kate

“It’s too rectangular.”

-

Feedback on a PowerPoint presentation 

wizardingwednesday:

hagrid & baby harry

aaaand here’s my first piece for wizarding wednesdays

I… Wow! I honestly do not know how to describe the bombardment of Nintendo video game references that were made in that video. Holy crap! I thought that James Farr’s other videos were epic, but this… THIS is just friggin’ brilliant. Mr. Farr, I am getting into my car, driving to the store, and buying a brand new hat just so I can take it off to you. Great job!

Kotobukiya: 1/35 Tachikoma with Kusanagi Motoko & Bato (Release Date: March 2014, Price: 3,300 yen)

There are, by our quick count, at least five versions of the Complete Sandman out there, but this Sandman Omnibus Silver Edition Autographed by Neil Gaiman is undoubtedly the most ultimate and absolute to date. For a mere $499 you get a special silver version of the Sandman Omnibus signed by Neil Gaiman. Only 500 have been made, and I expect they will sell quickly.

If you open up Vivian Maier: Self-Portraits seeking answers as to who she was, prepare to be disappointed. Even when Maier turns the camera on herself, she doesn't offer much.

In death, as in life, Maier left few clues about who she was, why she pursued photography, or what she was thinking. Four years after her death, and six years after the discovery of her photos (which author Alex Kotlowitz wrote about for Mother Jones), very little is known about her. She was born in New York in 1926, worked as a Nanny in Chicago, and died in 2009. She spent her life compulsively taking pictures. Most of those who knew her never even realized she was a photographer. Then again, she may not have considered herself a photographer.

With this book of Maier's self-portraits, we hope for clues. We want to be a witness to her life. But we're really just spectators, seeing only what she lets us—often just her shadow. Sometimes it's almost like a game of Where's Waldo: You need to find her in the frame, catching her reflection in the corner of a mirror that's secondary to an otherwise great street photo. She is usually alone or with children. Rarely smiles. Mostly out in the world, on the street, experimenting with reflections, composition, shadows and shapes. We get more questions than answers.

The book, compiled by filmmaker and street photographer John Maloof, who first discovered Maiers' work in 2007 while researching a book on the history of a neighborhood in Chicago, contains 60 never-before-published images. Most are black and white, shot with a medium format camera. However, in the '70s and beyond, we see Maier more in color, shot on 35mm film. In the later work we see an aging Maier, generally even more alone than in earlier photos. 

It's tempting to approach the book with a modern sensibility of the self-portrait, thinking of these as Maier's selfies. That would be a mistake. As Elizabeth Avedon puts it in her opening essay:

So often contemporary photography needs something…It demands an audience, requires funding. It needs someone to like it, share it or comment to it. Images today are not content to exist on their own, they constantly seek opinion and validation…Vivian Maier's work is extraordinarily different in that it only needed to be made.

According to Maloof, Maier almost never showed her work. Most of it she never even saw herself. The pictures "only needed to be made."

Some people see a particular vanity in photographers' self-portraits. But with Maier's, it seems like a case of the photographer trying to figure out her subject. Given that she died with most of her film undeveloped and negatives unprinted, it's a safe bet that she never found the answers she may have been searching for.

Vivian Maier: Self-Portraits by Vivian Maier, edited by John Maloof, is available from powerHouse Books.

 

This summer, after the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, a group of protesters remained outside Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s (R) office for 31 days, demanding that he call a special session to repeal the Stand Your Ground law. Scott said he wouldn’t call lawmakers back to the capitol, but House Speaker Will Weatherford agreed to hold a hearing on a repeal bill in the fall.

On Thursday, after five hours of emotional testimony, the House’s Criminal Justice Subcommittee wholly rejected the repeal bill by a vote of 11-2, and voted in favor of a bill to expand Stand Your Ground-like immunity to those who fire or brandish a gun.

Among the speakers was Lucia McBath, the mother of 17-year-old Jordan Davis, shot dead in purported self-defense after a disagreement at a Jacksonville gas station. “My grief is unbearable at times,” she told more than 300 attendees. “I’m here as a face of the countless victims of gun violence.”

But as the Orlando Sentinel wrote in August, this outcome was a “foregone conclusion” in the conservative Florida House, particularly after Weatherford selected Rep. Matt Gaetz (R) to preside over the hearing. Gaetz is not just a stark opponent of the bill who has said from the start he would not support changing “one damn comma” of the law. He is also known as a pugnacious, social media-savvy legislator who, the Miami Herald reports, “has sponsored (and passed) some of the most conservative legislation in a conservative-dominated Legislature.”

Last year, Gov. Scott participated in a similar “farce” when he agreed to review the law in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s death. After a six-month review, a task force stacked by Scott with supporters of the bill recommended that the law remain largely the same, without even considering several studies that found these laws are associated with a significant increase in homicides, have a disproportionate impact on African Americans, and do not appear to deter crime at all.

While the committee vote halts the Stand Your Ground repeal movement in Florida for now, another bill that garnered overwhelming 12-1 committee support will move forward. The NRA-backed bill expands Stand Your Ground-like immunity to those who brandish or fire guns in self-defense. It has been marketed as a “warning shot bill,” capitalizing on outrage over a 20-year prison term for Marissa Alexander, who is serving a mandatory minimum sentence after firing a warning shot during a dispute with her abusive husband. But while Alexander’s conviction and sentence have been panned across the ideological spectrum as exemplifying overly punitive sentencing, racial disparity, and insensitivity to domestic abuse, the bill passed by the House Committee does much more than exempt Alexander’s conduct from such harsh punishment. In addition to giving judges some more discretion to depart from mandatory minimum sentences in the 10-20-Life law behind Alexander’s sentence, the bill expands immunity for violent conduct in as vague and sweeping a manner as Florida’s existing Stand Your Ground law, and could represent the newest mechanism for encouraging even more vigilantism.

The post Florida House Panel Rejects Stand Your Ground Repeal, Wants To Expand It Instead appeared first on ThinkProgress.

It has often been said that the rhythmicality of animation has much in common with music. The other, more unfortunate, similarity between the two arts is that the animation artist, like the musician, often has to contend with companies that believe the work they produce has no monetary value.

British indietronica artist Whitey finally had enough of the “there’s no budget for music” shtick after he was approached by the TV production company Betty, who asked to use his music for free in one of their shows. Whitey penned a biting response and promised to share it, which he did on his Facebook page.

The sentiment is not much different from what character designer Stephen Silver has preached to young artists, what writer Harlan Ellison has ranted and raved about, and what we’ve been saying on Cartoon Brew for years. It boils down simply to this: if you operate a company that earns money (and even if you don’t), don’t expect artists to work for free.

Here is the full text of Whitey’s letter to Betty:

Firstly, there is no label- I outright own my material, so I’m not sure who you’ve been emailing.

Secondly, I am sick to death of your hollow schtick, of the inevitable line “unfortunately there’s no budget for music”, as if some fixed Law Of The Universe handed you down a sad but immutable financial verdict preventing you from budgeting to pay for music. Your company set out the budget. so you have chosen to allocate no money for music. I get begging letters like this every week – from a booming, allfuent global media industry.

Why is this? Let’s look at who we both are.

I am a professional musician, who lives form his music. It me half a lifetime to learn the skills, years to claw my way up the structure, to the point where a stranger like you will write to me. This music is my hard earned property. I’ve licensed music to some of the biggest shows, brands, games and TV production companies on Earth; form Breaking Bad to the Sopranos, from Coca Cola to Visa, HBO to Rockstar Games.

Ask yourself—would you approach a Creative or a Director with a resume like that—and in one flippant sentence ask them to work for nothing? Of course not. Because your industry has a precedent of paying these people, of valuing their work.

Or would you walk into someone’s home, eat from their bowl, and walk out smiling, saying “So sorry, I’ve no budget for food”? Of course you would not. Because, culturally, we classify that as theft.

Yet the culturally ingrained disdain for the musician that riddles your profession, leads you to fleece the music angle whenever possible. You will without question pay everyone connected to a shoot – from the caterer to the grip to the extra- even the cleaner who mopped your set and scrubbed the toilets after the shoot will get paid. The musician? Give him nothing.

Now lets look at you. A quick glance at your website reveals a variety of well known, internationally syndicated reality programmes. You are a successful, financially solvent and globally recognised company with a string of hit shows. Working on multiple series in close co-operation with Channel 4, from a West London office, with a string of awards under your belt. You have real money, to pretend otherwise is an insult.

Yet you send me this shabby request – give me your property for free… Just give us what you own, we want it.

The answer is a resounding, and permanent NO.

I will now post this on my sites, forward this to several key online music sources and blogs, encourage people to re-blog this. I want to see a public discussion begin about this kind of industry abuse of musicians… this was one email too far for me. Enough. I’m sick of you.

NJ White

In followup notes, Whitey clarified his stance on why he sometimes gives away his music for free:

I donate music all the time to indie projects, students and those who need it but cannot pay…I don’t want payment for everything. I don’t even care that much about money, I give away my music all the time. You and I live in a society where filesharing is the norm. I’m fine with that.

But I don’t give my music away to large, affluent companies who wish to use it to make themselves more money. Who can afford to pay, but who smell the filesharing buffet and want to grab themselves a free plate. That is a different scenario.

(Photo via Shutterstock. Story via Dangerous Minds)

I’ve got a rep.

Actually, I have several reps depending on who you’re talking to, and some of them are actually pretty cool, but the one that always bugs me is my rep for being negative or pushy. I bristle at that description in part because I think it unfairly turfs the vast majority of stuff I’ve written in favor of focusing on a small aspect of my work. And yeah, I have gotten in fights and damned things I thought were worthy of eternal damnation and being removed from the sight of God forever and ever amen. I freely and proudly own that. But the entirety of what I write about, my “body of work” if I can sound like a real writer for a moment, feels overwhelmingly positive to me. But that’s my rep, amongst a certain group of people: negativity.

I know why this is my rep. Spending five years writing about the intersection of black culture and comics every day for a month doesn’t really get links, and neither does writing about how much I like Katsuhiro Otomo or Frank Miller. But pointing out that a comic has some mildly racist undertones or is tone deaf in some way? Hoo boy does that get people talking. So if they see that, but not the other stuff, I can’t really blame them for how they perceive me. They only know me that part of me.

It still grates, because I spend a lot of time thinking about how I approach writing, especially racial issues. You’d be hard-pressed to find anybody in comics I’ve called a racist. I spent a long time only associating that word with acts, not specific people. That was a purposeful choice on my part. I know how people—white people, specifically—react to the word “racist,” so I’ve avoided it. I’ve made sure to structure my arguments in such a way that they weren’t purely inflammatory or pointlessly insulting, included context and history and excuses and disclaimers and things that would soften the blow of saying, “Hey, this thing you did? It’s ugly and hateful and you should be ashamed of yourself for even thinking it.” I mean, count how often I’ve cussed here on 4l!—less than fifteen times since 2005, probably? I do quote a lot of rap songs, though, so maybe it evens out. Anyway.

I did and do that extra legwork because of how I was raised and who I am. I mentioned on tumblr the other day that I’m worried I might have a near-pathological fear of being seen as an Angry Black Man. That’s because I learned that Angry Black Men are someone to be avoided, someone that’s easily discounted and dismissed because he represents loudness or anger, instead of knowledge or power. I didn’t want to be that guy. I want to be taken seriously. It’s an insecure stance, but it’s one I can’t shake.

I bite my tongue a lot, I take great pains to avoid a certain type of offense even when throwing a jab, and it doesn’t work, because I don’t get to decide how people feel about me. They’re gonna feel however they’re gonna feel, and if that’s going to affect my personal and professional lives…been there, done that, and came out the other side with twin middle fingers, a mean mug, and a bad mood. But the idea that I can’t control the reaction to my work is a hard lesson to learn and an even harder one to internalize. I’m still not there yet, so I balk whenever I see it.

---

This thing, biting my tongue to avoid offense, is part of a concept called “respectability politics.” This recent post by Maurice Dolberry is a good primer. The short version is that respectability politics is a system in which you sand down your rough edges (pull up your pants, cut your hair, erase your accent, dress differently) in order to appeal to the majority. In America, that means white men, nine times out of ten.

It’s common, super common, and I can’t really blame people for buying into it. If you don’t have power, you don’t want to alienate those with power, because that just makes your life worse. Respectability politics argues that you should hide your light under a bushel because it might make somebody who doesn’t know you and will never care about you turn up his nose. It makes sense, because it’s basically “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” But it still doesn’t do any good, because it requires a level of control and equality (in power, in position, in dialogue, in society) that simply doesn’t exist. Respectability politics blames the powerless for their powerless status irregardless of history, and prioritizes the comfort of others over your own personal comfort.

You can’t win. The only thing you’re doing is diminishing yourself at the unspoken behest of someone else. It’s a “love me please” that tends to fall on deaf ears.

---

A few weeks back, I let a young black dude use my phone on BART. After I handed it over to him, he laughed and said that he knew he had to ask me, because none of the white folks around us would have let a young black guy hold their phone. “You know how that go,” he said, and I laughed, because I do. Some of them would have, but for the most part? Even money on a very high chance of getting a rude response.

A big part of being black in America is being constantly aware of how your blackness affects others. It’s being aware that you might could get away with something in one situation, but you’d get murdered trying that same thing in another situation. The guy knew he could ask me because, even if I still had a bunch of internalized racism (I do, it’s killing me inside), there’d still be a good chance I’d have a voice in the back of my head telling me I’m the same as him and should treat him properly. Our shared experience of being suspicious first, of being not-normal, was what made that transaction possible. I’ve been on both sides of similar interactions with other black folks, both out here in Oakland and in Georgia.

I got a flat tire on my bike last week, so I had to take to riding the bus to and from work until I was ready to fix it. One morning, while walking to the bus stop, I saw a car at a stop sign with the hood up. I looked in as I walked past and there was a lady just sitting in there, doing nothing, but obviously upset. Her car’s busted, it’s pushing 0900 so she’s probably late for work, that’s a bad scene.

My bus stop was across the street from her, catty-corner, but close enough that I could see her sitting in the car at the sign and watch as cars paused in confusion before looping around her. I got to the stop early (full disclosure: late for the bus I wanted, early for the bus I settled for) and I had plenty of time and nothing to do but look around.

I saw that there was space for her car in a red zone just around the corner, maybe 15 feet away from where she was. It’d take her out of traffic, it’d be less embarrassing (I’ve been stuck in traffic with a busted car—it’s awful, especially if you don’t know how to or cannot fix it), and it’d be safer when whoever she called showed up to help her. I had ten minutes on the bus, and I could’ve easily pushed her car over there for her. I’ve done it before for friends and family. It’s easy. It would have taken longer to convince her to let me push her car than it would to get it where it needed to be, particularly since she was at the bottom of a hill, but still on the incline.

But again: I’m very aware of who I am and where I am. Strange black dude knocking on her car window in a moment of distress? Maybe it would’ve been okay. But as a counterpoint, my beard’s mad scruffy lately, my hair’s slowly getting longer, and I was probably in a t-shirt, jeans, and a backpack, because waking up blue means just throwing on clothes that sorta match and leaving the house. I was dressed “regular black guy,” not “respectable black guy with a decent job,” and a lot of times, “regular black guy” is not good enough to avoid people looking at you as a threat.

I had to choose whether or not doing something to help someone, which wouldn’t have involved going out of my way or anything resembling actual work, was worth the risk of getting dissed and dismissed first thing in the morning, whether that was a curt “no thank you” without eye contact or her jumping in fear when I tapped on the window.

I chose to go to work.

---

Renisha McBride was murdered in Dearborn Heights in MI recently. She had a car accident and was walking door-to-door looking for help. She knocked on a door, the man inside saw her and recognized a threat, and shot her in the head. She was nineteen and unarmed. He has not been charged, and the prosecutor’s office says they need more information before they decide to file charges.

Jonathan Ferrell was murdered by the police. In a cruel twist of fate, he had also experienced a car accident and was looking for help. He went door-to-door, looking for it. A woman opened the door, thinking it was her husband, realized it wasn’t, slammed it shut, and called 911 to report a home invasion. The cops arrived, Ferrell ran to them, and was tased, shot, and killed. The charge is voluntary manslaughter, and the cop who killed him is free to walk the streets after posting bail. Ferrell was twenty-four, unarmed, and had been in a wreck so bad he apparently had to crawl out of the back window.

These are recent incidents, but they are far from uncommon. These situations? These are my mother’s worst nightmare. A lot of what she taught me—including the respectability politics—was delivered with the intent of preventing my early and sudden death or a trip to prison. Like anyone else, I have a right to my anger, to my frustration, but I know that that frustration, no matter how eloquently I express it, will be seen read differently than anger from a white man or white woman, and I will be treated as more dangerous by default. It’s not my fault—it’s the result of centuries of white supremacy—but I have to live with it.

ComicsAlliance EIC Joe Hughes tweeted some things recently that were the truest tweets ever wrote:

Renisha McBride was shot in the back of the head for the crime of being a black woman who asked for help in a white town. She was 19.

We won’t talk about it enough. The story won’t go viral. Because as much as this country hates black men, it hates black women even more.

I doubt Jonathan Ferrell’s family will ever actual know justice, but at least we TALKED about his story. I doubt Renisha will get even that.

Every day I fear being shot to death while unarmed, my family going through a media circus that ultimately leads to nothing. Every day.

And so I’ll sit here and fear for my life, and my sister’s. And I’ll feel horrified and enraged for Renisha McBride’s family.

And when I’m done working, I’ll head home and hope to god that no one shoots me dead, knowing full well that they’d get away with it.

And somewhere, my sister will do the same. Because that’s what we do. Every day.

This is real life. This is truth. It sounds like paranoia, but paranoia suggests irrationality, or that you’re at fault. This is fear, and more than that, justified fear. If there’s a shooting near my area, or near places she knows I frequent, Mom will email me to make sure I’m okay. She knows that white America hates black bodies, and that colored life isn’t worth too much. She shouldn’t have to live under that burden. We shouldn’t have to live under that burden.

Killer Mike, one half of the duo Run the Jewels with El-P, said this on their cut “DDFH” (“do dope, fuck hope”):

Cops in the ghetto, they move like the gestapo
Drunk off their power and greed, they often hostile
My lil’ homie talked shit back and they beat him bad
That boy in the hospital now, he lookin’ bad
and I’m with his mama and dad, we lookin’ sad
My own mama called me said, “Baby, I’m just glad
“They ain’t put they hands on my child and kill his ass
“Please don’t rap about that shit ‘fore they murder yo’ black ass!”

And this situation is fictional, it’s storytelling raps, but every line of it is drawn from real life.

Vince Staples on “Versace Rap:”

I asked my mama what’s the key to life, she told me she ain’t know
She just try to take it day to day, and pray I make it home

I don’t quote these songs to prove a point so much as to illustrate how we think about the fact that we can get dropped any day of the week. Some of it is typical parental concern, but there’s a morbid edge, a fatalism, tucked in there. We prepare for this, train for it, because it is a real enough possibility that we worry about it. And in that sense, we accept it. We reject the violence, we reject the post-death smear campaigns that always follow, but we accept the reality of the situation, which is that we might just get killed by the people who are theoretically responsible for our safety or total strangers who fear our skin. Sometimes it’s glib, a lot of times it’s a joke, but underneath the gallows humor is the truth: “Please, God: any one but me or mine.”

Respectability politics are a self-defensive move. I modulate my self. I avoid police as a general rule, I avoid the appearance of wrongdoing, and I’m very careful and discreet when doing something I know I shouldn’t in a way that none of my white friends have ever been. I don’t ever lose my temper in public, I’m polite, and I’ve never thrown the first punch.

But it’s gonna be what it’s gonna be. I can’t fix any of this. I can’t make anyone feel better. This is the kind of problem that manifests itself in major and minor ways. You could get murdered for being black or dissed in a store. Both results are unacceptable to me. But all I can do is try to figure out how to survive and steal a little happiness for myself without simultaneously diminishing myself.Similar Posts:

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• No Effort Week: “For selling the tales… of young black males”
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tehkei:

gundamfuckyeah:

bearwhal-ninja:

autopony:

fujisakiiyusuke:

Is this how flirting works?

this is how it should work

this is how i flirt

You can all flirt with me like this if you want.
My birthday IS coming up soon after all…

I dont think this will work irl.

Whilst there are a number of aspects to Kickstarter which may not sit well with people, at the very least most of the people contributing and pledging are doing so for the best of reasons – they want to reward, fund, and spread creative projects. But a new string of reports have emerged over the last few days, suggesting that scammers are beginning to target the site.

Rather than a campaign which acts as a scam, however, it appears this is a pledger causing the trouble. The basic of this case is that the pledger funds a project at the highest level possible – only to then claim a charge dispute once the project is funded.

This can cause massive problems, especially if a campaign has only JUST made the funding level. It also appears that this particular pledger has done this over a hundred times – making it very surprising that Kickstarter haven’t spotted it.

I reached out to Alex Heberling, an artist whose project The Hues found Kickstarter success earlier this year. She’s been a victim of this pledger, named as Encik Farhan, and it may cost her $1000 from her project total.

 

UPDATE – Just prior to this post going online, Kickstarter have deleted the profile for Farhan. So at the least, the pledger will struggle to get anything else past Kickstarter for the time being.

 

Steve: What happened to alert you to this scam, Alex?

Alex: My campaign ended in August, so I was merrily plugging away at fulfilling the rewards;  the main goal of my Kickstarter was to produce the next chapter of my webcomic and offer it to backers in eBook format.  I started shipping the physical rewards in early October, and on the 11th, I got an email from Amazon Payments informing me that a charge dispute had been filed for $1,000.  I’d only had one backer who pledged that much, so it wasn’t hard to figure out who it was.

Steve: What does a charge dispute mean, exactly? 

Alex: As far as I have gathered, this guy backs a project for a very high dollar amount, hundreds or thousands of dollars, and waits for the physical rewards to ship before filing a charge dispute with his credit card provider.  In my case, my project had already cleared the funding goal before he pledged, so I would have been fine without him, but there are other creators for whom that was not the case.

Steve: Did you get to speak to any other creators who had experienced the same?

Alex: I was contacted by another Kickstarter creative team, Anarchy Enterprises, regarding this backer a few days ago, which confirmed my suspicion that there was something seriously off about him.  After receiving the chargeback notice, I took a closer look and saw a whole lot of discrepancies between his profile, his survey response, and so forth.  When I told the Anarchy Enterprises guys what happened to me, they wrote back with a long list of comments from dozens of other project creators, all saying the same thing had happened to them, too.

Steve: Have Kickstarter responded to your complaint? How has their response been?

Alex: I first contacted Kickstarter about this last month, when I got the charge dispute email, and I asked them for help on how to best appeal the dispute, but I didn’t get a whole lot of advice, just a suggestion to check out Amazon Payments’ FAQ on the subject.  Once I got in touch with the other creators, however, I sent them a follow-up, letting them know that I wasn’t the only one.  I forwarded my correspondence with Anarchy Enterprises, and got to posting on my social media outlets while I waited for a response.

Later the same day, they let me know that they’ve forwarded the issue to their Trust and Safety team for further investigation, so I hope we get an official response about this in the near future.  Kickstarter and Amazon need to develop a policy on this sort of situation, because creators have no protection against this kind of thing.  It’s not like we can stop a backer from pledging, fraudulent or otherwise, and there’s no way to report a user for this kind of behavior from their profile.

Steve: What does this sort of scam potentially mean for your project? 

Alex: It’s thankfully not going to affect the project itself too much as this stage, as all the physical rewards have already gone out, and I’m just working on finishing up the actual comic now.  Part of the campaign, though, was to enable me to work on my comic full-time while I did so, and losing that much money, in my position, is a huge deal.

I live a very austere lifestyle, with most of my time spent working on my comic, and that money is all I’ve got to pay my bills and rent through the end of the year.  I have the enormous privilege of having a great support network of family and friends should the credit card company rule in the backer’s favor, so while it may sting for awhile, I’m ultimately going to be okay.  Not all the creators this guy has scammed have been so lucky, though.

 

Many thanks to Alex for taking the time to talk to me about this problem. If you’d like to find out more about her work, then you can find her site here, and her webcomic The Hues, on which the Kickstarter was based, is here.

I’ll be looking into it further, to see if any more light can be shed. If you have a similar experience you’d like to share, please leave me a message in the comments.

 

@stevewmorris

This indie developer is a proud pirate, and argues that we need to change how we buy and try games

Internet privacy relies heavily on the ability of tech companies to hide user content—such as your emails and bank information—behind a secure wall. But the Department of Justice is waging an unprecedented battle in court to win the power to seize the keys of US companies whenever the US government wants. Edward Snowden has shown that the government is already doing a great job at getting companies to hand over information, breaking down weak doors, and scooping up unlocked material. But if the Justice Department succeeds in this case, it will be far easier for it to do so, and—poof!—there will no longer be any guarantee of internet privacy. 

The case started this summer, when Lavabit—an alternative email provider that promised highly secure email—was handed a subpoena by the Department of Justice. The subpoena required that Lavabit supply the billing and subscriber information for one of its users, widely believed to be Edward Snowden. Lavabit supplied this information. Then, the government asked to install a device on Lavabit's servers that would allow it to monitor all of the metadata (time and email addresses) of the individual's account. But Lavabit encrypted all of this information, and the only way for the government to view it was to use Lavabit's private keys to break the encryption. Those keys weren't set up to access an individual account. Instead, they broke the encryption of 400,000 Lavabit email users and would allow the government to rifle through all of that content. 

Lavabit offered to record the individual's information that the government requested and hand it over on a regular basis, for a fee of at least $2,000—but it refused to give up its keys. As Ladar Levison​, Lavabit's 32-year-old founder, told Mother Jones in August, "What I'm against, at least on a philosophical level…is the bulk collection of information, or the violation of the privacy of an entire user base just to conduct the investigation into a handful of individuals."​

The government obtained a warrant demanding that Lavabit give up the keys anyway. When the company refused (at one point, Levison turned over the keys in 11 pages of 4-point type that no one could read) it was held in contempt of court and slapped with a $5,000-a-day fine. The government prosecutor in that closed-door hearing argued that "there's no agents looking through the 400,000 other bits of information, customers, whatever…No one looks at that, no one stores it, no one has access to it." The judge presiding over the case said that sounded "reasonable." 

Lavabit handed over the keys right before shutting down the entire company. On October 10, it filed its appeal of the contempt charge in the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, in a case that civil liberties groups say is the first of its kind. (A Justice Department spokesman says it does not comment on pending litigation. The department is scheduled to file a brief in response to Lavabit by November 12.)

Karl Manheim, a professor at the Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, says that that the government's demand for Lavabit's encryption keys appears "unconstitutional." The same argument is being made by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union, both of which filed amicus briefs in the case last week. "This case could set a very dangerous precedent," says Brian Hauss, a legal fellow for the ACLU. "The government regularly reminds us how important cybersecurity is right now [in relation to protecting water plants and electrical grids from hackers, for example], so for them to say that and then execute these legal orders that undermine a critical layer of that security, is somewhat paradoxical."

Here's how that critical layer of security works: Any tech company that gives a damn about privacy and security employs Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption, which protects communications from being intercepted by third parties. Companies use different length "keys" to protect their encryption. It can take a lot of time, money, and expertise to crack a company's private encryption keys, but if the company just hands them to you, it's possible to read most anything on its website, including message content. "You can also decrypt the information months or years after the fact," notes Matthew Green, a professor at John Hopkins University and an encryption expert. With Lavabit's key, the US government could read any email in a Lavabit user's inbox. "Once this precedent is set, what stops them from doing this to other companies? How far can this go?" asks Green. 

Snowden has maintained that the NSA can break many keys and has exploited a backdoor to Google's and Yahoo's encryption layer—gaining access to the messages and content that flow through these firms without needing any keys. The government has also reportedly asked big tech companies for their master keys, but Google and Microsoft insist they have not provided them. So internet privacy may already be undermined by NSA activity. Yet Hauss argues that if the Justice Department gets its way in court, it will be "much easier" for the NSA to engage in privacy-busting operations because the agency will "just get the key from the company." Hauss adds, "On top of that, it would give [the NSA] more legal backing and make it easier for tech companies to be complicit in these surveillance schemes." 

EFF contends that the Justice Department's demand is a violation of the Fourth Amendment. It notes that it is certainly appropriate for the  government to demand specific information from an internet service provider as it relates to a warrant, but obtaining the keys would provide the government access to "thousands or perhaps millions of customers who aren't the target of any criminal investigation." In its brief, the ACLU calls the request "unduly burdensome," arguing that a company shouldn't have to blow up its entire business to comply with a government request.

If Lavabit loses its case, it will have the option of petitioning the Supreme Court. Should Lavabit not triumph in the end, tech companies will have to find a new way to protect information on the internet. And they're already looking ahead. Google has started using what's called "Perfect Forward Secrecy" on most of its communications. This system generates new keys each time someone logs in, so there isn't one master key to break all the communications. And Lavabit is working on a project called the Dark Mail Alliance with another secure provider, Silent Circle, which followed Lavabit's lead and shuttered its email service in August in an effort to resist the NSA. The new service will not rely on a master key and aims to make it impossible for the NSA to obtain even a user's metadata. There's no telling how the US government will respond if Lavabit and Silent Circle succeed in developing this service.

"Everyone was saying we have to abandon all hope. There's nothing we can do to protect ourselves," says Phil Zimmermann, the founder of Silent Circle. But he says that coming up with a new way of keeping email secure could change that. "If you just do it by fighting them in court, you might lose. But if you do it by changing the architecture, well, that gives you a big advantage."

Of the many comics I picked up at the recent Lakes International Comic Art Festival, there was one comic in particular that caught my eye as I turned around one of those giant rooms. A small little book, nestled amongst publishers large and booming, that shone out with a cover that immediately made me smile: Astrodog.

Seeing that I had tuned out the rest of the world in those thirty seconds, my boyfriend knowingly weighed himself down with my bags while I went for a closer look. I had not seen Astrodog before, I had missed its previous outing in webcomic form at the hands of creator Paul Harrison-Davies, and the glorious colours jostling upon the pages called to mind an old favourite of mine with a similar, yet completely different premise: Hendrik Dorgathen’s Space Dog.

Like its German sibling, Astrodog is a charming wordless tale of a dog who goes into space, told with charm and splendidly unique style. But what really sets Astrodog apart from the pack is the simplicity of both the comic itself, and the joy that it generates.

As the webcomic “about” page notes, “Astrodog is a dog, who goes into space. It’s pretty straightforward.” At 32 A5 landscape pages it is perfectly pint-sized, and combined with the appealing art and lack of words makes this a perfect all ages tale. And yes I do use the term “all ages” here because as attractive as this was to the many youngsters passing by Harrison-Davies’ stall, Astrodog is equally at home stealing the hearts of those whose childhood days are long behind them.

Astrodog is indeed a dog, who runs in a circle to put on her space suit before her enormous spaceship emerges from her owners garden and blasts into space. With that the adventure begins, with Astrodog en route to find a tasty Dog Star before being distracted by her rumbling tummy and a canteena of aliens of all shapes and sizes – and colours!

The entire comic has a wonderful dreamlike quality to the pages, with large white gutters and wibbly wobbly unlined panels containing the cosmic capers and gorgeous scenery. The comic is largely wordless, certainly with no dialogue or captions, but the occasional word does sneak in to highlight that Astrodog’s fridge is “Empty!” and that eating provides some chomps, munches, crunches and burps. Not to mention the use of a perfectly timed “KABLOOIE!!”

There’s some lovely brush work on the inking here, which gives everything a fuzzy edge – something that works particularly well on Astrodog herself of course, as well as the menagerie of aliens. The overall storyline is fairly simple, but with several diversions along the way the book is surprisingly action packed for its size and Harrison-Davies’ ability to explain situations and devices almost entirely without words is – on second read – rather impressive. On the first read I was far too swept  up in what was happening to notice, save for the occasional pause to squee out loud at a particularly cute Astrodog expression.

But mostly the joy of Astrodog is that it serves as a wonderful reminder of how great comics can be. They don’t need a convoluted plot line, pages of exposition, or heroes we’ve seen a hundred times before. Astrodog reminded me of all the cartoons I used to love as a child, from Rhubarb and Custard to Barney (the dog). Just pure fun in a deceptively simple package.

You can buy Astrodog here for £5.

More please!

(Oh and did I mention? Astrodog is a girl!  The back cover describes her as a “she” and just made my week.)

Laura Sneddon is a comics journalist and academic, writing for the mainstream UK press with a particular focus on women and feminism in comics. Currently working on a PhD, do not offend her chair leg of truth; it is wise and terrible. Her writing is indexed at comicbookgrrrl.com and procrastinated upon via @thalestral on Twitter.

So you want to travel through time, but you’re worried about the consequences. Perhaps you’ve heard of time travelers erasing their family trees, or screwing up world history, or destroying the universe altogether. You’re curious about the fourth dimension, but you don’t want to be “that guy” (or “that gal”) whose obsession with meeting King Tut ruins the future for the rest of us. Well, good news: when it comes to time travel, you’ve got options.

[Read more]

Modern storytellers have put forth at least eight different theories of time travel, not all of which involve ripple effects. Some don’t even require a proper time machine: travelers have been known to zip through history using phone booths, hot tubs, the streets of Paris, or even their own strange genetics. But temporal excursions are nothing if not complicated... so hang on to your history books as we fire up our flux capacitors and explore the myriad ways that books, movies, and TV shows handle that most mind-bending of sci-fi subjects: time travel.

 

1. History Can Be Altered: Lessons from Marty McFly and JJ Abrams

The most common theory of time travel goes like this: if you change the past, those changes ripple into the future. The classic example is Back to the Future, in which Marty McFly travels to 1955 and accidentally prevents his parents from falling in love. This causes Marty to start fading out of existence, and he has to set the timeline straight before he disappears entirely. In so doing, he also manages to help his dad best the school bully, which turns out to make the future much brighter for his entire family.

This setup has been the basis of countless time travel stories, from comedies like Hot Tub Time Machine and the new British film About Time, to the TV drama Quantum Leap (in which the lead character jumps not only through time but also through souls). In each case, this form of time travel is almost always about characters changing (or not changing) the past so as to selectively change the future—the amount of “ripple” tends to vary depending on the scope of the story, but the ripples always exist.

The danger of altering history is that small changes can have big consequences. No franchise plays to this idea better than Star Trek. Five different Trek movies have featured time travel, including Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (in which Kirk and company visit 20^th century Earth to save the whales, and therefore the future), and Star Trek: First Contact (in which the Borg enslave Earth via time travel, forcing Picard and his crew to do battle in the past). But the most interesting take is the JJ Abrams Star Trek reboot, in which a wormhole causes Kirk’s father to die prematurely, thereby altering Kirk’s life and the entire Trek mythology, and allowing for a franchise reboot, since the events of the TV shows and first ten movies now never happened at all.

Of course, there’s a big problem when it comes to changing the past: what time travel Professor Emeritus Doc Brown calls a “paradox” (and which is more accurately described as The Grandfather Paradox). If you go back in time and kill your younger self, then you can never travel back in time to kill yourself, and therefore you live, thus you do travel back in time, creating an infinite logic loop that (according to the Doc) threatens to unravel the very fabric of reality. Whoa, that is heavy! Fortunately, there are much safer methods of time travel available to the discerning explorer…

 

2. Time Travel Without Consequence: From Mark Twain to Woody Allen

Many fictional characters travel through time with no consequences whatsoever. One of the earliest time travel stories is Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, in which a man of Twain’s time travels to medieval Britain. There’s no talk of temporal side effects in this clever tale, just of the surprising challenges of finding yourself living in a bygone era. (Michael Crichton used a similar plot in his book Timeline, in which a team of New Mexico scientists travels to medieval Europe and, once again, experience no historical consequences beyond the obvious difficulties of being caught on a medieval battlefield without any broadsword training.)

Another early time travel story was H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, in which the main character travels through time to Earth’s extremely distant future, then returns to tell his friends of the strange world he found. Once again, no ripples ensue—perhaps because the future is so distant that any logical connection is hard to conceive of—or perhaps because in 1895, even imagining a time machine as such was quite a feat of the imagination.

The Time Traveler’s Wife played with time travel in a different way entirely: the main characters in this book (and movie) have a genetic illness that causes them to jump around through time, witnessing key moments in each other’s lives and living out a romance unbound by causality. But this isn’t a story about logic or loopholes; the focus is on the emotions between two characters who form a relationship outside the bonds of linear time, filled with strange certainties that have a palpable influence on their love.

Then there’s Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, in which Owen Wilson takes a nightly trip to his favorite time period, the 1920s. Allen must have been tempted to have Wilson’s character mess with the timeline by, say, giving Ernest Hemingway story ideas or sleeping with Gertrude Stein—but he instead avoids all such liberties and keeps the story focused on the characters and the theme of idealizing the past. The movie is one of the more artful time travel stories ever told, and was nominated for several Academy Awards.

 

3. The Future is Written: On Monkeys and Terminators

There’s another theory of time-travel-without-consequence, and it goes like this: the future is written, and anything a time traveler does will simply cause that future to occur. This idea actually has a scientific name: it’s called the Novikov Self-Consistency Principle, which basically says that any time travel event which would cause a logical paradox has zero mathematical probability of happening. In short, the universe is internally consistent, and nothing we do (even with a time machine) can ever break it.

In the movie Twelve Monkeys, Bruce Willis travels back in time to the 1990s to locate the source of a plague that nearly wipes out humanity in the future. But it turns out that his own trip back leads to the events that let the plague loose: a classic case of self-fulfilling prophecy. The Terminator movies follow a similar logic: the Terminator is supposedly trying to kill John Connor before his rise to power, but it’s the chase itself that gives the Connors their strength—and, unfortunately, leads to the waking of Skynet and the nuclear holocaust that sets the stage for John’s adult life.

The TV show LOST used a similar technique several times during its run—for instance when Desmond’s every attempt to save Charlie’s life seemingly played into Charlie’s inevitable death. In season five, several of the main characters went back in time to join the Dharma Initiative and participated in key events in island mythology; that instance of time travel is more properly classified as a time loop (we’ll explore time loops in Part 2 of this article, but included elements of history writing itself via time travel.

And let’s not forget Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, the classic bromantic comedy in which the title characters find themselves “helped out” on several occasions by mysterious events such as a pair of metal trash cans falling out of the sky at just the right moment. Who provided the timely assistance? They did, a day later, using a time-traveling phone booth. Before the movie is done, Bill and Ted make sure to go back in time and lend themselves that helping hand: what goes around, comes around, dude.

 

That concludes part one of our exploration of time travel. Next week, things get a lot weirder with temporal causality loops, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, and the great big mind-bender known as the Multiverse. So let’s time travel one week into the future and rendezvous back here at Tor.com.

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Brad Kane writes for and about the entertainment industry, focusing on storytelling in movies, TV, games, and more. If you enjoyed this article, you can follow him on Twitter, like Story Worlds on Facebook, or check out his website which archives the Story Worlds series.

“I’ve attached our company’s color palette. Although, I’m not sure if they’ll come through very well in this black and white scan…”

In a decisive victory on Tuesday night, Bill de Blasio won the office of New York City Mayor, becoming the first Democratic mayor of the city in 24 years and winning by the widest margin since Mayor Ed Koch (D) in 1985.

Tuesday’s other victories — the re-election of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (R) and the selection of Terry McAuliffe (D) as Virginia’s governor — maintained a status quo of establishment candidates, largely viewed as moderates and backed by business interests.

But de Blasio is not your run-of-the-mill Democrat. He has unabashedly embraced the title of “progressive” throughout his campaign, pushing a platform of new ideas and promising economic fairness as a corrective to the reign of Mayor Mike Bloomberg (I) that some feel has unfairly rewarded the wealthy and corporations. Under Mayor Bloomberg, the percentage of New Yorkers living in poverty has risen to over 21 percent, and income inequality in the city rivals that of developing nations.

“The people of this city have chosen a progressive path,” de Blasio said during his victory speech. “We all have a shared responsibility and a shared stake in making sure their destiny is defined by how hard they work and how big they dream, and not by their ZIP code.”

Here are just some of the progressive policies that de Blasio has vowed to push for during his time in office:

Expanding Pre-K with taxes on the rich. The new mayor has an aggressive agenda on education reform, and he’s tied it to reducing income inequality, too. de Blasio has promised to overhaul the city’s preschool system and use taxes levied on the richest (those making over $500,000 in the city) to fund a daycare for all Pre-K programs. Affordable preschool programs are shown to have a lasting effect on the economic success of children and provide the means for mothers to work and avoid trying to pay for daycare.

Ending Stop and Frisk. In his previous role as Public Advocate, de Blasio released a series of reports (PDF) on how discriminatory Stop and Frisk is — 84 percent of those stopped under the controversial policy are Black or Latino. He now says he wants serious reforms of the practice and plans to introduce a racial profiling bill, as well as replace top-level officials at the New York Police Department.

Creating new affordable housing. The number of homeless families in New York City has skyrocketed under Mayor Bloomberg’s tenure, by 73 percent according to Coalition for the Homeless. But affordable housing has never been large on Bloomberg’s agenda. de Blasio hopes to change this and has pledged to preserve or create a total of 200,000 affordable housing units in the city to serve homeless and low-income city dwellers.

Raising the minimum wage and expanding paid sick leave. de Blasio has called for a change to the minimum wage in New York and wants to ask the state capitol of Albany to allow New York City to determine its own minimum wage, instead of hewing to the state’s overall wage laws. He also wants to close loopholes left open in the city’s paid sick leave laws. Currently, the law only gives paid sick leave to employees of companies with over 15 workers, leaving out over 300,000 workers.

Throughout his campaign, de Blasio told voters that he wants to be a mayor of all the city’s residents, not just the white, wealthy elite. And, judging from the election results, that’s what he got. The New York Daily News ran the headline Wednesday morning saying, “Exit polls show Bill de Blasio swept virtually every demographic.” Indeed, he won 52 percent of white voters, 95 percent of black voters, 85 percent of hispanics and, perhaps most surprisingly given his economic agenda, 64 percent of those making over $100,000 a year.

The post The Progressive Future Of New York City appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Microsoft is no stranger to OS-tan moe technology personifications. There's Windows 7's Madobe Nanami, Windows 8's Madobe Yu and Madobe Ai, Claudia for the Azure technology and now, Inori Aizawa for Internet Explorer. 

International audiences can see her anime adventure on the internetexplorer YouTube Channel. As they pitch it, "The dark side of the Internet can be a dangerous and scary place. Will our heroine be able to survive? "

 

She's getting her big launch with IE 11 at Anime Festival Asia 2013 in Singapore.

 

Valerie from Asian Pop Collective as the character:

 

 

 

A Facebook fan page with a custom version of the browser can be found at: https://www.facebook.com/internetexplorertan

 

Microsoft's previous anime adventure featured:

 

And a bit of Claudia (voiced by Eri Kitamura):

 

Unofficially, there's also Hatsune Miku's ode to Windows 8

 

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Scott Green is editor and reporter for anime and manga at geek entertainment site Ain't It Cool News. Follow him on Twitter at @aicnanime.

Hey, remember Wii Mini? It was revealed almost a year ago as a stripped-down Wii that was exclusive to Canada, but now Nintendo finally has plans to bring it to the United States. It's set to arrive this holiday season, around mid-November to be more specific, and will retail for $99.99.

 

The system—which lacks internet connectivity and GameCube support—comes bundled with a red Wii Remote Plus controller, red Nunchuk, and Mario Kart Wii.

 

 

If you're still in the market for a regular Wii, Nintendo will be keeping them on store shelves in America, at least for the time being. The company confirmed this after reports of Wii production officially coming to an end in Japan.

 

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Joseph Luster is the Games and Web editor at Otaku USA Magazine. His blog can be found at subhumanzoids. Follow him on Twitter at @Moldilox.

The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences announced this afternoon that 19 animated features have been submitted for consideration for the Animated Feature Film Oscar this year. This field of contenders will be whittled down to between three to five nominees on January 16, 2014. In addition to the already familiar American features, the list includes films from France, South Korea, Canada, South Africa, Spain, Japan and Brazil.

• Cloud with a Chance of Meatballs 2
  
• The Croods
  
• Despicable Me 2
  
• Epic
  
• Ernest and Celestine (Watch trailer)
  
• The Fake (Watch trailer)
  
• Free Birds
  
• Frozen
  
• Khumba (Watch trailer)
  
• The Legend of Sarila (Watch trailer)
  
• A Letter to Momo (Watch trailer)
  
• Monsters University
  
• O Apóstolo (Watch trailer)
  
• Planes
  
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica the Movie – Rebellion (Watch trailer)
  
• Rio: 2096 A Story of Love and Fury (Watch trailer)
  
• The Smurfs 2
  
• Turbo
  
• The Wind Rises
  

The Academy also notes that:

Several of the films have not yet had their required Los Angeles qualifying runs. Submitted features must fulfill the theatrical release requirements and comply with all of the category’s other qualifying rules before they can advance in the voting process. At least eight eligible animated features must be theatrically released in Los Angeles County within the calendar year for this category to be activated.

Films submitted in the Animated Feature Film category may also qualify for Academy Awards in other categories, including Best Picture, provided they meet the requirements for those categories.

One of this month's Club Nintendo rewards is perfect for building up to the November 22 release of The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. For 150 Coins, you can download arguably the best Zelda game of all time, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, to prepare for Link's follow-up adventure. 

 

Both that and Art Style: CUBELLO are November's Wii offerings, while 3DS has Metroid and Dillon's Rolling Western up for 150 and 200 Coins, respectively.

 

 

All four titles will be available to spend your hard-earned coins on until December 8. 

 

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Joseph Luster is the Games and Web editor at Otaku USA Magazine. His blog can be found at subhumanzoids. Follow him on Twitter at @Moldilox.

Marvel have announced that G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona will be the creative team for a new Ms Marvel series, starting in 2014. The ongoing series will star a new character in the title role – Kamala Khan. She’ll have a costume designed by Jamie McKelvie.

She’s also a Muslim character, something which I simultaneously want to play down and shout out. Marvel have a small handful of Muslim characters in their back-catalogue, including Monet and Faiza Hussain – but this is their first series with a Muslim character in the lead role, headlining a title. As a result, I hope you don’t mind that I make a pointed note of her religion in this article, because it’s an important aspect of the series and announcement.

Kamala has body-morphing powers, a power-set which sets her up for heroism – but also for problems at home, with her conservative family and social life. After she gains her powers, she’ll be taking on the Ms Marvel mantle in tribute to her hero, Carol Danvers, whom she will be attempting to follow in the steps of. In perhaps a telling quote from the announcement interview with George Gene Gustines, Wilson states:

Captain Marvel represents an ideal that Kamala pines for. She’s strong, beautiful and doesn’t have any of the baggage of being Pakistani and ‘different’.

Which speaks volumes about the personality of the character already. The series is both written and edited by Muslim women, which leads me to believe that this is a series which will be firmly in a smart and considered tone of voice and style. And also, let’s not stray too far from the simple fact that G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona are DOING A COMIC TOGETHER. That’s a brilliant creative team! 

Marvel have been making a concerted and well-received effort to make their comics more reflective of actual American society, expanding their line to feature a more diverse line-up in as many respects as possible. Many of their best books have come about as a result of that ambition – and Ms Marvel looks like it’s going to be another unique, dynamic, and progressive series from the company. I couldn’t be more excited about it.

The Animal Crossing bug still has me smitten and I imagine I am not the only one who is still drawn to the game despite new, enticing releases (Pokemon X and Y, I am looking at you). The lovable characters and obsessive collecting keep calling me back. For those who feel similarly, J-List has listed two lovely new toys in the Animal Crossing Stamp Collection, the Snack House and the Mermaid House. Both toy sets come with two characters from the game and two pieces of furniture.

A really snazzy part about these sets is that each piece is also a stamp. The characters stamp out their corresponding faces and the furniture leaves handy messages with emoticons. All of the pieces, as well as the included ink pad, can be placed inside the house for storage. 

Each of the Animal Crossing Character Stamp Collection sets costs US$35 each and both are available now at J-List.

[available at J-List (Snack House | Mermaid House) ]

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When Fantagraphics co-publisher Kim Thompson died earlier this year, the company suffered more than just the loss of one of its key figures. As an editor, Thompson was responsible for a great deal of the translation and distribution of European comics, and with his sudden, unexpected diagnosis of lung cancer and his death just four months later, the publisher had to delay a third of their line. As you might expect, this caused a pretty significant financial shortfall.

Now, the company is turning to its readers to make up the difference. In order to support their Spring line of titles, including work by Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Floyd Gottfredson, Don Rosa, Dan Clowes, Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez and more, they're attempting to raise $150,000 via Kickstarter. Check out more information, as well as a very, very strange Kickstarter video, below.

Continue reading…

Last week, Frank Santoro and Sean T. Collins engaged in a discussion of contemporary comics criticism, that raised several issues on the lack of in depth criticism of newer cartoonists and the lack of outlets for the same. This is related to my own call for critical and cultural context for the emerging indie comics scene that I mentioned a few months ago. So I’ll have quite a bit to say about all this.

In the piece, Frank Santoro mentions what he calls “pap pap comics,” an insular world of middle aged men who like their Flash, the way they like their omelets — with a little Wally West. This world in various iterations has been the primary force in comics for a long time—but no longer. With the explosion of micropresses, tumblr and webcomics, its clear that people want a spirit guide to help them get to the other side, but I’m not sure that the current comics culture responds to much more than the crowd-sourcing of “like” and share.”

But before we move on to the new world, I would like to explore segment of the TCJ.com piece that sent the mercury shooting up the most on the Internet Outage-ometer.

In an offhand comment Sean T Collins, wonders about why there aren’t more women indie comics critics. And he does so with this:

The “where are the women critics” question’s an excellent one too, of course. Zainab Akhtar? Sarah Horrocks, to the extent that she writes reviews?

So that’s it. 24 words. Two question marks.

Of course this followed this graph on the “established” critics:

Moreover, when not a lot of writing is being done overall, the idiosyncracies of individual critics start mattering a ton. Rob obviously performs an invaluable service, but he reviews literally everything people send him, so it’s difficult to ascertain his point of view as a critic based on what he chooses to talk about, particularly because he rarely pans anything. Matt basically never wrote about women cartoonists. Comics Comics’ mission of broadening the discussion to genre-indebted work led to a dropoff in discussion of canonical ’90s alt comics and the rise of a lot of criticism by people intelligent and well-read enough to handle that kind of work but who now had the cover to talk about nothing but Heavy Metal and Akira. I’ll never begrudge a critic as great as Joe McCulloch for following his bliss, but I’d love to read more from him on current alt/art comics as opposed to older/obscurantist/untranslated manga, just from a purely selfish perspective. He’s great on the podcast he does with Matt, Chris, and Tucker Stone, but it’s not the same. (Super, super excited to see his review of Fran, on that note.) With me you’ve got a much tougher row to hoe if your work isn’t at least bleak if not overtly horrific; I’ve got a bias toward hard-R work that’s undoubtedly limiting. Nick Gazin is Nick Gazin. The loudest, most argumentative, most in-it-for-the-insults voices — who are invariably the most thin-skinned when criticized, oddly enough, perhaps because they take everything as personally as they make it with the comics they go after — dominate, and that can be a huge turnoff to artists whose personalities don’t mesh with that mode of discourse. That’s always been my problem with Tucker, for example, who has phenomenal taste and is a top-drawer critic outside of his superhero-insult-comedy mode — he’s tough to have a conversation with if you disagree. So is David Brothers, whom in my experience approaches disagreement — over Kickstarter, say — like a debater looking to win. An exception here among the big arguers might be Darryl Ayo; you can feel like you’re banging your head against the wall with him, but he’s never going to block you on Twitter. But he loves argument for argument’s sake, which undermines him; it made him invaluable when decrying faux-edgy racebaiting, because you need someone with the fire to fire back at trolling, but often he’ll hit things he doesn’t like with any weapon to hand, no matter how inapt — he once told me Dan Clowes’s earlier work was less cynical, for example. And so on. We’re a weird group overall, and having more of us would mitigate the weirdness in a necessary way.

460 words on various guys—”a weird group overall”—whose quirks are investigated and biases known.

So just WHY is a Nick Gazin worthy of analysis and a Sarah Horrocks a question mark? What sets Zainab Akhtar’s writing on comics apart from Matt Seneca’s in its quantity or quality that it gets a questions mark instead of an analysis?

I’ve said this a few times before, but it bear repeating, shouting and tattooing.

THE WAY TO BE INCLUSIVE IS TO INCLUDE PEOPLE.

Like, if you think there should be more female critics, maybe engage with the ones who are doing it and don’t just relegate them to a question mark.

Now, I know and like Sean T. Collins and we had a private email conversation about all this. As a stylist, he’s one of the finer writer about comics, and one of the few with a very specific viewpoint about the comics he likes and dislikes. I know Sean is a big admirer of the music critic Matthew Perpetua, and its often struck me that Collins is trying to bring the sensibilities of indie music to indie comics—specifically a more Pitchforkian elevation of the “authentic,” or in Collins’ case, the bleak and horrific. I don’t think this is wholly a waste of time in the abstract, but the general inclusivene nature of the indie comics scene mitigates against it. Oh sure, there is snobbiness and constant after hours trash talking, but it’s kind of hard to get people to band together in a “school” of any kind other than “Study Group” or “Kramers Ergot” and the work in these groups tends to be dissimilar in a way that makes branding it “nowave” or “Ibiza trance” a little harder.

Part of this, as mentioned, is also the change from the well worn highway of the “established canon” of comics from Kirby to Crumb to Ware to a place where the dirt road simply stopped in in middle of a flowery meadow. But the canon won’t go quietly into the night. And that’s what I’m here to talk to you about today. Because if you want to see rigid adherence to a canon that rejects anything that isn’t a straight white man, the place you want to be is the print version of The Comics Journal.

A long time ago I received the new (#302) edition of the Comics Journal and noted that not one page of it was written by a woman. Considering that there were 670 pages, this was quite a definitive shut-out.

Was this just an aberration? A mistake? I decided to dig through the last THREE issues of the Comics Journal, and found not only maybe five pages written by women, but exactly ONE article devoted to female cartoonists.

But even that shocking neglect doesn’t get quite to the level of near-total dismissal of the work of women in comics over the last 20 years evinced in The Comics Journal.

Lets take issue #300 for instance. It is 288 pages long. I took a post-it and stuck it in every time art by a woman was shown. I used four post-its. One was for a report on the 2009 (yes it has been that long since TCK #300) Eisner Awards where Lynda Barry and Jill Thomson were winners. One was for the sole dedicated look at women creators in all of the 1578 pages of these three issues. The gimmick for TCJ #300 was younger creators interviewing older creators, so you have Art Spigelman and Kevin Huizenga, Denny O’Neil and Matt Fraction and so on. Representing the women is Alison Bechdel talking to Danica Novgorodoff. (You could only have women talking to women and men to men so that women could talk about their tampon brands, presumably.) The Bechdel/Novgorodoff piece is also only six pages long. Most of the other pieces average 20 pages. So not only do you have a grand total of two women represented in the whole thing…THEY GET THE DINKIEST PAGE COUNT OF ANYONE.

The last two post-its were for a picture of Marilyn Bethke, an early Journal rabble rouser, in a history of the Journal (And probably the reason you’re reading this, since she was my inspiration to even show that women COULD write for the Journal), and a few panels of Lynda Barry in R. Fiore’s round-up “The Experience of Comics” which goes over Little Orphan Annie, Plastic Man and Crumb, Pekar and the other touchstones of the orthodox pap pap history of comics.

The next two issues of TCJ have switched to a thick, bookshelf format, occasionally published. #301 from 2011 weighs in at 620 pages, and #302 from earlier this year, as mentioned before, at 670. They are handsome books that will always have a place on my shelf but lets look at the spines of these:

As you can see, R. Crumb is so important that he gets not only a 200 page analysis in #301, but an extensive history of his lawyer, Albert Morse, in #302. Joe Sacco is also a double dipper but he is, to be fair, pretty fucking awesome. Al Jaffe, Roy Crane, Jeff Smith, Roy Crane…all fine creators, but this is beginning to look like a driving school in Saudi Arabia.

I did a similar post-it run through with all 1290 page of these two books. In #301 there’s a five page interview with Tim Hensley by Kristy Valenti; it’s the only woman bylined article in all these 1290 pages. It is also, as I mentioned, five pages long.

But surely women cartoonists get covered, you must be saying? Surely after the decade in which manga changed the game, Bechdel, Satrapi and Beaton rewrote the rules and Bell, Barry, Hanawalt, Wertz, Modan, the Davises, Eleanor and Vanessa, Weinstein, Park, Tyler, Gloeckner, Hellen Jo, McNeil, Cloonan, Thompson, Brosgal, Hicks, Larson and so on triumphed and transformed the world of comics from a stinky man cave to a flourishing, universal art form…surely that got some mention?

Right?

By my count, the images of and by women in #301 include an ad from Diamond Comics (!!) where a woman gets up early so she can go through her Previews catalog; a panel by Aline Kominsky-Crumb in the aforementioned 200 page Crumb article; the Valenti piece, and (FINALLY) an article by Rob Clough on the Center for Cartoon Studies which discusses distinguished alum Melissa Mendes and co founder Katherine Roy. Mendes gets a picture and art and a discussion and everything.

Perhaps the most perplexing piece in the whole issue however, is Marc Sobel’s “The Decade in Comics” a look back at the Amazing Aughts which states in the section on “literary comics”:

An amazing number of these literary graphic novels were written and drawn by women. These books broadened the diversity of the medium as a whole, and brought a welcome, distinctly female perspective to the male-dominated industry. Many of these books took the form of graphic memoir, including Miss Lasko-Gross’s excellent two-part reflection on childhood, Escape from “Special” and A Mess of Everything, and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, which enjoyed widespread acclaim and turned the cartoonist into a media celebrity. Carol Tyler’s brilliant You’ll Never Know explored her father’s life and military service while Ann Marie Fleming reconstructed her search for clues about her personal relation to the long-forgotten celebrity magician in The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam.

Well alright then! Between manga and graphic novels, women were a driving force behind some of the decade’s most important developments. And what illustration is used to show the decade as a whole?

Yep, you got it, all potential Hair Club for Men customers.

Issue #302, the one which sparked my “gendercounting” exercise, has a similarl “no grrls allowed!” vibe. Trina Robbins gets mentioned many times in the article on Crumb’s lawyer, since he was also her lawyer. Ruth Krause gets a mention; an ad shows a book about Lynda Barry. A 130-page piece on children’s comics has not a single female voice because, to paraphrase the explanation I heard, Francoise Mouly had better things to do with her time than send emails about Al Hubbard all day, as delightful as it sounds.

The one ladypart invasion comes yet again from Rob Clough in a tribute to Dylan Williams and Sparkplug, because, shockingly, Williams published a bunch of female cartoonists including, Julia Gfrörer, Dunja Jankovic and Katie Skelly.

So what are we left with? 1578 pages of comics scholarship where, literally, the sex life of Robert Crumb’s lawyer gets as much attention as the contributions made by female cartoonists in the last amazing decade of comics. 1578 pages extolling Crumb, Dave Sim and Chester Brown, guys not exactly known for great relations with the opposite sex, and nothing to suggest there is any other viewpoint.

It’s also, 1578 pages of “pap pap” comics, the old familiar route from Krazy Kat to Dick Tracy to EC to Stan and Jack to Neal and Denny to Crumb. An old familiar comfy story that doesn’t need to be questioned.

After I tweeted about the gender imbalance in #302, in an interview, Tom Spurgeon did ask Gary Groth, editor in chief of the magazine, about the matter.

SPURGEON: Do you have any response to the criticism — I think it was Heidi MacDonald that was public with this observation — that this latest issue lacked women writers, cartoonists and even subject matter? I know that Esther Pearl Watson was scheduled but there was a hitch there.

GROTH: Yeah, Esther was supposed to be in it. I have to admit I’m gender-blind when it comes to good writing. And to subject matter.

And then fwoooooosh. That was it. Insider clubby “Oh I hear you tried! Good job!” And then moving on. Gender blind meaning, I suppose 1578 pages of comics criticism that spend, in total 6 pages looking at the work of women cartoonists? Yep, I could say blind is probably the word for it.

Nicole Rudick, an occasional contributor to the online version of The Comics Journal, and editor of The Paris Review later wrote in to comment on this exchange.

I’m a big fan of your interviews — they’re always substantive and insightful — and was eager to read the Gary Groth conversation. In some ways it doesn’t disappoint. It’s nice, for instance, to read a succinct appraisal of what’s missing in some comics; that is, that the cartooning can be great, but if the story doesn’t come together, then it throws off the whole project. I was mightily disappointed, though, by his response to issues of gender disparity in TCJ #302.

Say simply that he’s gender blind when it comes to writing and subject matter strikes me as disingenuous and utterly avoids the issue. And it’s a significant issue given that this is the second iteration of the print TCJ that has omitted women altogether. How is it that a 600-page doorstop can’t make room for women cartoonists? I would have loved to read more on this in the interview. It’s a subject that generally seems to get short shrift.

I hope all’s well with you, and I’m looking forward to your next interview.

How indeed? How has the supposed “last word” in comics scholarship completely ignored the contributions of women to the comics medium for four years?

I don’t know the answer to this question, but in this milieu, it’s easy to see how Horrocks and Akhtar were reduced to question marks.

Now, pulling out my old TCJ message board bingo card, my guess at the explanation for all of this from TCJ’s editors, is that TCJ is covering older established (pap pap) cartoonists and going in depth on them. Sure. But there was an attempt at covering some newer folks like Anders Nillsen, Kevin Huizenga and Tim Hensley, all cartoonists who I love, but I think every one of the women I mentioned above is as accomplished as them. And that doesn’t mean “Oh noes, we must cut out Anders and Kevin and Tim so we can have a woman!” It means…you ADD coverage. And I’ve also heard “Well Kristy Valenti is the assistant editor on this!” and as much as I love and adore Kristy Valenti, and she is one of my favorite writers on comics, my answer to this is…try harder.

And what is the price of all of this? Continuing exclusion. A continuing “Why have there been no great female cartoonists?” that has to be answered over and over and over. A continuing subliminal message that women creators don’t belong with Chester Brown and and Lewis Trondheim and Roy Crane. I know some pap pap adherents just felt a flush of rage when I suggested women were the equals of Roy Crane. Because they think no woman has touched these hallowed icons. I know this because I’ve stood there and argued with them about it.

But you know what? The new audience for comics doesn’t know about the pap pap tradition. They think Alison Bechdel is just as important as R. Crumb. And I think you could make a pretty good argument that she is.

I’d like to think that in the long run this exclusion doesn’t matter, since, well, only a few people read The Comics Journal any more, and thousands of people read tumblr and the web where people who are not white men are able to put their work on display without fear of “gender-blind” gatekeepers. It’s definitely a world without gatekeepers any more, thank God, and I’d rather have the tyranny of crowd sourcing than the tyranny of patronizing, patriarchal privilege; a privilege oblivious to its own sheltered viewpoint.

But heed me well, young women of tumblr, this is how women get forgotten and marginalized. They get left out of history. Over and over and over, and have to prove over and over and over that they belong in discussion. Women cartoonists and women comics critics have as much to say and as much wit to say it as a jackass showboat like Matt Seneca who once burnt and ate a book because he didn’t like it. I’d like to think it’s douchbaggery and prejudice that’s being marginalized when I look at the new world of comics—a world where most cartooning students are female; international influences are more important than Neal Adams or S. Clay Wilson; digital is a fact of life; and, most importantly, creators grew up reading only literary and indie comics, and aren’t still playing out their rejection of Marvel and DC as the Oedipal crisis of their adult lives.

Luckily, Peggy Burns, associate publisher of D&Q, rode to the rescue of everyone with a response to the Santoro/Collins big feminist question mark, to point out:

I know we’re all on the same page here, –more women in all areas of comics is a good thing–and that Sean and Frank are fighting the good fighting and asking and discussing the important questions. As a publicist, however, I would say that my list of VERY influential journalists who regularly write or assign (assign being just as key) comics reviews that happen to be women is pretty solid. I could clearly state as fact that my #1 journalist right now who regularly writes full-length reviews with more frequency than any of the men mentioned in Sean and Frankie’s conversation, is Hillary Brown of PASTE. In fact, she may be my only journalist who regularly writes single-title reviews with any frequency, second to, you know, Rachel Cooke of the Guardian of the UK, perhaps one of the top three newspapers in the world; or two of my most important Canadian journalists – Laura Kane of the Toronto Star and Nathalie Atkinson of the National Post; or Heidi MacDonald in her role at PW, or Francisca Goldsmith in numerous library journals, and these are just the few I can think of while cooking dinner for my family on a Sunday evening.

My own contributions aside—editing a weekly section of comics reviews for ten years—this is a fine list. And to those MEN who wonder “gee how come no women write about comics?” I can only say, will you just get your head out of your ass for ten minutes? You might learn something.

To promote The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD, a sand castle recreation of Windfall Island was built at Javits Inner Roadway, directly in front of the Javits Convention Center. After displaying it at New York Comic Con, Nintendo has posted a look at its construction. 

 

 

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Scott Green is editor and reporter for anime and manga at geek entertainment site Ain't It Cool News. Follow him on Twitter at @aicnanime.

Jillian Tamaki is an artist originally from Calgary. She now works as an illustrator, cartoonist and teacher in New York City.

Jillian generously shares her working process and ideas about illustration on her Sketchblog. Her Student FAQ links to popular posts that she has written about idea generation and “thought webs.” The logical, thoughtful process she uses to create her illustrations is partly responsible for the success of her work. Equally important is her ability to draw and render expertly in a variety of fresh styles and her willingness to experiment. She even illustrates with embroidery on occasion.

SuperMutant Magic Academy is one of Jillian’s personal comics projects in which magical mutants deal with high school issues such as grades, work, and constantly crumbling into cosmic dust. Drawn & Quarterly plans to eventually compile these comics into a book.

Find more work on Tamaki’s portfolio website and her Tumblr.

rough edits of this idea ive had for a long while

i received a notification that OMOCAT turned 2 years old today! i guess a lot can happen in two years… work hard and dream big, everybody!

On November 21st, just two days ahead of the Doctor’s 50th anniversary, and the day before his big convention in London, Puffin will publish the eleventh Doctor Who e-Book of the year. This one has been written by Neil Gaiman.

This one is to be Nothing O’Clock, and Blogtor Who have this quote from Gaiman that explains what it will be about. Sort of.

Nothing O’Clock stars the Eleventh Doctor, the Matt Smith Doctor, with Amy Pond as his companion. I set it somewhere during the first season of Matt Smith, mostly on Earth, in our time now and in 1984, but also somewhere else, a very, very long time ago. I had never created an original monster for Doctor Who and really enjoyed getting to create a creepy Doctor Who monster of the kind that we haven’t quite seen before… I hope that the Kin will get out there and occasionally give people nightmares. And that you will be worried if a man in a rabbit mask comes to your door and tries to buy your house.’

To be honest, I would already feel a little anxious about a man in a rabbit mask at my front door, and that’s whether he’s trying to buy my house or not. It didn’t really take Peter Benchley to make a shark scary, and so it will be with Gaiman and his bunny-faced property hunter.

I’ve opted out of buying any of the years’ short Doctor Who e-Books so far, knowing that there was a compendium coming. This one, though, I’ll skip happily into straight away on November 21st. I’ve already ready a pile of new Neil Gaiman this year – it’s been a vintage year, really – and I’m nowhere near sated.

Neil Gaiman Writing Doctor Who Again – Nothing O’Clock To Be Published As E-Book On The 21st