How do you mess up Superman’s S symbol? Bad AI artwork I guess —Comic Bookmarks 6/22/2024
An AI focused week.
It’s been a week on a very personal level that I won’t go into here but that has caused me to think about the things that I do and why I do them. So I haven’t paid lot of attention to what’s happening online (so this may be a bit smaller than usual) but I’ve been thinking about why I write what I write. It’s my way of engaging with the world, with being a part of it and hopefully in some small way, a voice that while maybe not transforming it, is hopefully pointing out that we could be better. I think that’s why my review for Hate Revisited #1 went in the directions it did.
I’m not too sure where I was going on this when I started writing—my notes have a lot on the Muppet-like quality of Bagge’s cartooning (a byproduct of recently watching the Jim Henson documentary?) but as I was writing it, I felt the need to go more in a direction of exploring why now and how is it different than the Hate that Bagge created in the 1990s.
Headlines
Graeme McMillan
How have DC and Marvel just managed to botch it anytime that they try to reimagine their logos? Honestly, the DC Bullet and the blocked MARVEL logo are pretty good classics and maybe just shouldn’t be messed with.
JK Parkin
I’ve read a lot of Gillis over my years and he was one of those stalwarts of the 1980s, producing largely readable books. His work on First Comics Warp still remains some of my favorite comics as it was some of the first independent comics I discovered at a small used bookstore where I grew up. Marvel needs to put out a nice Strikeforce: Morituri collection.
Heidi MacDonald
See the top of this post for just how badly the S symbol is botched.
Bleeding Cool is reporting that DC is scrapping all of the planned-but-unpusblished Francesco Mattina covers in their pipeline.
Business
Caught in the crossfire of intellectual property lawsuits, the ambiguous language used to previously update the terms shed light on a climate of acute skepticism among artists, many of whom overrely on Adobe for their work. “They already broke our trust,” says Jon Lam, a senior storyboard artist at Riot Games, referring to how award-winning artist Brian Kesinger discovered generated images in the style of his art being sold under his name on Adobe's stock image site, without his consent. Earlier this month, the estate of late photographer Ansel Adams publicly scolded Adobe for allegedly selling generative AI imitations of his work.
We’re still in the early days of AI so this is not the end of of this discussion (see the news about DC Cover artist above.). It’s a shame that artists have to be the ones who are policing this.
The Funny Pages
Reviews & Features
Dan Greenfield
I’ve felt for a long time that there’s some connection between Neal Adams and Alan Davis. This article focuses more on their approach to aging and approaching retirement but there’s something about Davis’s figure work that has elements of Adams to it. I’ve never quite been able to put my finger on what it is though.
JK Parkin
Last Monday if you had asked me to dream up the wildest crossover I could think of, I don’t know if I would have come close to Usagi Yojimbo and The Power Rangers. I don’t think I’ve ever actually bought a Power Rangers comic before so I guess that there’s a first time for everything.
Alex K Cossa
Kurt Busiek is one of those writers I constantly underestimate. I had ignored The Autumnlands when it first came out but picked up the trades somewhere during the pandemic and just loved the books. His writing and Benjamin Dewey’s artwork made me remember why I used to like these kind of fantasy stories more than I do now.
