Latest Posts

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: On Business: Korean IPs?

FreakSugar: Fanthropology: An Anti-Fan’s Perception
http://ift.tt/2ALJ3DW

Kleefeld on Comics: On History: FF #35 & #50 Scripts

Patreon: MTV Geek Classic: Kleefeld On Webcomics #51: Kicking The Habit  https://t.co/geK7cq5sNS
 
Kleefeld on Comics: Weekly Comics Links

FreakSugar: Webcomics Wednesday: Repercussions?

Patreon: MTV Geek Classic: Kleefeld On Webcomics #52: Henry Art Gallery's Morning Serial

Kleefeld on Comics: On Strips: A Cartoonist's Memoriam
http://ift.tt/2kCZYlJ
Cartoonist Michael Cavna lost his father earlier this week. He noted, "I haven't been able to quite put my feelings into pure words. So instead, I created this short "animated" eulogy -- my small tribute to Dad, and newspapers, and the gift of handing down the art of storytelling."

My condolences, of course, to Cavna and his family. It's never fun to lose a parent, but I like that some people are able to take those feelings of sorrow and that sense of loss and turn it into something beautiful.

Go watch: For Art's Sake: The Newspaper My Father Gave Me...
Last week, I pulled out an old comic book script I had stored in my archives, and I thought I'd run another this week. I had come across a handful of scripts that I received several years back, and had originally posted on my old FFPlaza site. With that site no longer around, I'm re-sharing them here.

Fantastic Four #35 (cover dated November 2000) was the first issue of that title written by Rafael Marín and Carlos Pacheco. They had originally written up a story from which Pacheco would draw the issue. However, for whatever reason, this story was scrapped and an entirely new one was concocted. That new one is what made it into the issue. (I seem to vaguely recall editor Bobbie Chase thinking the first attempt didn't serve as a proper introduction for any new readers that might be jumping onto the book with the new creative team. But my memory is decidedly hazy on that, and I could be totally misremembering things.)

However, a year and a bit later, they pulled the script out again, revised the story so that it reflected whatever continuity they'd developed in that time and used it for the lead story in Fantastic Four #50 (cover dated February 2002). As the story was also part of Marvel's "Nuff Said" month, part of the rewrite consisted of removing all of the dialogue to make it a completely silent story.

The script for #50 was at one time posted on Marvel's website, but the original script for #35 -- the one from which #50 was based -- was provided to me by Marín himself. At the time, he noted, "You'll see there are some changes with this plot and the final version, as number 50 is tied to the continuity we had made in fifteen issues or so. You'll see too this plot has the dialogues and captions, as we originally intended to write the book by ourselves." Both of these were to be what Pacheco would draw the story from, and the script for #50 is indeed what he ultimately used.

So download them both and compare them against each other as well as the finished book!

Fantastic Four volume 3 #35 by Rafael Marín and Carlos Pacheco
Fantastic Four volume 3 #50 by Rafael Marín and Carlos Pacheco
Let's start with this video report about Comic Con Seoul from back in August...
Two interesting things I noticed here.

First, the first half of this report sounds a lot like US reports about San Diego Comic Con from 10-20 years ago. I don't know if that necessarily means Korea's pop culture market is a couple decades behind America's or it has more to do with the news outlets or something else, but it definitely has a different demeanor and tone than what you'll typically find in current US news reports about San Diego.

Second, the back half of the video talks to how/why some characters generate more money than others. What's note-worthy here is that the most popular characters in Korea, generally speaking, are the ones from the US and Japan. The Avengers and One Piece are called out in particular. The reason provided for why there isn't more love for Korean characters is that most of them are geared much more heavily to a very young audience, and that there's little focus on characters for anyone in their teens and older.

So here's a thought. If Korea excels at doing pop culture stuff for kids, wouldn't it make sense of a US publisher to get the rights to those and translate them into English for American audiences? That's long been noted as a significant failing of American comic book publishers: they just don't do kid-friendly material very well. Scholastic has become something of an exception in recent years, but no one else has really gotten any traction there. So couldn't some other publisher, who already has a comics backlist to work with, start licensing Korean material since it's already tailored for young audiences? They'd be able to make a pretty big dent in the youth market here in the US, I think, and would set up audiences for their more grown-up materials as the kids grow into teens and adults. If the Koreans have expertise in the area of kids comics, why not utilize that instead of trying to reinvent the wheel?

Granted, translating kids books would be quite the same as translating ones aimed at older crowds, so you probably couldn't use the same translators for both, but the basic process and structure would be similar, I should think.

Or am I missing something here?
Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: On Business: The Long Tail in Action

Kleefeld on Comics: On History: FF #511 Script
http://ift.tt/2k5MLS0

Patreon: MTV Geek Classic: Kleefeld on Webcomics #49: Why Free Works  http://ift.tt/15DhcCp

Kleefeld on Comics: Weekly Comics Links
http://ift.tt/2nfEb4s

FreakSugar: Webcomics Wednesday: Responsive Comics?

Kleefeld on Comics: On -isms: Tales of the Mighty Code Talkers Review 
http://ift.tt/2zSipd6

Patreon: MTV Geek Classic: Kleefeld On Webcomics #50: Webcomics The Movie  http://ift.tt/15DhcCp

Kleefeld on Comics: On Strips: Cartoonist as Celebrity
One thing that I think we frequently forget these days is that, back in the first half of the twentieth century, cartoonists were celebrities. They'd get paid to hawk wares the way pro athletes do today. Here's clearly-not-very-comfortable-in-front-of-a-camera Rube Goldberg in an educational short about perpetual motion. (Also, buy a Chevrolet!)
And here's (in addition to the cast of the Blondie radio show) Alex Raymond encouraging people to join the Marines...
And here's a Chicago Tribune promotion about the creation of paper featuring Chester Gould and Carey Orr...

Maybe it's just me, but I'm continually astounded that cartoonists used to be celebrated that much.