Comic Book Creator # 25 Spring 2021 (magazine review).
The 25th edition of ‘Comic Book Creator’ is running a season late but editor Jon B. Cooke apologies and lists a couple projects that we should be seeing the results of next year.
The first interview is part one with Sal Quartuccio, a name you should be familiar if you bought the SQL comicbook portfolios and artbooks from the late 1970s and he’s been releasing them up to this decade. He was also involved in ‘Phase’ and the 8 issue ‘Hot Stuf’, both inspired by Wallace Wood’s ‘Witzend’. I’m keeping my eye out for the latter but now also for the former, so they are still out there. The edge Quartuccio had was because he was a trained printer he knew how to get the quality on the page at the right time.
Rick Leonardi goes over the creation of ‘Spider-Man 2099’ and how he went in diagonal opposites to what Stan Lee created with the original Spider-Man so not to have a direct lineage to Peter Parker so not locking down any history.
Part 2 of Scott Shaw!’s interview covers his time in animation with character design and then with ‘Captain Carrot And The Zoo Crew’. I do think he needs to clarify his involvement with the Pebbles sugary cereal causing diabetes. I don’t think he’s referring to Type One but excessive sugar contributing to making people obese which is a contributing factor to Type Two. Even so, there are a lot of other fatty foods contributing in the USA so I doubt it was the only dangerous food.
Obviously, the biggest section is devoted to Barry Windsor-Smith and his new graphic novel ‘Monsters’ and its evolution from what was once going to be an Incredible Hulk story. After an interview with Windsor-Smith, the exploration of plagiarism in comicbooks is interesting but doesn’t go far enough. I’ve always felt that that there was a grey area between plagiarism and homage, let alone acknowledgment of using someone else’s ideas but taking it in a different direction and let’s not even talk about things falling out of copyright.
The usual problem is getting away with it. I could make a subject of this myself which goes beyond the confines of this review. Suffice to say, until an idea is in print and circulation, it isn’t as protected as something left in a drawer.
The information in these articles here should make you think, more so about the type of creator contracts you sign and what they mean. Read and learn.
GF Willmetts
July 2021
(pub: TwoMorrows Publishing. 82 page illustrated magazine. Price: $ 9.95 (US). ISSN: 2330-2437. Direct from them, you can get it for $ 9.95 (US))
check out websites: www.TwoMorrows.com and https://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=133&products_id=1561
