Who's Who In The CBU Update 2009

Who are... Park and Barb?

Barbara Lien-Cooper and Park Cooper, are the owners of Wicker Man Studios and of Gun Street Girl, its flagship project created by Barbara and artist Ryan Howe. Barbara has written for many websites, and served a one-year stint as Managing Editor of the multiple-Eisner-award-winning print magazine Comic Book Artist. Park is the Editor-in-Chief of indie comics company Septagon Studios, and of Comics Bulletin's sister-website MangaLife. Together, they also co-wrote the graphic novel Half Dead, published by Dabel Brothers Productions and Marvel Comics, and later picked up again by Desperado Publishing, and the New Media project The Hidden for manga publisher Tokyopop. They both also adapt manga and edit manga and comics for various companies.

Any Comment?

By Park Cooper & Barb Lien-Cooper

ITEM: Barb had a dream this morning before waking up that Trondheim's DUNGEON from publisher NBM was all in color now. That's the sort of stuff that goes on here at the Apartment of Ideas.

ITEM: Is anyone else getting spam that LOOKS like it's from comics creators? Barbara was horrified at why Paul Jenkins might have emailed her until we saw that it was simply offering cheaper interest rates.

It wouldn't be the only time that a big-name creator emailed Barbara to be mean to her about a bad review so it made her nervous at first. Not that Barbara's been feeling unkind toward (or indeed reviewing) Paul Jenkins since she saw what happened to Hellblazer AFTER he left... Sure, Paul Jenkins isn't the most unique name in the world, but I got some spam from Mike Allred today. There was a third instance of this recently but I can't remember who it was supposedly from. Is anyone else getting these? It's only a matter of time before Mark Millar sends email extolling the virtues of the process that now allows him to knock down brick walls with his enormous johnson... a _fake_ MM for a change, that is.



ITEM: Haven't seen HULK. Haven't seen MATRIX 2. Haven't seen DAREDEVIL. Haven't run out and bought HARRY POTTER EPISODE 5. Spent that money on two books by Crepax. Rented BABA YAGA. Rented RURONI KENSHIN. Read NEOTOPIA #5. Barb's trying to decide between watching WHALE RIDER or THE EYE this afternoon.

What if there were no Marvel _or_ DC? I'm becoming increasingly convinced that comics would continue just like always. I think these are ecological niches that just happen to have penguins and kangaroos in them. If there suddenly were no penguins nor kangaroos, then before ya know it, monkeys would get webbed feet and hands and start catchin' fish and nurse sharks would crawl up on land and be hangin' around the outback. I'm sure that if Marvel and DC disappeared tomorrow, that inside of two months, Dark Horse would stop taking any unsolicited submissions and Image would start... well, you know.

Barb says "You're saying the market would adapt, and you've said it. Move on! What bothers me is that our people will go to a movie whether it's good or bad just because it's geeky. If the reviews are bad, if even Entertainment Tonight pans it, they'll go because 'what would the MAINSTREAM culture know about OUR media?' It's like we're scared if we don't go see everything geek culture produces, that Hollywood will do like the comic book companies and say, 'oh, well that failed, we'll never make another superhero movie again...' This is the problem with voting with your wallet. You can have the crappiest superhero book, for instance, and if it's Batman or Cruller-Man, or whoever you've loved since you were 6, you'll buy into it, and if you have an ounce of intelligence, you'll know it's no good when it turns bad. But you'll stick by it anyway, maybe vowing to yourself that if it doesn't improve in a year, that MAAAAAYYYYBE you'll consider dropping it from your pull list."

Barb: "Movies are the same. With Daredevil there were reviews from geeks online BEFORE the movie came out, based on the ads and the clips shown. I thought maybe these people got into special previews and had actually seen the movie. They hadn't, I saw when I looked more closely--they were flooding the system with 5-star reviews just out of love for the comic and they'd 'heard' it was going to be good. Gee, thanks, that really helps me make a decision. They also would say things like, 'well, it's from Marvel, so it's got to be good.' That's the slogan of Smuckers Jam, you saps, not Marvel. I'm not picking on Marvel about this, Spider-Man was terrific and X-Men 2 was even better than X-Men 1. It's great when Hollywood gets it right. But for pity's sake, have some discernment. If only people had loyalty to the power of the story instead of this nostalgic "well I learned to read from this comic, so I'm gonna keep reading it until I have it delivered flat to my retirement home..."

Me: Thank you, Barb...

Barb: "Would you like to hear my rant about how we hold on to comic books from former eras and how that's done a lot to keep comics in the value systems of those bygone eras?"

Me: "I'd love to."

Barb: "The value systems of the Golden and Silver Age comics reflect the eras from which they came, say 1940's to 1965... This was the era when women were portrayed as victims, not having jobs outside of homes, passive, needed to be rescued, women who were sexually independent were not to be trusted, the golden age came out of the pulps and the pulps were by men for men and therefore had little to no interest in women as anything except as an adjunct to men's desires. By the same token, people of other races, when portrayed at all, were portrayed as stereotypes. But mostly, they were subject to what the feminists call erasure. If you're not part of the dominant culture, you just ain't seen. While popular culture is basically really dealing with minority rights and the incredible strides that have been made on racial, gender, and sexual preference issues since the civil rights act of 1964 and how this is portrayed in television, to pick a form of pop culture with which we're all familiar... Back over in comicbookdom, having driven most of the women and children out of comic book reading by basically the whole Diamond distributing thing and fanboys being the comic book store owners and basically ordering what appeals to them, comics by men for men, comics, especially the comic book store, is/are the last bastion of Floyd's Barbershop or Turkish Baths. By men for men."

Barb: "Not surprisingly, the by men for men thing holds on to the Golden and Silver Age comic books as The Golden Era, unconsciously still holding on to the value systems of those comics, systems that really need to be gotten rid of. It's once again the case of the fallacy of putting new wine in old wineskins [one of Barb's favorite phrases]. We get new authors, but all they want to be is like the guys before, so their new energy or new wine in those old wineskins just ends up tasting as stale as the old stuff. I suppose this is why some comic book fans don't really consider manga to be REAL comics. To do so one has to rise above one's cultural-centric viewpoint and embrace a take on a value system that's different. These fans will only, when discussing manga (which they usually haven't read), discuss the most stereotypical aspects of manga, the big eyes, the short schoolgirl skirts, the occasional sexual situation. And maybe speedlines, instead of actually investigating the quality of the books themselves. It feels ethnocentric and because females are finding values within manga that they can more readily identify than in American comics, these discussions or put-down sessions of manga frankly seem a tad sexist and chauvinistic. Manga, god bless it, is the court case that gets the first woman into the all-male health club or smoker's club or old boy's club. You might not like it, but things have changed."

Me: Hey I been meaning to show you this link: http://www.geocities.com/Broadway/1906/cultr03.html

Barb: "That's a great link. Back over in Tart I have people arguing with me in Going Postal because I'm saying Europe and manga are better in general than what America is coming up with. I've said that a lot of it is because of the respect comics are held in in Europe and the sheer availability of manga in Japan. So this little link you found might be of interest as it shows that American comics just aren't the only game in town. We think that oh golly, American comics must be just so damn popular around the world, and it just ain't always so. People, even if you don't agree with me, think! Don't be sheep!"

Me: Unless you are sheep. The site statistics show that 40 percent of SBC's readers in New Zealand and Wales are in fact sheep. They also like The Beano.

Barb: "On the other hand, I have to applaud those comics store owners that are ordering manga and do treat their female customers well and care about our (women's) business! Because I know you're out there! And I appreciate you! I know that you're not all, or even the majority of you, immature sexist fanboys. Although Eisner knows I have met more than enough comic-book-store personnel that fit that description. Not you, Kurt."

Barb: "It's not just that we LIKE these things, the Golden and Silver Ages, because I like Dickens or Bram Stoker or whatever and I'm not holding on to those value systems. But no one claims 'boy those were the days, wish we still wrote just like that, all we should ever do is write pastiches of that because that's when the medium peaked.' Except Alan Moore of course."

Me: "Good night everybody."














Your New Mantra: NEW WINES IN OLD WINESKINS