you can make a comic

Remember being a kid and making home made comics. You used white paper, brown paper, loose leafed lined and created!

you folded and stapled them just like the big time publishers and voila!..

nowadays with the internet and photoshop and independent publishers you can have a professional looking comic just like the pros. even from a webcomic

supply a publisher with your comic and they can print them but they need to be print ready..


when we say print ready what do we mean? well they should be in what ever format the publisher wants:    tiff files, pdf files, jpeg etc...

the art should be finished and free of typos and the files should be at least 300 dpi (dots per inch)

most publishers have templates to help guide you but once they do you will have a slick new comic

a few good publishers are: ka-blam digital printing and grekoprinting-comixwellspring

New comic from Harvey Comics

With the success of the movie Precious Harvey Comics has decided to launch a new comic based on the early years of academy award nominee Gabourey Sidibe .......

APRIL FOOLS!!!

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live action green lantern movie

there is a Green Lantern live action movie in the works I think Ryan Reynolds is tapped to play Hal Jordan but this trailer by Jaron Pitts is great. Pitts made a fan made trailer of what the real trailer will probably look like with Nathon Fillion as the star. His trailer actually looks like a good Green Lantern movie if it was on the up and up. The bad part about it is that trailers have become so cliche that they can be easily parodied by anyone. You can go here to see it Green Lantern fan trailer

John Byrne cover homage

One of John Byrne's favorite covers to parody is fantastic four #1
which he has parodied several times

Here he parodies his cover from fantastic four 259 in the DC mini
series Legends

This cover parodies a cover from his x-men run when he was
drawing alpha flight

a parody of a fantastic four cover

here he parodies the vision's first appearance with the new vision
from his run on the west coast avengers

early comic to movie strip

Most people, me included did not know that Friday foster, a blaxplotation 1975-feature film starring the great "Pam Grier" was actually based on a newspaper comic strip. Friday Foster, which debuted on January 18, 1970, was the first mainstream syndicated comic strip to star a black woman.A breakthrough newspaper strip-she was a globe- hopping photographer's assistant-ex-fashion model always getting into trouble....the strip spawned a "comic book" by DELL . The strip was created by writer Jim Lawrence and artist Jorge Longeron, and syndicated by The Chicago Tribune Syndicate.

life imitating art

Back in the 80's John Byrne( a comic book artist) wrote a story about Dr Doom that rings true in the real world. Dr Doom was a despot ruler of his fictional country of Latveria and he ruled with an iron fist. Well he was defeated by the fantastic four and another guy named Zorba and thrown out of the country, well later we find that without doom the country goes to heck. similar to the way Iraq fell apart when Saddam was defeated. It was rumored that Saddam and Osama Bin Laden did not like each other

first black superhero

Marvel comics’ Black Panther is always trumpeted as the first black superhero but I think that distinction goes to someone else. Back in 1947 a comic called All Negro Comics had a character very similar to Black Panther, Lion Man –

This Tarzanesque adventure story begins with this foreword: “American-born, college educated, Lion Man is a young scientist, sent by the United Nations to watch over the fearsome ‘MAGIC MOUNTAIN’ of the African Gold Coast. Within its crater lies the world’s largest deposit of URANIUM – ENOUGH TO MAKE AN ATOM BOMB THAT COULD DESTROY THE WORLD.

Lion Man’s job is to report on the doings of any treacherous nation that might seek to carry away any of the lethal stuff for the purpose of war. Lion Man has been warned against agents of a certain warlike nation who might try to smuggle some of the mountain’s treasure out of Africa. He was invented by Geo. J. Evans Jr and The publisher, writer and “President of All-Negro Comics, Inc.”, Orrin. C. Evans you can read the comic here for free  DIGITAL COMIC MUSEUM

fun with adobe photoshop

Fantastic Four #1 is one of the most parodied covers in comics. I thought I would try to combine the cover with a real street to see what it would look like in real life. In the first picture it is in color the second is in black and white, both done with my limited knowledge of Adobe photoshop.

The joker

The Joker is one of the oldest and well known Batman villain's and maybe most popular. Several actors have portrayed him on the small screen and big screen and now the deceased Ledger takes a stab at it. I think his performance may be remembered as one of the best.

Byrne victim

I am a marvel zombie from way back, I used to collect comics but I stopped some time ago. One of my favorite artists was John Byrne, the dude could draw although his depiction of black people was a little limited it was okay because not many black people showed up in the comics. My only prob with Byrne was his way of putting little sneaky racial stuff in his works.
A while ago in his website he used the word "nigger" in a rather offensive way. I know how can you use it in a non-offensive way. The problem I had was that he compared the use of the N-word as being interchangeable with black, like the two words for the word bubbles in comics that hold the dialogue of the characters. I don’t know about you but "word balloon" and "word bubble" has never been as repugnant as "nigger" to me. Not only was his analogy wrong but also it was gross and a little racist. I just think it was a way for the dude to say his own feelings. As for some of his works I have a problem with, they are numerous.

1. Fantastic four- (241) Byrne finally uses the Black Panther in a story but it is destroyed by his antagonist being a racist, a Greek or Roman racist too at a time when the kind of racism that exists today the villain would not even be aware of


2. 
   Captain America- (I am not sure of the issue number) Captain America is having a flashback about being in school and the pictures are an obvious play on the little rascals and there is buckwheat pictured as an inkspot. I don’t know if it was the colorist’s doing or the way it was drawn but I am sure Byrne was happy with the results.


3. Marvel Fanfare- (29) Hammer and Anvil star in this issue. They are marvel comic’s play on The Defiant Ones (one is black the other is white)and they battle the hulk. In the end of the story a mysterious stranger blast one of the two in the face with a gun (guess which one?)


4. 
   Omac limited series- here we have Byrne doing a reworking of the classic Kirby character (Kirby being the one artist he is compared to most and he has chased his whole career) there is one scene that has been changed from the original comics. A scene depicting how to relieve stress. There are these dolls that you can kick and beat up. Well Byrne decided that one of the dolls should be black complete with wide mouth and white lips. A change from the original drawing by Kirby.

I could go on but I think I made my point

Innovations in comics

The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, is a guide that attempts to detail the fictional universe of Marvel Comics. The original 15 volume series was published in comic book format in 1982. This was innovative because now you could read the back history of a character from his creation until now, also his powers and abilities.DC comics would later come out with their own version. A cool bonus was that if you collected all the books they would create a poster