firehose

In the overwhelmingly male comic book industry, it has been a challenge for some editors and readers to see the ever growing number of talented women currently trying to make a name for themselves. With that in mind, ComicsAlliance offers Hire This Woman, a recurring feature designed for comics readers as well as editors and other professionals, where we shine the spotlight on a female comics pro on the ascendance. Some of these women will be at the very beginning of their careers, while others will be more experienced but not yet “household names.”

Cartoonist Julia Nikitina is the focus of our feature today. Nikitina is from Russia, where she studied extensively as a fine artist and has completed her first graphic novel, Wizard’s Journey, which she wrote and drew. None of her work has, as of yet, been translated into English and is presently available only in Russia, but its fine quality and her great potential in the English-speaking market are manifest.

ComicsAlliance: Which is your preferred form of creative output?

Julia Nikitina: For me it’s hard to say what I prefer. I like to do everything step by step; every part of the work is wonderful. Usually I see how the idea can be realized, and do my best to perform it.

 CA: Do you work on paper or digitally?  Why?

JN: In comics I usually start on paper, then after inking scan everything and work digitally with it. My experiments with fully digital comics weren’t satisfying. A combination of methods gives me the best results now.

CA: What’s your background/training?

JN: I was born in Salekhard (it is town on the Polar Circle, in Russia). It’s quiet and beautiful, and northern nature is severe but so inspiring. I’m so lucky to have grown up here! I graduated from the Tumen State University as a teacher of fine arts after I was trained as printmaker and illustrator at the Herzen State University in Saint-Petersburg and graduated from this university as master of graphic art. In sum, I studied fine art professionally for seven years.

CA: How would you describe your creative style?

JN: It’s not easy to give description, but I’ll try. Simple but constructive; many patterns contrast with minimalistic shapes; sometimes it looks linocut-like (because I love lino). For me in comics it is more important to transfer required feelings through drawing, not to do overly realistic or overly detailed pictures.

CA: What projects have you worked on in the past? What are you currently working on?

JN: I started drawing five-seven pages comics for anthologies, and made some short stories for the Internet. In 2009 I had the idea to do a series of stories about the strange man with missing legs. The first story was about 20 pages, then I redrew it, and in 2012 I redrew it once more, and made it bigger (about 160 pages). So the short story became a graphic novel (I would translate the name of it as “Wizard’s Journey”). Now I’m working on a second part of this novel.

CA: Approximately how long does it take you to complete a 20-page issue?

JN: I know exactly that I can do a seven-page thing in three days (with all writing and drawing), and 160-page thing in five months. Maybe for 20-page it would be a week.

CA: What is your dream project?

JN: I want to accomplish trilogy about journey of my dear hero with missing legs, so for now this is my dream project. The third book is always a hard one, I need to imagine a kind of right open ending for story, and now I dream about inspiration, hehe. When I finish it, I’ll have new dream project, I suppose.

CA: Who are some comic creators that inspire you?

JN: There are many, but first I think of Wendy and Richard Pini, Neil Gaiman, Winsor McCay, Shaun Tan, CLAMP group, Natsume Ono.

CA: What are some comics that have inspired you either growing up or as an adult?

JN: The first comics that I admired was Elfquest. I found a Russian translation of it when I was about seven years old. It was like a miracle and I was deeply in love. There were pictures from Little Nemo in Slumberland in an encyclopedia for children, but I had no Internet, and nobody in town library could help me to find it. I was so happy to see it in translation in St-Petersburg comics library! I also like xxxHolic, it’s my favorite work of the CLAMP group, it’s so inspiring to me.

CA: What’s your ideal professional environment?

JN: My computer with all things for digital drawing and painting , clean table, paper and pen. May be headphones and good music. Other things are not very important.

CA: What do you most want our readers and industry professionals to know about your work?

JN: I love calm, gently developing stories — stories about magic — so in my work there are no explosions and car chases. For me it is important to show world as I can see it -  intuitive, emotionally full,  and full of stories. I still search for balance with drawing and writing, and I hope someday I’ll find it!

CA: How can editors and readers keep up with your work and find your contact information?

I have a DeviantArt page and a LiveJournal. It’s in Russian, but there are all my comics and many illustrations. Also people can email me: ner-tamin-at-yandex-dot-ru.

If there is a woman you’d like to recommend or if you’d like to be included in a future installment of this feature, drop us a line at comicsalliance-at-gmail-dot-com with “Hire This Woman” in the subject line.

Mars One, the organization attempting to send small teams of astronauts on a one-way trip to Mars, has made its first round of applicant decisions, selecting just over a thousand people to move on to the next stage of what it hopes will be a decade-long, televised training and colonization mission. Today, 1,058 of the roughly 200,000 people who applied were told that they had made the cut. Between 2014 and 2015, all but a few dozen of those will be weeded out, leaving a final set of four-person teams that will theoretically begin heading to Mars by 2025. Before then, though, there's a long process of testing, prototyping, and fundraising ahead of the company.

Applicants' 'physical and emotional capabilities' will be tested next

Mars One's proposal for private colonization has elicited both enthusiasm and skepticism, particularly because the actual process bears similarities to a reality TV show. The exact details of the next rounds haven't been nailed down, but applicants could be given interviews or asked to complete group challenges meant to test their "physical and emotional capabilities," with everything recorded for eventual TV broadcast; in later rounds, audiences will be allowed to help with the selections. "We fully anticipate many of our remaining candidates to become celebrities in their towns, cities, and in many cases, countries," said co-founder Bas Lansdorp in a statement. A documentary, One-Way Astronaut, already profiled a handful of applicants from the first round.

Currently, Mars One is in talks with a few TV studios about the project; sponsorships and media partnerships are meant to help fund the trip, along with investment from individual benefactors. Most recently, an Indiegogo campaign, launched in mid-December, has raised $100,000 of a $400,000 goal with about a month left on the clock. That money will go towards paying Lockheed-Martin and satellite company SSTL for concept studies in preparation for an unmanned test flight in 2018. If successful, the flight will put a satellite in orbit around Mars and a lander on the surface, allowing Mars One to conduct experiments and set up a livestreaming camera on the planet's surface.

Lansdorp described the process of winnowing hundreds of thousands of applicants (a number that still fell under the organization's original goal) as "separating those who we feel are physically and mentally adept to become human ambassadors on Mars from those who are obviously taking the mission much less seriously," noting that a couple recorded application videos naked. The United States has the strongest showing in the second round with 297 applicants, and 458 come from the Americas in general. After that, 282 are from Europe and 218 from Asia, including 52 from Russia and 62 from India — the largest national envoys outside the US and Canada. A total of 107 countries have candidates in the second round, with a gender split of around 55 percent male and 45 percent female. For those who didn't make it in, Lansdorp says Mars One may take more applicants at an unspecified later date.

Does the Hoodie Fit? In Paul Graham’s comments over the years (and in their influence on Silicon Valley) we see the outlines emerge of…

The Android’s Dungeon & Baseball Card Shop owner Jeff Albertson, the character from The Simpsons known to most as Comic Book Guy, has had his share of romances in the show’s 25-year history, dating Agnes Skinner and nearly marrying Edna Krabappel.

Now, it seems he’s finally found his one and only, a manga artist named Kumiko who is working on an autobiographical manga. If the screenshots (and the title) from the Jan. 12 episode, titled “Married to the Blob” are any indication, they’ll be tying the knot. Check out some of those very screenshots after the jump.

Stan Lee, who has previously appeared in another comic book-centric episode of the series back in 2002, will make a guest appearance. Perhaps more importantly, though, it looks like Milo, the owner of Springfield’s MUCH better “Coolsville” comics shop featured in the 2007 episode “Husbands and Knives,” will be on hand for the nuptials with his main squeeze Strawberry and their daughter. No word on whether Jack Black will return for a speaking role or if Milo will just be chilling in the background.

[Via Comics Continuum]

More than 33 years ago Mount Saint Helens blew its top, causing 57 deaths and forever changing the landscape of Washington state and its surrounding areas. One of those deaths was Reid Blackburn, a reporter on assignment for The Columbian — a local area paper — who was snapping photos inside what tragically turned out to be a massive blast area. Those images were never recovered, but The Columbian now shares photos of the slumbering volcano that Blackburn never developed, and that were tucked away for decades in an unmarked paper bag.

Sitting in an unmarked paper bag

Discovered in the newsroom by accident, the film roll contains aerial photos of a smoky mountain captured approximately five weeks before it erupted. You can see clear geological features, and dark plumes of smoke rising up from its top, suggesting something big was about to happen. It's unclear why the shots went unused. The film managed to stay preserved though, and was processed in a professional lab in nearby Portland, Oregon. You can see the whole contact sheet, and some of the individual shots in higher resolution, over at The Columbian.

In the pages of Forever Evil, the Crime Syndicate of Earth-3 — the evil opposites of Earth-New 52′s greatest heroes (plus an evil opposite of Alfred Pennyworth) — have conquered the world!

The master villains have come up with a particularly brilliant plan to rid themselves of the DC Universe’s heroes, trapping them all in sinister tie-in comics well beyond the pages of the main series. If you’re wondering who’s where, you can find most of the Justice Leaguers trapped in a weird prison in the pages of Justice League of America; Steve Trevor and his military team are in Forever Evil: ARGUS; the Teen Titans got sent into the future in the pages of Teen Titans; and all the magic guys are embroiled in their own 18-part tie-in crossover “Forever Evil: Blight”, which is, amazingly, going to end up being much longer than Forever Evil itself will be. They don’t call the Crime Syndicate villains for nothing.

It looks like the only forces left to challenge the Syndicate now are a handful of free-thinking bad-guys under the leadership of Lex Luthor, and Batman and his remaining Justice League allies, Catwoman and Cyborg. If they can  put aside their differences and work together, they just might have a chance at saving the world from the clutches of the Crime Syndicate.

Forever Evil #4
Written by Geoff Johns
Penciled by David Finch
Inked by Richard Friend
Colored by Sonia Oback
Edited by Brian Cunningham and Kate Durré

Batman and Catwoman, last seen delivering what little remained of Cyborg after his robot parts revolted to the top secret Detroit lab his dad works in, are walking through a series of background-less panels. Batman’s still wearing his battle-damaged cowl, which reveals about three-quarters of his face, while Catwoman is now wearing a blindfold.

Why the blindfold? Because “there are secrets about me you’re safer not knowing,” Batman tells Selina when, after hours of walking, they arrive at the Batcave. So I guess whichever of the fifty states Gotham City is in, it’s one within walking distance of Detroit. That ought to narrow it down a bit.

It’s kind of cute how Batman continues to try and keep his secret identity secret from Catwoman, despite the fact that his mask is now barely-there and Bruce Wayne’s one-time ward and current close friend and business partner Dick Grayson has just been revealed to the world — Catwoman included — as the secret identity of Gotham-based superhero and Batman ally Nightwing.

Batman even provides a further clue to Catwoman while she tries to get him to talk to her about his feelings instead of their plan of attack against the Syndicate: “I trained Richard Grayson to become Robin, Selina,” Batman tells her, “And after I drove him away, he became Nightwing.”

Catwoman may be a master thief, an accomplished martial artist, and great with a bullwhip, but she must be terrible at that Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game.

Batman leads her to the special closet where he keeps six metal brief cases, each labeled with the symbol of one of his Justice League co-workers, and each containing a secret weapon needed to take them out should he ever need to do so. He picks up a handful of weapons that might come in handy against his co-workers’ extra-dimensional doppelgängers, and then asks aloud, “If we can’t stop the Syndicate…WHO WILL?”

Funny he should ask.

On the very next page we find Lex Luthor straddling the unconscious Black Adam, shooting him with some kind of hand-lightning generated by his power-suit that makes a KRAKAAAKOOMM sound. He’s apparently trying to revive him, I guess, although it’s not entirely clear what happened to Black Adam during last issue‘s fight with evil Superman Ultraman (other than the fact that Adam had his jaw broken and lost).

Luhtor re-introduces readers to his Legion of Doom: Black Adam, Black Manta, Captain Cold and the imperfect Superman clone designated “Subject: B-Zero,” who here finally starts saying something other than “RR!” and officially dubs himself “Bizarro.” Five bros does hardly a legion make, but the brave Entourage of Doom sets off to acquire the one last thing they’ll need before taking on the Syndicate.

Elsewhere, Ultraman is busy tearing out Metallo’s Kryptonite heart, atomizing it and huffing it (remember, Ultraman gets his power from snorting Kryptonite up his nose), when Superwoman appears to tell him that A) She’s pregnant, B) The child is Ultraman’s and C) Owlman is plotting with the captured Nightwing to betray Ultraman and the Syndicate.

As for A and B, Superwoman previously told Owlman that her baby was his and encouraged him to get ready to take down Ultraman, so, suffice it to say, she’s kind of a terrible person.

And as for C, there’s only a one-panel flashback here regarding Owlman’s conversation with Nightwing, but if you read Justice League #25 you can get the whole story of Owlman and Earth-3 Grayson’s origins (plus what sure looks to be the origin of New 52 Plastic Man, despite his cameo in Justice League International #1 two years ago) and the nature of Owlman’s offer to Nightwing. According to Owlman, the world is either going to be taken over by Ultraman and the Syndicate or by Owlman, and obviously Owlman is on Team Owlman in that particular conflict. He asks for Grayson’s help in taking down the rest of the Syndicate, to which Grayson agrees.

The rest of the issue is devoted to those Johnsian splash pages where characters make dramatic arrivals. Luthor’s team breaks into a Wayne Enterprises lab to find Batman and Catwoman standing there.

Before they can get to fighting and team-ing up, however, the evil Green Lantern of Earth-3, Power Ring, shows up with a posse of the Syndicate’s villain army! Then Batman puts on the Sinestro Corps ring we saw earlier and takes on Power Ring, but it doesn’t have enough charge and the villain snatches it it away!

“A yellow ring? You can’t hurt me with this,” Power Ring says snidely, thus setting up the final splash page entrance of the book, as Sinestro appears on the scene.

So if Sinestro, Catwoman and Batman join Luthor’s team, that gives them eight guys, and Luthor is now just one recruit shy of being able to field a Baseball Team of Doom.

More Forever Evil Recaps