* With Halloween on the way, Robot 6 is once again Robot 666 for the week. I celebrated with a trio of spooky links:
* Becky Cloonan comes up with the post title and image-gallery idea of the week in “Sluts of Dracula” (seriously, Curt Purcell, call your agent);
* Johnny Ryan does Small Wonder;
* and Jordan Crane presents the next chapter of Simon and Jack’s adventures in “Dark Day.”
* Whoa, look, a new Tom Neely comic, Doppelganger! I love how regularly he’s been sneaking out new stuff.
* Kiel Phegley talks to the great Frazer Irving about his Batman work with Grant Morrison, his upcoming Moz-related plans, the fate of his long-delayed Image series Gutsville, and more. Here he is on his stunning coloring:
Color is like everything to storytelling — well, alongside form, composition, line and everything else. It’s not just a way to say “this is a tree” or “this is skin!,” it’s as powerful as lots of speed lines or heavy shadows — it says “this tree is warped” or “this man’s skin is sickly for he is evil” etc. I like color that creates mood more than realism, and that’s in the stuff I read as well as draw. It’s a key part of pacing a story to allocate a basic hue to each scene, so that (ideally) one can see the pages at a glance and see how the pages group together in scenes dictated by overall color scheme, and if one is using a specific hue for a particular location, then the color alone should act as a subconscious visual cue for each time we visit that place.
Irving is one of the best.
* Welcome back to comics class with Frank Santoro: This time, Frank’s tackling the nine-panel grid in Watchmen. He points out that the center panel on each page sort of “sums up” what’s going on that page–a perfect visual anchor. He also notes that on the occasions when Moore and Gibbons abandon the nine-panel grid, there’s still a “center” image where that central panel would go.
* Sleazy Slice is on sale cheap! If you’ve wanted to get your hands on hard copies of Josh Simmons mini-masterpieces like Cockbone and In a Land of Magic, this is your chance.
* Here’s a fantastically weird and smutty gallery of art from Blutch. I was going to say “of all people” but the truth of the matter is I haven’t seen enough Blutch comics to know if this is out of character or not. It’s striking, that’s for sure. (Via Tom Spurgeon.)
* Marvel Studios is apparently ramping down production on its adaptation of Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona’s excellent Runaways. Maybe they, like me, just got too depressed when fanboys freaked out because they were making a white character black.
* I’m so smitten with the idea of using epic-fantasy orcs as horror-movie monsters in a contemporary setting that I’m actually pretty bummed that this movie Orcs! is playing the idea for laughs. I mean, can you imagine seeing just one of those ugly bastards baring its teeth and swinging a scimitar in your direction? A lot scarier than some mute dude in a hockey mask. Oh well, you take what you can get.
* Here’s a very thorough and easy to understand summary of the issues surrounding the now-abandoned actors union boycott of The Hobbit, from a person whom I believe is a Kiwi actor herself. The gist is that the demand for negotiations made by the New Zealand branch of an Australian union, which precipitated the whole situation, was illegal under current NZ law due to actors’ status as independent contractors rather than employees–an attempt at collective bargaining was therefore classified as a sort of price-fixing. So Peter Jackson legally couldn’t meet to negotiate even if he’d wanted to, which apparently he really really didn’t. It also seems like Jackson and The Hobbit were singled out precisely because they were an enormous production already offering generous terms to its performers and helmed by someone who clearly wanted to shoot in New Zealand: The union calculated that it could make a big splash by targeting a big name already known for being amenable to actors and who clearly wanted to stay in NZ. This backfired bigtime, obviously, because Jackson reacted very badly to being singled out like that. (Via Kristin Thompson, of course.)
* I spent a decent amount of time last week watching all 20 5-to-7 minute “micro-episodes” for the new cartoon series Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes!, then watching the hour-long series premiere. It was pretty darn good! Please keep in mind I have almost no background with the Avengers prior to Brian Michael Bendis’s relaunch a few years back, and this is very much the classic pre-Bendis team and its pre-Bendis antagonists (although the opening storyline is loosely cribbed from Bendis’s Breakout arc, and obviously the Iron Man characterization is very post-Downey). Yet the series’ creators are obviously having so much fun trotting adamantly non-classic villains like Whirlwind across the screen in all their bizarrely designed glory that it’s tough not to go along with it. I’m also the sort of geek who really likes the idea of a Marvel Universe in which Hydra were our World War II antagonists rather than Nazis, and where there are four supervillain prisons each with its own specific purview in terms of how the villains it houses got their powers, and where Ant-Man and Iron Man found the Avengers in large part to avoid becoming government thugs, and on and on. Fun stuff. You can watch every micro-episode here, and I think you can still watch the two-part premiere here. (Thanks to Rob Bricken for the recommendation.)
* Finally, my friend Chris Ward has posted DJ Daymage’s Halloween mix for 2010, and it’s wonderful. Eighty minutes of continuously mixed spookiness and sexiness, worth the price of admission for “Walk the Night” by the Skatt Bros. alone.
