Which doesn’t mean we’re a newsblog. If anything, we’re an expositoryblog – or a selectively focused varietyblog. Maybe a comic-centric infoblog.

But what’s in a name anyway? Definitions only detract from the potential of any form of medium. For all intents and purposes, The Fabler Blog is The Fabler Blog. Nothing more and nothing less.

Although, for the record, we’re not a newsblog.

Right-O, with that established, a few things:
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1.) I would be remiss if I didn’t mention first and foremost the latest aesthetic overhaul to TheFabler.com. That’s right folks,  our home in this here little corner of the internet is evolving.

Click on over to observe the beauty – nay, the majesty – of The Fabler’s latest iteration. I’ll understand if it takes you a few minutes of breathless wonder before you return to peruse the rest of this comparatively humble post.
We even have some sneak peeks into the future of The Fabler posted on our brand-spanking-new About page. Also worthy of mention is the addition of Groups to the site, which you can learn more on at that same link above.

2.) Free Comic Book Day is right around the corner, and coming up fast! Of course, the figurative ‘corner’ here is actually a measure of roughly two months time, but still – I’m sure May 1st will be here before any of us knows it.

In fact, the day (which I personally believe Canadians should petition for to become a nationally recognized holiday) is so fast approaching, the official Free Comic Book Day website now has previews up for this year’s slate of comics.

The lineup is decently impressive. Marvel has an Iron Man/Thor comic written by Matt Fraction and illustrated by John Romita jr. on there, while DC and Top Cow are each using the opportunity to launch major imprint events. DC has War of the Supermen # 0 up, while Top Cow is releasing Artifacts: First Look.

One of the highlights looks to be Dynamite’s Green Hornet # 1, featuring Kevin Smith’s debut take on the legendary character. Another would be the Mouse Guard/Fraggle Rock double feature (the second title I’m oddly excited for), and another still is Fractured Fables – a kid-friendly collection of fairy tales turned upside down by a wildly talented collection of artists/authors. Alex Grecian, Doug TenNapel, and Camilla d’Errico are among the names associated with that last project.

Victoria Day is a fairly cumbersome Canadian holiday that could use the axe. A holiday celebrating the birth day of the current British monarch? The Canada Act was so twenty-eight years ago, people.

Free comics is a much more culturally relevant subject of celebration for modern Canadians.

3.) Back in January I made a post about the lawsuits currently brewing between Marvel and the heirs of Jack Kirby. Somewhere amidst the senseless gibbering I made reference to the ongoing legal woes between Jerry Siegel (original co-creator of Superman) and Warner Bros./DC.

In the latest piece of news regarding the Siegel/Warner Bros. litigation, it seems that WB has chosen to replace its existing outside counsel with Daniel Petrocelli.

Petrocelli made his name originally representing the father of victim Ronald Goldman in the infamous O.J. Simpson murder case. He’s also represented Disney in a licensing battle over the rights of Winnie the Pooh.

If there were a witty correlation I could find between the three cases, you would be reading it right now. Sadly, not the case.

What this means for the trial is that Warner Bros. is essentially baring its teeth and bringing out the big guns. Marc Toberoff, who is representing the Siegel estate in this matter as well as the Kirby family in the aforementioned case, is going to have his hands full in the coming months.

4.) If you’ve scoped around The Fabler Blog before, (and chances are if you’ve read to the end of this post you probably have) you’ve probably heard me gush adoringly about Scott McCloud at some point or another.  My fascination with the works and ideas of Mr. McCloud is so great, it probably even rivals the level of contempt I feel for Boise, Idaho.

Well, that may just be hyperbole.

In any case, Graphic NYC posted on Monday what just might be the definitive profile of Scott McCloud.

Christopher Irving, who wrote the article, is meticulously thorough in detailing the career and ideas of the Understanding Comics’ author. McCloud himself gives ample insight throughout into the background processes behind everything from Zot! to his upcoming 2012 graphic novel, tentatively titled The Sculptor.

Seth Kushner also provides some nifty photos of Scott looking all professorly in front of a blackboard covered in diagrams and doodles.

Why should you read this profile? Because Scott McCloud is one of the most influential minds in comics today, and has vested more time in deconstructing and explaining the nuances of the medium than possibly anyone else alive.

Also because you’ve already wasted at least five minutes of your life reading  this comparatively shallow post, and you will be roughly twenty times more enriched for spending another ten minutes learning about Scott McCloud.
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That’s all for this Wednesday. We have another double-feature of interviews in the works for the next couple of weeks, so check back soon for that double-dip of artist insight.

I now find myself oddly craving Dunk-a-roos.

This is Kevin@thefabler, signing out.

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

Archetype [ahr-ki-tahyp] – noun: a typical example of something; the original model of something from which others are copied.

A few weeks ago I wrote an article about Jack Kirby that touched on some his contributions to the Marvel Universe of comics, and it got me thinking. Jack was a visionary thinker, and many of his creations grew into modern-day icons – destined to be emulated, satirized, and reinterpreted in countless ways.

Many of the characters that he co-created, along with the creations of such other visionaries as Stan Lee, Joe Simon, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Bob Kane, Bill Finger and Gardner Fox, became the de facto mold for what people came to expect from comics. This mold would later be resisted by underground comic movements, innovative ‘darker’ takes on character properties, sequential art with underlying social statements, and biographical comics… but even in the resistance it continues to cultivate, the mark left by ‘traditional comic heroes’ is apparent.

Of course, when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the Incredible Hulk, they weren’t exactly pulling pearls out of thin air. Stories like Jekyl and Hyde had been around for centuries, with tales of the dual natures of mankind going as far back as Ovid’s Metamorphoses. When Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster came up with their Man of Steel, anyone familiar with the Greek myth of Heracles would attest that this wasn’t the first invincible ‘Hero of the People’ to go around kicking super-powered villain ass.

The stories that came to define the Golden and Silver Ages of Comic Books were really themselves just new spins on old ideas. Imaginative, well-crafted spins uniquely re-imagined on a 20th century canvas, but still largely patchwork products sewn from the fabric of all the similar stories that preceded them.

But this isn’t what I was thinking about. At least not in the super-big-picture-all-stories-throughout-history-build-on-each-other blah blah intertextuality blah sort of sense.

A lot of these characters and stories don’t need to be traced back to antiquity to find the earlier incarnations that inspired them. Most Golden-to-Silver Age characters – as influential as they would be on our modern ideas of ‘comic books’ – owe much of their own existence to the pulp magazine and newspaper comic strip heroes of the twenties and thirties.

Those thoroughly immersed in the geeky waters of comic book fandom are generally familiar with the legacy and impact of the pulps and early 20th century comic strips. Some characters from the era cemented themselves in such strong iconography that their names are widely known today, even outside of the comic reading populace. Zorro, Buck Rogers, and Conan the Barbarian would fall into this camp.

That same widespread audience might be less likely, however, to draw parallels between the mythos of Batman (created in 1939) and that of Zorro, (created 1919) the wealthy Spanish nobleman who dons a mask and black garb to defend innocents from the corrupt.  Not that I’m implying Bob Kane and Bill Finger shamelessly lifted the concept of Zorro – Kane has openly stated that Zorro was an influence in his original imagining of the caped crusader. This isn’t a closely guarded secret by any means, as is seen in the panel below from Batman # 0 by Doug Moench.

Similarly, the same general public that would recognize the name Conan the Barbarian and identify it largely with a younger, less fluent future Governor of California, would likely be lost if you sparked up a conversation about Kull of Atlantis. Kull was the earlier creation of original Conan author Robert E. Howard, a character whose heroic barbarism and wanton sexual exploits would form the basis of its own sub-genre of pulp magazines and literature.

I think it’s important to continue to acknowledge the cultural contributions made by those protagonists of pulp magazines and classic comic strips that have fallen from the collective consciousness. If not their lasting effects on entertainment in general, then at least their influence on (what are typically seen as their successors) comic books.

Take Doc Savage for instance, a name cited from time to time as a pop culture reference directed towards ‘in the know’ audience members. In the comic book world, Doc Savage has maintained a spotty presence over the years; most recently, he appeared alongside Batman as part of DC Comics’ First Wave miniseries, though he has also had his own limited run titles with Dark Horse, Millennium Comics, Marvel, and Street & Smith. Savage represents a man who has, through science, been pushed to the pinnacle of human achievement, and through it all retained his moral obligations to both his country and his fellow man.

This may sound a little familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of traditional superhero motif, like, say, that of Spider-Man or Captain America.

To approach a (comparatively) more obscure classic character property, Mandrake the Magician could be seen as an early antecedent to the DC Universe lexicon of modern, supernaturally powered superheroes – or in Marvel terms, as an early antecedent to Dr. Strange. Created by Lee Falk, who would later create the character of ‘the Phantom’, Mandrake could cast illusions with particular gestures of his hands – an ability he used to fight everything from common thugs to evils from other dimensions.

Other pulp/early American comic strip heroes worthy of note included The Shadow, The Phantom Detective, Flash Gordon, Solomon Kane, and The Spider, among many others.

The likes of Jack Kirby and Gardner Fox should never be disparaged for their contributions to comics as they exist today, so long as credit is also given to the creators of the pulps and comic strips of the early 20th Century for laying the groundwork.

I guess we could also give credit to Ovid, but let’s stick relatively contemporary here.

It’s pretty nifty that the comic industry itself continues to recognize the impact of these original characters in the form of new comics telling new (or retelling old) stories of their adventures.

It’s also neat (and worthy of mention) that a lot of the titles I’ve mentioned have live action movie adaptations in the works, like Doc Savage and Mandrake the Magician. and Solomon Kane has already been released in France, and you can view an English trailer for it here. There’s even a remake of The Shadow in the works – by Sam Raimi, no less.

Let’s all just keep our fingers crossed on the casting of that last one.

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

At the other end of the lawsuit, we find… the artist responsible for creating the original likenesses of all of the above properties.

Okay, okay – so as we all know, legendary comic book artist Jack Kirby has been dead and gone for over a decade and a half now. The man who (alongside Stan Lee, Joe Simon, Steve Ditko, and several others) helped build Marvel as a major player in the comic industry is not in fact the direct catalyst behind this latest nugget of comic book conflict.

Last September, Jack Kirby’s heirs made it known that they intended to invoke a copyright law which would terminate existing copyright claims to many of the characters Kirby co-created. Apparently, there are certain tenets within the murky waters of rights and ownership legislation that allow an author (or that author’s heirs) to regain copyrights a certain number of years after those rights were initially granted out.

Last year, the heirs of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel made headlines with a similar court case. They wound up winning a packet of rights back concerning the Man of Steel, including his origin story, the names of his parents (as well as of the planet Krypton), and publishing rights to some of the earliest Superman appearances in comics. Marc Toberoff, the lawyer who represented Siegel’s heirs, is now onboard helping to defend the Kirby copyright claims.

The big news now is that, as of a week and a half ago, Marvel is suing to render those claims invalid.

And so the soap opera that revolves around creator rights versus those of the major comic book publishing companies spills over into yet another decade.

This daytime drama is one that has been around as long as the very concept of comics as we know them today.

Jerry Siegel’s own struggles with creative ownership go back to 1938, when he and Superman co-creator Joe Shuster originally sold the copyright for the character to Action Comics for a measly $130. After receiving a comparatively tiny fraction of the revenue generated by their creation for nearly a decade, they sued to void their original contract in 1947.

The attempt was met with failure, and for several decades more the creators of the most wildly successful comic character in history continued to go uncredited and underpaid. In 1973 they made another (ultimately futile) attempt to regain rights to Superman, though at least this time the press rallied around their cause enough to effect some kind of change. Warner Communications (who by that time inherited the rights to the character through the acquisition of National Comics) responded to press coverage of the unfair treatment of Siegel and Shuster by offering them each a pension of $20,000 per year.

In addition, they would finally be credited with creating Superman on all Supes-related media. Over thirty years after the event.

After Siegel and Shuster passed away in 1996 and 1992 (respectively), their heirs attempted to reclaim copyrights in 1999 and several times again between 2002 and 2008. It wasn’t until just last August that they actually gained some significant ground in the courts.

Marvel has had its own share of discontent within the ranks of its creative talent to deal with in the past.

One notable example would be Marvel’s infamous tendency to merchandise characters and art created by freelance artists without allowing those individuals any creative control or proportionately reasonable royalties.

In 1991, Marvel experienced a coup of sorts in reaction to this. A number of popular artists then-freelancing for Marvel decided to collectively demand more rights with regards to their creative contributions to the company.

Many are now familiar with how Marvel’s flat-out refusal of their requests led those disenfranchised illustrators to branch off to form their own independent comic company, Image Comics. Those artists were Todd McFarlane, Erik Larsen, Rob Liefeld, Jim Lee, Marc Silvestri, Whilce Portatio, and Jim Valentino.

If you’re starting to get a sense that ‘copyright law’ and ‘creative rights’ are vastly important terms in comics, you’re bang on the money. As an artistic medium historically dependant on complex relationships between publishers, artists, writers, distributors, and everyone else in-between, ‘who controls what’ and ‘who deserves how’ much become paramount questions.

It’s no wonder that many prefer to go the route of self-publishing their creative material.

Establishing creator rights in the comic book industry is such an integral concern to artists that many even got together to draft their own ‘Comic Creator’s Bill of Rights‘ back in the eighties. Scott McCloud, Dave Sim, Kevin Eastman, and Peter Laird were but a few of the big-name creators involved in the Bill’s conception.

The latest case of the Kirby heirs versus Marvel does represent another soap-operatic episode in an industry pointedly prone to such drama, but it is important nonetheless to pay attention to its outcome.

Some are claiming that the heirs are merely partaking in a cash grab now that the window to terminate existing Kirby copyrights is approaching, especially since Hollywood is experiencing a surge of popularity with movies based on comics. It doesn’t help their case that the initial letters of termination were distributed to most of the major production studios in Hollywood, nor does it help that they came on the heels of news that Disney was buying Marvel.

The argument put forth by Marc Toberoff on behalf of the Kirby Heirs is that they are just seeking “proper compensation and credit” for the lasting creative contributions he made to Marvel in his lifetime.

Meanwhile, Marvel claims that Jack Kirby’s creations were all work-for-hire assignments, and thus not covered by laws regarding termination of copyright.

Toberoff has pointed out that, “It is a standard claim predictably made by comic book companies to deprive artists, writers, and other talent of all rights in their work.”

I’m tentatively siding with Toberoff and the heirs here, mostly because I don’t want to see further precedent set against artists (or their heirs) trying to regain some form of artistic control or monetary compensation from corporations that have reaped disproportionately vast profit from their creations.

That being said, here’s hoping that – whatever the outcome – what Jack himself would’ve wanted winds up factoring in at least a little amidst all of the talk of dollars and cents.

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming