Neal Adams: The future is now for motion comics

GUEST ESSAY

Who is the greatest living comic-book artist? Neal Adams gets my vote. His work for DC Comics in the 1960s and '70s still stands as a towering achievement, and he drew the perfect Bruce Wayne, the definitive Green Lantern and the most memorable Green Arrow. Adams remains a dynamic figure in the world of illustration (check out Adams' website if you haven't already), and his new passion is for motion comics, as he writes in this guest essay for Hero Complex.  -- Geoff Boucher

New York, Union Square, 14th street, October 28th. It's not every day that a new medium is invented or created and usually it happens by accident, against the tide and is roundly ignored and criticized by the majority of the population.

You want to put sound with movies? Talkies?! A flash-in-the-pan! Comic books?  That's not a medium, is it? They're written? And drawn? I thought they just sort of ... appeared.

And now the latest...motion comics? Isn't it enough that HALF of our movies are based on (heh) comic books, overnight, it seems?  No? There are going to be motion comics?  And what is that, a moving comic book?  Yep! But isn't that ... animation?

Actually NO. Animation, as it is defined today, is hundreds of thousands of animation cells drawn by a studio of animation artists who adapt ONE creator's work to a simplified version -- a version that has as few actual lines as possible. Done well, it can be brilliant -- BUT, it can never be the original artist's work. Until now. Which brings us to the aforementioned Oct. 28th.

On that day the first "true" motion comic, the first issue of Marvel's "Astonishing X-Men," will be presented in a world premiere at 14th Street-Union Square as part of MarvelFest NYC 2009. It will be outdoors and projected -- yes, I did just say "projected" -- on the side of the massively large, now closed, Virgin Megastore.

Ladieeze and Gentlemen, you will actually see the drawings of artist John Cassaday come to life and move. You will hear the words of the writer Joss Whedon (of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Dollhouse" fame) spoken by John Cassaday's drawings. (Well, OK, it's actors doing the actual voices coming from the drawings, but this is exciting stuff.) Also, to add to the excitement, there is a signing at the near-legendary Forbidden Planet comic book store as well as a Marvel-Disney costume contest.

It's a comic book come to life and fully drawn by your favorite artist and written by your favorite writer. "Impossible,"  you logically say. "No one artist could do all that work!"  And, you'd be absolutely RIGHT. But, this is the Age of Computers and, more importantly, the Age of Brilliant Computer Operators. The BEST of these are at my studio, Continuity, and they manipulated the work YOU will see (or miss) on the 28th. (If you do miss it, you can purchase the "Astonishing X-Men" series via iTunes beginning that same day.)

Properly cajoled and manipulated, computers can do nearly anything. For us at Continuity, computers have taken John's drawings and made them talk, run, jump, punch and take a massive cosmic ray blast right in the labonza! As a result? A never-seen-before medium.

Welllll, that's not true, of course. Continuity has been doing this sort of revolutionary animation for years,  Except yours truly is a dyed-in-the-wool comic book artist (and comic book writer, too).  Who better to debut this new form? All this comes together as Walt Disney Co. is completing its $4 billion purchase of Marvel Entertainment. Did Disney buy Marvel in time to tap into the most incredible boom time in the comic book business, and will motion comics contribute to the Disney bonanza? A prediction: "Motion comics" will be a household name a year from today.

-- Neal Adams

RECENT AND RELATE

Neal Adams on "Dark Knight" and the comics industry

Spider-Woman get Marvel moving in motion comics

"Brave & Bold," a look back at classic Neal Adams

"Tales of the Black Freighter" sets sail

"Next Door Neighbor" webcomics peek past curtains

Act-I-Vate is making dynamic webcomics

Webcomic to check out: "Fear My Dear"  

Carnival Comics scares up downloadable apps 

Photo: Neal Adams in 2007. Credit: Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times

Marvel's first motion comic stars Spider-Woman

Here's the trailer for "Spider-Woman, Agent of S.W.O.R.D." --  the first motion comic from Marvel, which is dipping a toe into the medium that DC has been pursuing more aggressively to date. This five-part story is by writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Alex Maleev and goes on sale today at iTunes. The episodes cost 99 cents for the first two weeks of release then jump to $1.25.

It's interesting to consider the motion-comics marketplace. The medium hasn't really captured the imagination of fans yet, and it's not clear what the upside is. The funny thing for me is that, at first, motion comics and their static image and use of screen-slide approach reminded me of the 1960s' Marvel television cartoons -- the same cartoons that I simultaneously loved and mocked as a kid because they were far less "animated" than other animation. Clearly, though, the medium is advancing, and the work is becoming more eye-catching...  

-- Geoff Boucher 

RECENT AND RELATED 

"Tales of the Black Freighter" sets sail

"Next Door Neighbor" webcomics peek past curtains

Act-I-Vate is making dynamic webcomics

Webcomic to check out: "Fear My Dear"  

Carnival Comics scares up downloadable apps

FEARNet fans hoping to hold on to chills

Carnival Comics scares up downloadable apps

Hero Complex stalwart Jevon Phillips keeps an eye on comics pushing into new tech mediums, and today he has a report on a Blackberry-based funny book...  

Everyone is living on their cellphones nowadays with games, GPS directions, Cylon detectors and more, so why shouldn't comics readers be able to take advantage? Carnival Comics is making it possible.

Of course, if you have a phone that gives you the full Internet, you can read digital comics and graphic novels like "Heroes" or the ones from Marvel. Others have launched comic book apps, like Dark Horse's "Terminator", but Carnival went the extra step of making the downloadable tidbits available on the BlackBerry Storm. Two books, Carnival of Souls and Funhouse of Horrors, are being offered.

Clowns, as Stephen King and everyone else knows, are fairly terrifying. Carnival of Souls has three books split into 12 chapters, a breakdown that keeps download time shorter. The first three chapters are free, while the fourth is $2.99. Or as they say in the press release, "If you want to see how it all goes down, you've got to throw some coin to the clown!" The Funhouse of Horrors book was just recently made available for download, but was published last Halloween and sold out.

Guess I'll do what he says.

-- Jevon Phillips

Photos: Carnival Comics

Related:

- FEARnet fans hope to scare up support

- Leonard Nimoy: 'Star Trek' fans can be scary

- 'Joker' creator Jerry Robinson reflects on Gotham and the golden age

- Forrest J. Ackerman's scary treasures part of Hollywood auction

- Wes Craven, Rob Zombie and Jason Voorhees: 2009 Horror Film Preview

Everyday Hero, your fanboy news roundup

Welcome to the weekend edition of Everyday Hero, which brings you hand-picked headlines from across the fanboy universe. Before we get to the links, a quick recommendation: Take a look at my favorite Web comic of the moment, "Fear My Dear" by Dean Haspiel over at Act-I-Vate. It's a nasty fever dream of a story and well worth checking out, especially if you enjoyed his art on "The Alcoholic" (see the bottom link below) or "The Quitter".

Now, on with the news...      

Astral projection: Neil Gaiman wants to make a Dr. Strange movie with Guillermo del Toro, but they won't be making magic anytime soon. "We’d love to do it together. The problem is, Guillermo’s off doing ‘The Hobbit’, and that’s going to be three, four years in New Zealand for him." [Splash Page, MTV]

On the set of "The Road": There are some photos posted online showing the "cannibal house" from the upcoming film adaptation of the harrowing Cormac McCarthy novel. The photos came from Jeremy Ambler, an actor in the film, and show him posing with star Viggo Mortensen. [Quiet Earth]   

Kind of blue: A behind-the-scenes video on the creation of Dr. Manhattan for Zack Snyder's upcoming "Watchmen" film. [Sci Fi Wire]

A new book called "The Age of TV Heroes" hits shelves in November with a history of costumed crusaders on the small screen and interviews with the actors who played them. George Khoury, who co-wrote the book, is a bigger geek than you. Want proof? "The only time that I really got starstruck was when we interviewed Danny Seagren, the actor who played Spider-Man in 'The Electric Company.'" [Newsarama]

Michael Miller graphic novel review: "The Alcoholic" by Jonathan Ames and Dean Haspiel  comes "laced with the brittle, soul-scraped-out feeling of a hangover" [Time Out New York] ... and you already know how the Hero Complex feels about this one.

-- Geoff Boucher

Image from "Fear My Dear" courtesy of Act-I-Vate.

'A.D.' and Hurricane Katrina: After the flood

One of the most compelling Web comics to date is Josh Neufeld's sobering documentary effort "A.D." at SMITH Magazine. If you haven't had a chance to check it out, now is the time. The final chapter of the epic has been posted and, not surprisingly, it's a thoughtful, candid and gripping finale to many months of labor by Neufeld.   

I talked to Neufeld last year about the project. Here's an excerpt from that article:

The pen-and-ink drawings are clear, simple and so static in their muted colors that they suggest an airless calm — but the real-life events in those drawings pulse with tension, confusion and fear.

“It’s an account of Hurricane Katrina by a small group of survivors,” artist Josh Neufeld said by phone recently, “but really, at its heart, it’s a story of loss and how we deal with loss.”

On Sunday, New York artist Neufeld posted online the sixth chapter of “A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge,” an illustrated work of nonfiction storytelling that springs from the tradition of comic books but, like so many similar projects these days, is poorly served by the clunky term.

Referring to “A.D” or one of Joe Sacco’s illustrated memoirs as a comic book is a bit like calling “Schindler’s List” a talkie.

“A.D.” tells the tale of the worst natural disaster in U.S. history through the experiences of six people: Denise, a poet and sixth-generation New Orleanian; Hamid, an Iranian-born father of two who owns an uptown market; Kevin, a high school student and the son of a pastor; a young couple, Leo, who works with developmentally disabled youngsters, and Michelle, a gymnastics instructor; and Dr. Brobson Lutz, a man about town and former health department official.

One person who is not in the story is the man holding the pen. Neufeld, 40, perhaps best known to comics fans as a frequent collaborator with Harvey Pekar on “American Splendor,” is the unseen journalist at work in “A.D.” But that doesn’t mean he didn’t witness the destruction of Katrina firsthand.

Neufeld was overwhelmed as he watched the media coverage of the hurricane and the destruction in its wake from his home in New York. After a few days, he had to act. He became a Red Cross volunteer and was shuttled down to the ravaged Mississippi coastal communities of Biloxi and Gulfport.

You can read the rest of that article right here. "A.D." will be collected in a printed graphic novel scheduled for release next summer, probably in August, right around the grim fourth anniversary of Katrina's devastation. I encourage you, though, to check it out now in its Internet incarnation; it's really a turning point for the medium of Web comics and it also has audio files posted that add different dimensions to the documentarian effort.

-- Geoff Boucher

BONUS: See more artwork and other reviews of "A.D." after the jump.

ACT-I-VATE is making dynamic webcomics

T.J. Kosinski, one of our talented interns this summer here at The Times, wandered around Comic-Con International a few weeks ago and interviewed some of his favorite comics creators. Here is his third guest post.

Like the undergound comix scene in those roiling days of the 1960s, the burgeoning online comics sector is a wide-open frontier now making up its own rules and picking its leading voices. I'd say one of the strongest players at the moment is Act-I-Vate, the webcomics collective with about 30 creators on its roster. It's both smart showcase and wild laboratory, providing consistently updated (and thoroughly interesting) comics to readers across the Web for free.

Two of the member creators are Joe Infurnari and Molly Crabapple.  Infurnari is a writer and artist who values the benefits of creating comics strictly for the Web: “Going digital is great to get yourself to a wide audience. If I write something, [someone] can place a link to it on MySpace and it gets 60,000 hits. That sort of exposure can’t be done by handing out postcards or just talking to people.”

Infurnari is working on his latest webcomic, "The Transmigration of ULTRA-Lad!" It's a reverse-Shazam sort of story in which an old man transforms into a teenage superhero. The aesthetic of the webcomic is great. The story is told on "pages" that have the browning, battered edges of a vintage comic book (one that was not stored in a Mylar bag) and the art is a shadowy valentine to super-hero artists such as Mac Raboy and Wally Wood. Infurnari also has The Process, which had been nominated for an Eisner Award.
One interesting dimension of Infurnari’s The Process is how tailored it feels to the Web. The website that hosts the comic is meticulous; even the table of contents is intricate. Infurnari took this approach seeking “an interactive experience.” He explained that “with the Web, I can control how the audience absorbs material. The whole thing is an immersive design. My goal is to teleport the viewer into the world of the story.”

Readers should check out The Process, not only for the tremendously detailed artwork, but for Infurnari’s surreal narrative. It’s self-described as “a journey and exploration through a personal ‘pleroma,’ an imaginary landscape populated by strange, wondrous creatures and archetypal characters." The Eisner nomination for Best Digital Comic speaks to the ability of Infurnari to relay his strange inner visions to a wide audience.

Zuda Comics competition

Zuda Comics (DC Comics' webcomics division) holds a competition monthly where anyone can submit an eight-screen sample. Every month, 10 of these Web comics are picked and put up for a community vote. The monthly vote winners and as many as six "instant winners" each get a year's contract to produce webcomics for Zuda. Pretty fantastic, yes?

Since its official launch last October, Zuda Comics has developed a strong and entertaining online community that provides both creators and comic book fans a place to be themselves and to judge others (welcome to the Internet). The best and also worst part about this competition is most of these strips feel like teasers-- I am dying to know more and while not all of these stories will thrive on, I can at least hope one will. This post is meant to do two things: Get some of you to sign up and be part of the Zuda community and to draw attention to my favorite submission this month, Shock Effect.

Shock Effect is about growing up during an alien invasion. We join Alice and her mom as they await a rescue that could lead to the truth behind the invasion itself. Each panel makes me want to make out with my monitor. That sounded strange, didn't it? Yeah, well, I do, as strange and awkward as it may be. Competitor John Lang's artwork is truly gorgeous. Beautiful, clean and all around solid. Alongside its beauty is its equally enchanting writer, competitor Ian Daffern, whose storytelling brings each panel to life flawlessly. I'm dying to know what happens next and yes, I hope it's picked for truly selfish reasons. 

It takes fewer than 60 seconds to sign up for Zuda and to be a part of monthly Web comics history. Do it for yourself or hey, do it for me. Vote for your favorite Web comic today (or you know, my favorite Web comic) and let's see who wins this month's online publishing contract worth more than $10,000.

I also recommend checking out all 10 brilliant Zuda submissions this month:

Harvest War --The survivors of a great nation seek the pieces of the Harvest Stone, which grants control over the natural elements. A source of their power, it cannot fall into the wrong hands of the Wildermen.

Vic Boone -- In a world where the science fiction of yesterday is today's science fact, being a private eye can be dangerous. But being a former motorcycle daredevil? That can be handy.   ** second fav. ;)

To The Red Country -- A stranger from the north walks the Great Divide, a trip that will certainly poison him to death, in order to enter the heart of the Red Country.   

Furiku Buredu --In a new era of blood-soaked peace, warriors are left to their traumas and samurais to wander on roads too narrow for their purpose.

Gulch --We pray for a flame to spread across our city and purify the land. Nothing pure will come of it. There will be ash. We will wade knee deep in the mess and no one will dare call it victory. We fight.

Junk -- After a strange compulsion causes the residents of an isolated town to merge with the objects they treasure most, a handful of people unaffected must find a way to escape before they succumb to Junk.

Rhandom Escape -- Rhandom is the only human in a galaxy of aliens. He has been accused of destroying a moon and is on a desperate run from the law. The only way to clear his name is to learn of a secret power.      

The Adventures of Rocki Gibraltar -- Rocki Gibraltar is a spunky girl who possesses one desire, to become a superhero on the same level as the other costumed heroes of Centennial City. Unfortunately, she has no special powers.

The Stuffed Animal Sagas -- A monster, a little girl in trouble and a teddy bear who shows it's not the size of the hero in the fight but the size of the fight in the hero.

Shock Effect -- It's tough growing up during an alien invasion. Alice and her mom have been waiting for a rescue. When it arrives, they embark on a journey that could expose the invasion's truth.

-- Christie St. Martin of Funny Pages 2.0

Images courtesy of Zuda Comics

I also recommend checking out all 10 brilliant Zuda submissions this month:

Harvest War --The survivors of a great nation seek the pieces of the Harvest Stone, which grants control over the natural elements. A source of their power, it cannot fall into the wrong hands of the Wildermen.

Vic Boone -- In a world where the science fiction of yesterday is today's science fact, being a private eye can be dangerous. But being a former motorcycle daredevil? That can be handy.   ** second fav. ;)

To The Red Country -- A stranger from the north walks the Great Divide, a trip that will certainly poison him to death, in order to enter the heart of the Red Country.   

Furiku Buredu --In a new era of blood-soaked peace, warriors are left to their traumas and samurais to wander on roads too narrow for their purpose.

Gulch --We pray for a flame to spread across our city and purify the land. Nothing pure will come of it. There will be ash. We will wade knee deep in the mess and no one will dare call it victory. We fight.

Junk -- After a strange compulsion causes the residents of an isolated town to merge with the objects they treasure most, a handful of people unaffected must find a way to escape before they succumb to Junk.

Rhandom Escape -- Rhandom is the only human in a galaxy of aliens. He has been accused of destroying a moon and is on a desperate run from the law. The only way to clear his name is to learn of a secret power.      

The Adventures of Rocki Gibraltar -- Rocki Gibraltar is a spunky girl who possesses one desire, to become a superhero on the same level as the other costumed heroes of Centennial City. Unfortunately, she has no special powers.

The Stuffed Animal Sagas -- A monster, a little girl in trouble and a teddy bear who shows it's not the size of the hero in the fight but the size of the fight in the hero.

Shock Effect -- It's tough growing up during an alien invasion. Alice and her mom have been waiting for a rescue. When it arrives, they embark on a journey that could expose the invasion's truth.

-- Christie St. Martin of Funny Pages 2.0

Images courtesy of Zuda Comics