Jeet Heer posted a really thoughtful comment or two in the Ebony White thread. It seemed a shame to have them buried in comments, so I thought I’d highlight them here.
Monthly Archives: February 2011
HU To Focus Exclusively on Green Lantern Slash Fiction, Effective Immediately
As you know, we’re planning a redesign here sometime in the not-too-distant future. I’ve got some ideas about what I’d like to do, but if you have suggestions please let me know in comments.
Speak now or suffer the consequences.
Update: Also, we’re on Twitter now — http://twitter.com/hoodedu. Vom Marlowe is handling our twitternessing, or whatever the kids call it, so sign up and tell her hi!
One Thousand and One Nights with Melinda & Michelle
MELINDA: Hello, Utilitarians. I’m Melinda Beasi.
MICHELLE: And I’m Michelle Smith.
MELINDA: About a month ago, Noah asked if we’d be interested in having a conversation about comics here at The Hooded Utilitarian, similar to our weekly manga discussion column, Off the Shelf (at Manga Bookshelf), and our monthly art-talk feature, Let’s Get Visual (at Soliloquy in Blue). He suggested at the time that we might try discussing a mutually admired series (as we once did with Ai Yazawa’s Paradise Kiss), and that the subject need not be manga.
With those thoughts in mind, we decided to take a stab at One Thousand and One Nights, a South Korean boys’ love series written by Jeon JinSeok and illustrated by Han SeungHee, published in English by Ice Kunion/Yen Press. While this may seem like an unusual choice for this audience, there are a couple of things that make this series especially interesting to us.
First, though the story has a BL romance at its core, it is a multi-volume epic (11 volumes in total) featuring a series of interwoven stories-within-the-story drawn from multiple periods and cultural settings. Secondly, it’s a BL romance written by a man, unusual in a genre mainly written by (and for) women.
The Approaching Conglomerate
As you know if you’ve been reading the internets, some mysterious anonymous soul showed up here in comments and stated that Comics Comics was going to be merging with our former hosts, The Comics Journal.
Matthias Wivel has a short piece about the good and the bad of this move. (If it’s true!)
Gerhard- Craft, Credit, Cross-hatching and Completion
On Boxing Day of 2010 I had the opportunity to speak to Gerhard, the long-time background artist and environmental designer on Cerebus, one of the most sprawling pieces of visual fiction ever created. While reading back over the completed interview, I kept coming back to points that we touched on but didn’t really explore. I’d like to share some of these tangents with you now. Rather than trying to make this into a seamless whole, I hope you’ll accept these few bullet-pointed thoughts. In no particular order-
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There is a strange allure to the incomplete
Towards the end of our conversation Gerhard told me about an exhibition of Cerebus art that had taken place a few years ago in which some of his pencil preliminary drawings had been on display alongside finished pages. He said that the tracing paper pencil drawings had gone over really well, and that, in some cases, he preferred his pencils to his finished artwork.
- Gerhard preliminary tracing paper image, courtesy of Margaret Liss
This isn’t an uncommon reaction. There’s an undeniable appeal to an image that is in process, and I think that appeal remains no matter how accomplished the destination drawing.
Will Eisner Is No Mark Twain
I wanted to comment on Matt Seneca’s blog about this picture , but the site or my browser is wonky so I couldn’t, so what the hell. We’re not at tcj any more; I can do short posts twelve times a day if I want. Who’s to stop me?
Anyway, Matt argues that Eisner’s use of Ebony White is comparable to Mark Twain’s use of “nigger” in Huckleberry Finn.
TCJ.com/fail — Post Mortem
Yesterday I announced that the Hooded Utilitarian had left tcj.com. I somehow failed to mention in that post how utterly, ridiculously indebted I am to Derik Badman, who did all the technical work to move the site out of the sheer goodness of his heart. I don’t know what I would have done without him. (Or without Stephanie Folse and Caroline Small, who both did some troubleshooting as well.)
Before we move on into our post tcj existence, I wanted to talk a little more about our time there, for good and ill.