GNBCC and The Influencing Machine

Okay. There’s these two books I’ve been reading lately.

One’s a docu-comic by NPR’s Brooke Gladstone, The Influencing Machine, with art by Josh Neufeld. Details American news services’ behaviour over the centuries, and it does a more than halfway decent job of noting the history, strengths, flaws and hopes for the future of the news services in whatever forms they take.

(If anyone’s working on a Canadian-focused counterpart volume, I’d be glad to know of it. If anyone is looking for an artist to partner with on it, I definitely want to know!)

The other is Seth‘s GNB Double-C (Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists). This one’s still “in progress” reading, mind you, and it’s a piece of “alt.history” comics about a version of Canada that might have been. If it had been a Marvel title – extremely unlikely! – the title would’ve been “What if Canadian cartoonists had really become akin to modern rock stars?”

I doubted that I was alone in being able to imagine an Inuit astronaut as a possible pop culture hit, but it’s good to have confirmation via this book.

More to follow on both…

CBC, Comic Books, TV, Movies and Polls

The CBC I refer to is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which fills a niche in our media landscape somewhere between PBS/NPR, the BBC and…well, I’m not entirely sure as to who else.

Anyway, they’re running a poll at the moment on comic books, and the adaptations to TV or cinema that they sometimes spawn. You might want to take a look if you haven’t already done so.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/yourcommunity/2012/01/do-you-prefer-your-superheroes-in-print-or-on-the-big-screen.html

From the “Outgoing Presents to Relatives” folder…

DC Universe character Black Canary II during the early days of the first ongoing Birds of Prey series:

From Sketches

Figure it’s time I introduced some of my younger relatives to heroes of their own. Dinah Lance the younger seemed a good choice.

Inked mostly with Faber-Castell Pitt Pens – F, S and XS – and a Prismacolor .005 for detail work. Pencil lines were left in as a “show your work” measure.

Helping Friends: Northguard Returns

Cross-posted from my Livejournal blog…because it’s friends, and they did something I enjoyed:

Mark Shainblum and Gabriel Morrissette did something big a quarter-century ago: it was a series called New Triumph featuring Northguard. The lead feature was about a young comics fan in Montréal named Philip Wise, who stumbled into both his biggest dream and his worst nightmare all at once…for they were one and the same thing. And Canada’s survival would depend on how he coped with that fact.

Now it’s back, available online.

My hope is that print editions will also resume shortly. Beyond that…?

Ridiculous Activist Comics Question

Inspired, oddly enough, by one of the spammers’ recent postings on their own blog. I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t link directly to that entry. The question is this:

Has anyone considered a comics project – web or print – devoted to covering the current asbestos situation around the world? Possibly, it might be better as a web project rather than print, because it could be updated “on the fly” as news developments became known.

Catching up on the reading – December 2011

Well. Today, I picked up a new batch of reading. Getting caught up on SHIELD, Punisher, Fantastic Four and FF, Secret Avengers…worth a few hours to me.

Speaking of SHIELD and the F4/FF titles…I know some people don’t care for Jonathan Hickman’s writing, but for me…it makes me work for my fun. I like that.

What’s your reading been lately?