the emotions of a quarreling couple with a touch”. I haven’t downloaded this yet, but I will be checking it out sometime in the near future. It looks quite interesting.

Jason points out that, in all those characters, he could only find one same-sex relationship in the whole map, and two same-sex crushes.

Here are three I don’t think have been mentioned on this site yet.

Anders Loves Maria

I love this strip!  It is about a young Swedish couple who are having a baby, and probably shouldn’t be.  Given that Anders can’t stop getting involved with other women, and Maria can’t seem to grow up.  It is wickedly funny and terribly authentic.  The art work some how manages to be simplified, and sophisticated at the same time.  I was really tempted to buy an original page, but unfortunately the I did not get my tax return before the half off sale ended.  It should be mentioned that even though the people are drawn in a very non photo realistic manner, 60% of the strips have included extremely explicit sex, that is probably not safe for work.

Sister Claire

This strip is only a few months old.  It follows the adventures of a very naive young girl who was raised by nuns.  It is drawn in the style of  kwai(cutesy) anime.  Claire  wants nothing more in life than to be the best nun ever, while still getting to indulge in all things sweet and cuddly.  Unfortunately for her a sexy messenger from God disrupts her cloistered existence.  I am totally digging it!

Finally we have Finn and Charlie are Hitched

It is a slice of life styled strip centered around a gay male couple and their circle of friends.  It is not as serialized as the previous two I mentioned, going with the more traditional 3 to 4 panels leading to a gag format.  It is consistently funny and done by local Chicago artist.

You’ve turned the page to the place where panels and popcorn meet. From coverage of comic-inspired flicks to that buzzed-about graphic novel that’s being primed for the big-screen, you’ll find it all here at MTV’s Splash Page. Check throughout the day for breaking news, exclusive chats with Hollywood stars and comic legends, and first looks at the blockbusters of tomorrow.

Thomas Scioli (of Godland fame) did their header and logo and background graphic (pictured above). As you may have noticed, I’ve added the link to our sidebar.

Now, I feel dumb for admitting this, but I’ve have to admit… I don’t know where the Kermit photo I clipped is from. When does Kermit dress up as batman? Was it in Sesame Street? I did some youtube searching, and I can’t seem to find it. Anyone know?

Back when I was looking for this stuff, I discovered the official watchmen movie site hosts a feature/page they call The Gunga Diner, that looks to basically just aggregate all the Watchmen parody stuff it can find. It’s cool, but what I don’t like is that there are a lot of entries that don’t cite their sources. Maybe they just had the stuff emailed to them, but the Watchmen Peanuts sketch they host can easily be found to have originated from Evan “Doc” Shaner’s DeviantArt account. (Looks like it wasn’t a totally original idea, as Jeff Parker did something similar a while back.) Likewise the Lil’ Watchmen comic Gungan Diner hosts can be found (with quite a bit more digging necessary) over at the Silver Rage Archive/TOC.

An image that Gunga Diner doesn’t actually have listed is this awesome Jay Ward’s The Watchmen sketch by Jay Fosgitt, AKA, Four Panel Hero. (Jay Ward created Rocky and Bullwinkle.)

KO Fight Club, who I have linked to before, because it is a board gaming webcomic, has a whole page devoted to how they parody Watchmen (and another page about why).

Here’s a cool illustration of Watchmen Watches.

The Watchmen Movie site also hosts a page that links to a bunch of Watchmen fan films. I haven’t really watched them all yet, so I don’t know if that page is better about sourcing its material.

And finally, if you haven’t seen it already, the Mad Magazine folks made a seven page Watchmen Parody (PDF format) in their signature style. It was apparently distributed at San Diego Comic Con earlier this year.

There’s actually a lot more text inside than there is comic book, but you can see a couple of example pages on flickr: Vote Theft for Idiots: Lesson 1 and Lesson 2.

Completely coincidentally, I have been meaning to post a link to The Pain–When will it end?, which is the site for the (mostly political) cartoons of Tim Kreider. It appears to be updated more or less weekly, and the archives are very definitely worth a look. If I had a complaint though, the images are pretty damn large, and scrolling is not really an option so much as an obligation. Good stuff though.

Bonus link, there are a TON of people’s favorite programmer comics in this thread over at StackOverflow.com. That should keep me busy for a while.

UPDATE: Note that this is the 200th ReadComics.org post! W00-H00!

The first is perhaps the most interesting because there is quite some controversy. Infurious Comics has created an app for the iPhone that allows you to view their comic Murderdrome. They tried to have it added to the iPhone application store (app store), and were denied, because it’s not suitable for all audiences (via Hypergeek). Here’s the video of the comic in action:

But Infurious didn’t let the Apple’s denial (some are calling it censorship!) stop them. They were, after all, developing a comic book application. So now sometime soon they’re releasing a new comic called Eye Candy. You can watch one of the developers demo that comic on youtube or the Infurious Blog. They added some new features to the app itself, including the ability to color the comic pages. They’ve also said they have more comics in development. Oh, and Eye Candy is going to cost $.99 in the app store.

There is another comic book application on the iPhone called ClickWheel that’s trying to be more of a comic book platform rather than just single issue comics. Check out their online demo (which is pretty amusing, but took me a few minutes to realize you could click and drag the comic to get to the later panels). Or you can watch this (not so flattering) demo off youtube:

I’ll probably try both of these out at some point in the near future, and I’ll report back if I find anything else interesting about them.

In case you were wondering where this image came from, Neil has a new book coming out soon called The Graveyard Book. It’s another full length young adult novel, and is about a boy who grows up in a cemetery, raised by ghosts. Click the title for a lengthier description.

Bonus links: Neil answers questions at the Mouse Circus FAQ. The latest issue of ImageTexT, (“a web journal dedicated to furthering comics scholarship in a variety of disciplines and theoretical perspectives”) features “The Comics Works of Neil Gaiman”, which basically means a bunch of scholarly essays about Gaiman’s comic books. I find this sort of academic BS hard to read, but maybe there’s some interesting stuff buried in there.

The funny (and relevant) thing about this is that they’ve created a comic book that explains why and what they’re doing, drawn by none other than Scott McCloud.

It reads like a textbook, or maybe like a complex user manual, but the illustrations are clear and overall it does a good job of explaining some difficult ideas and concepts. It feelt a bit simplistic to me, but I’m a web developer, and these concepts are part of my job. I’m probably not the target audience. Also, I sort of wished there were links at various parts of the comic. I’d have liked to read more about some of the things they’re claiming this browser will do for us. But probably those links aren’t public yet anyway. The beta (for windows first) is supposed to be released sometime today.

UPDATE: Scott McCloud has a page on his website about this project. (Via Blogoscoped, where you can view some additional screenshots of Google Chrome in action.)

I posted a few weeks ago in the forums, and the developer Chris has been really responsive and helpful. He even added some of the features I was asking for, which goes quite a ways toward convincing me that this thing is going to be around and maintained into the future.

You can add the Comic Book application to your facebook profile to show your friends what you’re reading, or just to check out all the cool features I’ve listed above.

UPDATE: I’ve just created a page for ReadComics.org on Facebook. Stop on by and become a fan, why don’t you?

Update: This should be required viewing (I mostly just listened) for anyone wanting to start out and make a webcomic. Some of the names dropped were Scott Pilgrim (not a webcomic, unfortunately), Kate Beaton (interesting, I’ll have to look at this more), jonathan rosenberg (who does Goats which is AWESOME), MC Frontalot, Scott McCloud and Ryan North who does Dinosaur Comics. This was part of the Authors@Google series, and there are hundreds of these videos, including one of David Hajdu (who, as you may recall, wrote Ten Cent Plague).

* Note: Not all stores participate in Free Comic Book Day. Your mileage may vary. Some assembly required. Sometimes, you get what you pay for.

I was curious, so I went wikipedia hunting. Free comic book day started in 2002, and the first one was scheduled for the day after the first Spider Man movie was released. Many free comic book days have coincided with big comic book movie releases. (Iron Man just came out yesterday.)

Linked from wikipedia was this interesting blog post about the real costs of free comics, and who pays for them.

In about half an hour, I’m meeting Jason J, Mike, Jason T, and maybe some other folks for breakfast before we head to The Source for their comics, and the annual sale they have on Free Comic Book Day. Maybe I’ll see you there!

Comics In The Classroom.net Lesson Plans

Teaching with Comics Resource Page (at flummery.com)

Also worth linking (and only slightly off topic), my brother John Grider (aka the stencil artist broken crow) was recently interviewed for walkerart.org, which was then picked up by woostercollective.com.