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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.

Christmas Newsletter 2008

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Hello, and Merry Christmas to all our readers, from all of us at/within Wicker Man Studios.

http://www.wickermanstudios.com/

This has been a big year for WMS, as we left our last site and re-launched our own site. Our own site had just been “hey here’s stuff about us” beforehand, but we re-launched it as the single location for all our stuff, particularly our flagship comic Gun Street Girl, where all stories that have been posted so far are readable for free.

http://www.wickermanstudios.com/comics/gsg/gsg-archives.html

Then a little while later we took on our first official new members aside from myself, Barbara, and Ryan Howe: Steven Saunders and Josh Wagner. Steven Saunders used to run the comics news column ALL THE RAGE in its final incarnation, and Josh Wagner wrote Fiction Clemens for Ape Entertainment, which I edited.

http://www.wickermanstudios.com/about.html

Along with them came their project SALVUS and the art crew for it: Leo Freites and Veronica Gandini.

http://www.wickermanstudios.com/comics/salvus/salvus-archives.html

Steven is also working on his own project, THE SECRET CROSS. It’s one-foot-in-one-foot-out of WMS proper, so far, and that’s fine.

http://secretcross.com/blog/

Me, I’m playing around with Twitter more than usual, trying to make a compromise between actually blogging and not having the time to bother to blog...

http://twitter.com/parkcooper

Barbara and I are really into Motown right now... We watched the TV Movie of THE TEMPTATIONS recently... now we’re reading up on them. My favorite is probably Melvin (Franklin), the lowest-voiced one... that’s him you hear going “There’s no difference between day and night” on “Cloud Nine” and “I can make it rain whenever I want it to” in “Can’t Get Next To You”... Melvin was the coolest one (besides the spooky-beyond-all-reason David Ruffin, which is a very scary sort of cool) in the movie, and in real life, Melvin loved BATMAN. That’s right, BATMAN. This was before the Adam West TV show, so Melvin just loved him some Batman comic books. Melvin put the bat-symbol on all his stuff, and asked to be referred to as The Black Batman. Barb now wants a black Batman for real.

Barb: “There oughta be a black Batman. How about that Azrael: Agent of the Bat AzBat guy? Was he black?”

Park: “HELL, no. THAT would have been COOL. Therefore you KNOW he wasn’t black, since that was NOT a cool time in Bat-history.”

Barb: “...There oughta be a black Batman.”

Park: “Word.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melvin_Franklin

Huh, and that’s interesting, David Bryan "D.B." Woodside, the guy who played Melvin in the TEMPTATIONS movie, was also the principal of the high school in the final days of BUFFY.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.B._Woodside

Barb wanted me to mention DORORO as the most comic-book like movie we’ve seen lately... she also saw the live-action DEATH NOTE 2 earlier this same year, but DORORO, as the much more recent viewing, looms much more recently in her mind these days. It was pretty good.

We became aware of Dororo because I’m going from one Osamu Tezuka thing to another these days. It all started when, wearing my editor-in-chief of MangaLife hat, Vertical sent me a volume of Tezuka’s BUDDHA. Well I read the rest from the local library, and came to respect the man. Then they sent me two volumes of BLACK JACK, which I liked about as well, and Dororo, which I came to understand only recently that the old master never finished... too bad!

So then I recently noticed that the local library also has like almost two dozen volumes of ASTRO BOY. I know what you may be thinking, but it’s really good! If the guy who wrote LONE WOLF AND CUB is their Frank Miller, Tezuka is their Will Eisner. I was just saying in my SEPTAGON BRIEFING column that I do for Septagon Studios, that Gun Street Girl is “Will Eisner’s brand of can-take-any-type-of-tone-and-be-used-to-tell-any-type-of-story Action/Adventure”. Well, GSG is much more characterization-based than Astro Boy, but otherwise, that description does cover all three works.

Did I mention that Astro Boy has machine guns that come out of his ass? Over and over, to the point that he seems to develop it as a natural reflex, any villain trying to sneak up behind Astro Boy is destroyed when someone yells “Astro! LOOK OUT!” BRT-T-T-T. End of evil attacker.

I’m serious.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astro_boy

In other recent comics news, last night, Barb showed me the old movie TEACHER’S PET with Doris Day and Clark Gable. Gable, getting up there in years, plays the city editor of a major New York newspaper. I watched him for a while, and finally it came to me: I hit pause and then turned to Barb and barked “Miss Brant! Get me Parker! I need those photos immediately if we’re going to make the 5 o'clock edition!”

She suddenly, totally agreed. Consciously or unconsciously, we’re convinced that this is where Stan Lee got J. Jonah Jameson four years later. The haircut was the same, the voice is the same, the attitude is the same, the mustache is the same as in every portayal, the character’s name was James (although some characters called him various nickname versions of that), the character is the same often-hypocritical-curmudgeon-with-a-heart-of-gold-buried-way-down-deep. Check it out:

http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMTUzMjYyMDI3NF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwMzQzNTI2._V1._SX327_SY400_.jpg

http://videodetective.com/photos/087/00368304_.jpg

Barb also reminds me, since I’m making a list of comic book culture stuff, to mention that we read online that the new President collects Spider-Man and Conan comics. So when will sequential literature start getting some arts grants? I am ready for that day to arrive right now. I think I shall not hold my breath in anticipation, though. I think he’s about to be too busy to read a lot more soon, and thus may not feel the need for any impending bailouts of the industry... on the other hand, maybe when one is President, Conan is ALL one has time to read. How long does it take a quick reader to read a Conan comic these days? Like 3 minutes, max? I do not know.

http://blog.ugo.com/images/uploads/savage-dragon-barack-obama.jpg

Okay, well, that’s a nice wrap-up of comics-related stuff for the end of 2008... Happy holidays to all of you who have love in your hearts for sequential storytelling.

--Park Cooper
--Wicker Man Studios



http://www.wickermanstudios.com/