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 Carla Berrocal writes, draws, colors, and letters her comics. She has published comics in her home country of Spain and is a contributor to Vertigo’s Dial H and CMYK: Magenta anthology. She is currently at work on an original graphic novel.

ComicsAlliance: What is your preferred form of creative output?

Carla Berrocal: I think every part is fun or in every process I learn something but If I have to choose one I prefer drawing and inking…

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

CB: I work on paper — I like to feel the pencil and the ink. I finish with my hand covered in ink but it’s a process where you transmit part of you to the paper. It has something magic.

CA: What’s your background/training? 

CB: Since I was a child, my parents developed my creative aptitudes. They put me in art courses. I did classic painting classes and courses about animation and comics. Then, when I grew up, I studied illustration at the Arte Diez School of Arts and Design in Madrid, and a couple of years later got a degree design in the same place. I also have a Masters of Creative Writing.

CA: How would you describe your creative style?

CB: I would like to think that my style is strong and minimalist. I love the basics. “Less is more” is my religion. In my stories I love lyricism and poetry, but also pulp stories and classic sci-fi.

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

CB: My last comic was published in 2011 here in Spain. It’s titled El Brujo (wich means The Wicked) and it’s a experimental work. Every page was done with a different technique. I was searching for the influence of the technique on the narrative. Since then I did short stories for other anthologies. Earlier this year I self-published one little book with fencing sketches (I love and practice the sport) and this summer I published a short story in the Vertigo Quarterly: CMYK: Magenta. Since then I’ve been working on a graphic novel, but I’m doing it very slowly because I don’t have publisher, so I use my free time to draw it.

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

CB: Writing the story takes me three or four days. The pencils may take 10 days and inking another 10. Finally, lettering it would take maybe one week. I think one month and one week more or less.

CA: What is your dream project? 

CB: I don’t know. Maybe to write and draw a personal version of Batman, as I love that character. Or maybe to publish my own graphic novel with a publisher that can pay me. Spain is horrible… you can’t survive doing comics.

CA: Who are some comic creators that inspire you?

CB: Some of my influences are Muñoz/Sampayo, Breccia, Philip K. Dick, Lem, Gabriel García Márquez, Jean Luc Godard, Ingmar Bergman, Noel Sickles, Caniff, Hugo Pratt, Kubrick, Tarkovsky, Tezuka, Brüno…

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

CB: Alack Sinner (Muñoz/Sampayo), Fenix (Osamu Tezuka), Corto Maltese (Pratt), Terry and the Pirates (Caniff), Kirby, Nemo (Brüno), Taiyo Matsumoto, Monster (Naoki Urasawa), Dragon Ball (Toriyama), Flavio Colin, Mazzucchelli, Raúl, Federico del Barrio…

CA: What’s your ideal professional environment?

CB: My own study is already ideal… but if I was rich, maybe in a little house in a small town, near the beach. That would be the best.

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

CB: I think that my work already speaks better than me, and it can give them a better idea than my words.

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

CB: Website: http://www.carlaberrocal.com/

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/pintamonas

Twitter https://twitter.com/pintamonas

Tumblr http://carlaworks.tumblr.com/

Instagram http://instagram.com/pintamonas

 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.

TV-over-Internet company Aereo, shut down this summer by a Supreme Court decision, may still pull victory from the jaws of defeat. As was rumored last month, the FCC may be its savior.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler published a blog post today saying that Aereo, and other "linear channels" of online programming, should be allowed to negotiate for programming just like cable companies. Just like satellite companies needed regulatory change in order to be allowed to compete in 1992, Internet video providers should be able to negotiate on the same terms, he wrote.

While Wheeler writes that "Aereo visited the commission to make exactly this point," he emphasizes that this isn't a rule that would be for just one company. Dish, Sony, Verizon, and DirecTV have all showed interest in offering preprogrammed content online, he noted; CBS and HBO, which recently announced it would offer online-only service, may well join in. Wheeler wrote, in part:

Just in time for Halloween, famed polling agency Gallup has released the latest results of its long-running annual survey of American fears about crime. For the first time, hacking tops the list of the things respondents were most concerned about, far surpassing every other type of meatspace crime. Specifically, 69 percent of those surveyed said they were "frequently or occasionally" worried about "having the credit card card information [they] have used at stores stolen by hackers." And almost as many, 62 percent, were "frequently or occasionally" worried about having personal information stolen from their computer or smartphone. In contrast, less than half of respondents (45 percent), were worried about their homes being physically burglarized and 18 percent were worried about getting murdered.

The survey was conducted earlier this month by telephone (landline and mobile) on a random sample of 1,017 adults chosen across all 50 states and the District of Columbia, as Gallup explains. The fact that hacking topped the list probably shouldn't come as a surprise given the massive hacks of celebrity photos just a few months ago and the continued hackings of major American retail chains and theft of shoppers' credit card information, all of which have been very well publicized. At the same time, this was the first year that Gallup asked all survey respondents about their fears of being hacked (they asked some of them a similar question back in 2013), so there's no historical data with which to put these results in context. Americans may have harbored fears of being hacked above all other crimes for years now, but we wouldn't really know it from Gallup's latest results.

The real question is whether the prevailing fear of being hacked is warranted. Compared to other crimes, it probably is: rates of violent crime have been decreasing markedly since a peak in 1993, according to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics. Comparable cybercrime statistics don't go back as far and haven't been collected as regularly, but the same agency took cybercrime surveys in 2001 and 2005 and found that 67 percent of businesses that responded detected at least one cybercrime in 2005 and 74 percent reported being victims of cybercrime in 2001. Other government surveys have found more steady increases in cyber incidents in the past two decades. Complaints of identity theft are also generally on the rise, according to government statistics. While it's difficult to quantify an individual's risk to certain types of crimes without incorporating their own unique habits and proximity to criminals, there's plenty of guidance out there about how to secure your electronic devices from hackers. Still, if you're looking for a last-minute Halloween costume, dressing up as a hacker may not be the worst idea.

Last week, privacy advocates turned up some unsettling news: for two years, Verizon's Precision Insights division has been seeding web requests with unique identifiers. If you visited a website from a Verizon phone, there's a good chance the carrier injected a special tag into the data sent from you phone, telling the website exactly who you were and where you were coming from, all without alerting customers or informing the public at large. Today, Forbes' Kashmir Hill reports that AT&T is testing a similar program, although it may be possible to opt out. In both cases, the message is clear: there's a lucrative business in tracking users across the web, and carriers want in on it.

Networks like this have been used for surveillance before

Carriers have usually stayed out of the ad-tracking business, although many of the same divisions have offered pilot programs in tracking users' locations. Instead, most of the tracking on the web happens through third-party firms like Google's Doubleclick, which use easily identified cookies to follow users from site to site. But the carrier programs are inserting trackers at a higher level, in the process of routing data requests, which make the cookies both harder to identify and nearly impossible for a user to shake off.

Verizon and AT&T will tell you they just want to help serve you more relevant ads, which isn't so bad on the face of it — but we've seen networks like this used for much more questionable ends, most notably when the NSA took over Google's cookie-tracking network to help target malware injections. Tracking is tracking, and it's hard to tell what else might be built on top of the network once it's in use. For Verizon and AT&T customers — which, put together, compose a little more than two-thirds of US citizens — the result is a comprehensive surveillance system that they didn't approve and, until this month, were largely unaware of.

Whisper CEO Michael Heyward says that the unknown employee who promised to track a user for life will be fired, assuming reports about what the employee said are true. Heyward, who was speaking at the WSJD Live event today in Southern California, addressed a report in The Guardian this month that said Whisper monitors some users' locations even after they opt out of tracking. Heyward called the report deeply misleading, and said Whisper is simply incapable of tracking users in the manner suggested by the newspaper.

Heyward said users must opt in to tracking, and that even then their location is "fuzzed" to within 500 feet. But the most explosive quotation in the Guardian story involved a Whisper user who identified as a lobbyist. "He's a guy that we'll track for the rest of his life and he'll have no idea we'll be watching him," the newspaper quoted an unnamed Whisper executive as saying.

"The important thing to remember is what the platform actually can do, versus what somebody might say."

Whisper's editor in chief, Neetzan Zimmerman, initially dismissed the report as "a pack of vicious lies." But Heyward later suspended unnamed members of its editorial team pending an investigation. Today, when asked by interviewer Evelyn Rusli whether he would fire the employee who said Whisper would track the user for life, he responded simply: "Yes."

But the question is complicated because every post on Whisper is already public — and in that sense, Heyward argued, the company doesn't know much beyond what the public does. (The big caveat is the user's IP address, which Whisper says it purges after a week.) If a lobbyist posts about his activities on the platform, anyone could theoretically keep track of those posts.

The question is whether Whisper has better tools to monitor and organize those posts than its users, and whether its employees will treat those sensitive posts with care. "The important thing to remember is what the platform actually can do, versus what somebody might say," Heyward said. "The challenge with this undercover reporting is that everything is unattributed. But obviously, we take it very seriously. We put the members of the editorial team who dealt with The Guardian on leave while we investigate it."

The History Channel’s sinister plot to force the American educational system to acknowledge aliens as “history” has just entered its second phase as A&E Networks announces the “first TV network-branded online course for college credit.” The course is being offered through the History Channel website and taught by University of Oklahoma professor Steve Gillon, the “Scholar-in-Residence at History,” which is kind of like being the chef-in-residence at Taco Bell.

The course goes by the nondescript title of United States 1865 To The Present, a time period that includes the Roswell Incident, the Nazis, and nearly 150 years’ worth of pawn-shop commerce. The course costs $500 for prospective students hoping (but not guaranteed) to parlay it into three university credits, or $250 for those simply trying to figure out how watching men with beards do their blue-collar jobs is considered “history.” If this trend continues, TLC will presumably offer ...

Earlier this month, Rolling Stone shocked the Adventure Time community with a profile of Pendleton Ward that revealed the series’ creator had stepped down from his position as show-runner in the middle of season five and has been working on the show solely as a writer and storyboard artist since then. The fact that the show didn’t experience any sort of dip following Ward’s self-mandated demotion is a testament to the strength of the infrastructure built by Ward and his esteemed team of collaborators, and Adventure Time is stronger than it’s ever been in its sixth season. Because this news came out while the series was on hiatus, I didn’t get the chance to say something:

Thank you, Pen.

Serving as creator and show-runner on this series as it grew from a passion project to an international phenomenon has taken its toll on Ward, but he ...

According to Deadline, Jason Bateman is set to direct and star in Fox Searchlight’s movie adaptation of Wired’s story about a guy who sold stock in himself. Since that’s not a thing that makes any sense, we’ll explain it a little further: The guy’s name is Mike Merrill, and, in an attempt to do something we don’t really understand, he sold off 100,000 shares in himself for $1 each. 928 people bought in—including family members and his then-girlfriend—and, like any similar business venture, he gave his “shareholders” control over what decisions he made. Unfortunately, the shareholders then went on to basically ruin his life. It’s hard to blame them, though, because that sounds like it was a lot of fun.

The movie version will be titled IPO Man, and even though we just explained what it’s about, we’ll ...