Posts Tagged Marvel
Chris Giarrusso on Mini Marvels, G-Man
Posted by admin in comedy, comics, sequential art on December 8, 2008
Chris Giarrusso (better known by many as Chris G) is the latest in a series of interviews spinning out of this past September’s Baltimore Comic-Con. Giarrusso is the artist behind the popular take on Marvel characters as children, Mini Marvels. He’s also known for his earlier work for Image, G-Man. We talked a little bit of both in this email interview.
Tim O’Shea: My first question actually comes from your biggest fan in the O’Shea home, my 9-year-old son, Colin. He asks: “How did he come up with the Mini Marvels?”
Chris Giarrusso: I was a big fan of newspaper comic strips growing up, and many of the classics comic strips featured casts of kid characters, like Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” and Bill Watterson’s “Calvin and Hobbes” for example. I thought it would be neat to do a sort of Charlie Brown meets Marvel Super Heroes hybrid.
O’Shea: If I understood correctly, the first printing of the Mini Marvels digest sold out. Did the strong performance of the digest take you or Marvel management by surprise, or were you guys expecting it to do that well?
Giarrusso: Marvel was on the fence with the decision of whether or not to publish it at all in the first place because they didn’t think it would do well. Marvel was very surprised that it sold out in under a month.
Jason Aaron on Ghost Rider, Wolverine, Scalped and More
Posted by admin in Uncategorized, comics, sequential art, sports on December 1, 2008
Jason Aaron is a creator I had the pleasure of interviewing back in my SBC days. Back then, Aaron was just starting to get some well-deserved attention for his work. What struck me about that interview was just how savvy he was (and continues to be). Ghost Rider and Wolverine are two characters that typically fail to spark my interest, but not when Aaron’s writing them. Aaron is busy at Marvel writing the ongoing Ghost Rider series, the Wolverine: Manifest Destiny miniseries. We also discuss his recent stint on Black Panther and the ongoing Vertigo series, Scalped. Last but not least, just in time to spread some holiday cheer this week sees the release of Punisher MAX X-Mas Special.
Tim O’Shea: As the positive reaction to Ghost Rider has grown, how much were you surprised at the number of reactions that ran along the lines of “I’ve never found the character of interest…until now”?
Jason Aaron: It’s nice to know I’ve helped bring new readers to the fold, but Ghost Rider was already a fun character long before I came along, all the way back to when he was first written by Gary Friedrich.
O’Shea: Given how busy you are with your various writing assignments, what drives you to take on the GR letters column? (Don’t get me wrong, it makes for fun reading…)
Aaron: GHOST RIDER was my first big ongoing assignment for Marvel, and I figured a lot of the people who’d be reading the book would have never heard of me, so I thought the letters column provided a great opportunity to introduce myself to them. And yeah, it’s a blast. GHOST RIDER gets a lot of mail. In particular, we get a lot of letters from people who don’t read any comics other than GHOST RIDER. I don’t know what it is about the character, but it has a very broad appeal. From church folks to cons, we get letters from them all.
Free Jeff Parker
Posted by admin in Literature, comics on March 23, 2008
No Jeff Parker’s not in jail or imprisoned in any metaphorical or actual manner.
And he’s gonna be annoyed that I don’t post with any graphics. But hey, he’s the guy who just posted an eight-part prose piece at his blog.
That’s where the free part comes into play here. While this first ran elsewhere in anticipation of his Marvel Comics 2006 miniseries, Agents of Atlas, Parker recently re-ran the eight-part Menace from Space story. Here are links to part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, part six, part seven and part eight. Jeff’s a great writer and the gives folks great dialogue lines like:
“Well I couldn’t find a suspect, so we’re even,” said Marvel Boy.
Thanks for the free entertainment, Jeff.