I’m making TOTE BAGS for TCAF and MeCAF this year! Holy crow!!!
I’m hoping to have a similar design available through Topatoco sometime in the near future, but I’m having these done by a local company (managed by a former employee of my comic shop, which is kind of perfect) so they’ll be real on time for May!
COOL
This purse is a must-buy for 2013 ♡
Coexisting With The Fair Folk Who Have Taken Up Residence In/Around/Beneath Your University: A How-To Guide
See more of my comics here, and my art here!
Whole bunch of lore/things I couldn’t fit/everything I love about the overlap in superstition and General College Weirdness below the cut-
can you imagine if manga series were as hard to follow as american superhero comics? like if they got rebooted and reinterpreted as often. some girl would be like ‘oh yeah i loved the run where naruto was a sweet teenage boy’ and some smug neckbeard would be like ‘no the series where he was a mysogynistic 30-something year old hitman with a coke addiction was the only true series’ and then everyone would be arguing over whether the crossover universe with bleach counted, and if so, which one.
conversely: imagine if american superhero comics were as exhaustively continuous as manga series. you’re on volume five and keep waiting for that moment you keep hearing about where the joker puts commissioner gordon on a literal trauma rollercoaster and then someone’s like “oh yeah that doesn’t happen until volume 53” and you’re like “how many volumes are there” and they’re like “130 so far, but the writer thinks he can get it wrapped up by volume 203 or 2044, whichever comes first”, and then on the internet someone recommends you the three-volume AU series where they’re all catchphrase-spouting high schoolers and you decide to just cheat by watching the anime but the anime overtook the manga plotline ages ago and batman’s just married a female green lantern who doesn’t even exist in the manga
Into The Spiderverse took 100% of its critically acclaimed visuals from comic books and street art and while there are obvious in-universe reasons for this it can’t be ignored that BOTH of these are traditionally seen as “lowbrow” populist art forms, here celebrated for their inherent beauty, complexity and sociopolitical importance. In this essay I will-
Where’s the essay OP
Not a full essay but lemmie tell you. Spoilers below.
Why does Miles stop at a time-sensitive moment to paint one of Peter’s suits when he’d probably want to get going as quickly as possible? Three reasons.
One, on a character level Miles is about to go into the scariest endgame fight he’s been in the entire movie. Taking the time to make the costume his own, to take this little part of the old Spiderman’s legacy and probably get some encouraging words from Aunt May is important to pysch himself up enough to do this.
Two, suiting up for the first time is an important rite of passage in superhero comics. It represents the character deliberately taking on the role. Miles has been wearing a kid’s costume because he feels like a kid trying to take on the role of a hero. By putting on a real costume, his own costume that he designed, he is becoming his own hero.
Three, his costume is an extension of his art. He uses spray paint to alter it, and we see little drips and splatters in the costume’s design. Miles is a street artist and his spider-suit is a street artists’s creation.
Miles’s street art and his coming into his own as Spiderman are directly linked in the narrative in a way that’s too perfect to be accidental. His costume is made with spray paint. He’s bitten while painting a mural. He uses his spider-powers to put a sticker where his dad can’t find it. Jefferson doesn’t like Spiderman’s methods or Miles’s art. But in the end, he’s willing to work with both. And street art is the shared history Aaron, Jefferson and Miles all have even if they ended up on three drastically different paths.
Miles paints murals, throws stickers up on street signs, etc, both as self-expression and an expression of love for his city. It’s that same love for his home that makes him Spiderman, the city’s protector. His vigilante heroism and his illegal art are expressions of exact same thing.
And comics! This movie loves the language of comics!
It loves the humor in seeing the words float in the air around the characters! It loves stylized human figures and kirby dots and dynamic transitions! It loves the way comics tell stories (note that every time a characters is narrating their backstory in Into The Spiderverse it switches to comic format, doing highly comic-specific things like having three characters telling their stories side by side.)
Miles reads Spiderman comics in-universe and they’re what helps him understand what’s happening. How many people who worked on this movie do you think read a comic at a formative age and saw themselves in it, in some way?
Of course, if I’m going to talk about the “language” of comics or the “language” of street art I can’t ignore the fact that these two art forms have influenced each other immensely over the years, joyfully borrowing from each other at every opportunity.
1. She mentions Lois Lane ( Superman’s lover in DC comics ) in the ninth doctor comics
2. She also mentions in the same comic book series The Daily Bugle ( the newspaper company Spider Man used to work in )
3. Rose said she used to read about people traveling between parallel universes in comics
4. Ten said that he gets Rose comics from the future
“All these girls dressing up like harley quinn now with suicide squad being popular, I bet they don’t even read comics”
Yes. Comics. The comics that harley quinn originated in. Harley Quinn, original comic book character. Comic books, the only medium Harley Quinn has ever appeared in, comics, nothing else.
You know who I really fucking hate who I don’t talk about much? People who are so high and mighty about superhero comics and how bad they are and how all non-superhero comics are better. The fact of the matter is, a huge majority of the independent comics scene is a trashy, ultra violent jerk off fest for the same assholes who ruined superhero comics in recent history to begin with.
A thread on Twitter this morning. Guys, don’t pirate comics. Please. Comics is a very small (mostly) creator run industry, so when you scan or torrent a comic, you’re directly hurting the creators. Even if you pirate comics from major publishers, you’re really only denying the creators of their income.
Artists/writers who work on comics make next to nothing. It’s commonplace in the comics industry for the people that make them to be constantly struggling to make ends meet. Just buy a book here and there. Support a Patreon. If you like the work, support it. We work very long hours to make the content you’re enjoying. We would like to not have to worry about how we’re going to buy food while we do it.
man, comics are fascinating and terrible
but at least being a comics fan gives you the ultimate power
what is canon? literally whatever you like, pick and choose from a zillion issues of contradictory nonsense because who can stop you? no one
once you’ve been a comics fan, you feel so free to do this with everything else. “that was bad and by a bad writer and it didn’t happen. GONE.”
i highly recommend it.
And speaking of gross bros thinking of nerd girls like fucking unicorns…
I was actually talking to a female client once about cannon-fannon and how much I love listening to her talk comics, and had a male client interupt us to tell me he has never met a chick that is into comics before, he’s never even heard of a girl being into comics before, and he has always wanted a nerdy girlfriend and that i absolutely MUST give him her number.
I actually had to explain to him that I wasn’t joking when I said she was out of his league.
Yes, she is incredible, she is beautiful, she is intelligent, successful, highly knowledgeable and enthusiastic about comics, and she’s also not even going to look twice at you because literally all you got is that she fulfills a fantasy of yours.
Yes bro i get it, she’s your ideal girl.
Trust me, she’s a lot of people’s ideal girl. And you’re not even on her radar. You’re not special because you’re into comics. She has a very wide range of potential partners to choose from and ‘never having met a nerdy girl before’ isn’t a good character trait, because it means you know zero women. Or zero women have trusted your creepy ass with the knowledge that they are into comics.
The most concerning part of that entire conversation was his complete inability to grasp the concept that she wouldn’t date him and his insistence that she would.
He insisted that I give her name/number/fb/actually call her and ask her to come to the studio (wtffff???) because he needed to meet her.
And then just could not fathom that I refused.
He seemed to be running on this idea that if she met him, she would like him. For no other reason than that he was into comics and he wanted a nerd girlfriend.
And I was somehow out of line for refusing to give my best freinds deets to this creepy nerdbro because I couldn’t possibly know that she wouldn’t be into him.
He got really upset.
He was in my studio for 45 mins arguing with me on and off about this and trying to push me into giving her number.
Out. Of. Your. League. Not on your level. Too fucking good for you. Not a possibility. You’ve got nothing she wants. You’re one of literally thousands who would want her. You have nothing to offer her. You tick zero of her boxes. You do not even meet the minimum requirements for me to even ask her.
NOT
HAPPENING
MATE.
This is why women don’t say they’re women in WoW, this is why women don’t say they’re into games irl. This is why women don’t hang out in comics stores. This is why nerd women hide one of these two aspects of themselves when interacting with nerd men.
Because you creepy as FUCK about us.
‘never having met a nerdy girl before’ isn’t a good character trait, because it means you know zero women.
truuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuth
