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Due to injuries sustained during a month long blogfest, Matt. Murray is currently on the SAC Blog’s disabled list.  He hopes to quickly ascend the ranks of the injured reserves with a fresh onslaught of insights and snarky comments about comics and cartoons.  This week, Jared Gniewek will graciously be delivering a double dose of Die by the Pen…

As someone who is recently unemployed, it is doubly important for me to adhere to a work ethic regarding my writing. I find that my gentleman’s library can be a touch distracting if I am in the middle of a piece and need to get out of the house to work. I found a coffee shop a mere fifty blocks away. It’s good to get out of the house and the walk keeps the brain gears greased. I find, sometimes, that stories are a very easy thing to come up with on a two and a half mile walk, but what becomes difficult is communicating their setting. I mainly write Horror, and it is very important to maintain setting. A reader has a very hard time accepting that the monsters are real when the characters are floating around an undefined place. One must know the barriers in Horror, so that these may be destroyed by the invading agent.

My latest inspiration is experimenting with world building exercises. It’s important that the characters you work on live in a breathing, vital world. No one lives in a vacuum – not even the most powerful wizard in the universe. Everyone is a part of their community (even an outsider is a reflection of our response to a pre-existing social network). We inhabit physical spaces; so should our characters. The town, country, planet, dimension, etc. should be hatched out at some point. In a lot of cases it won’t matter all that much that the story takes place in Utah or Burbank. But in quite a few stories the environment is so defined that it becomes an entity as strong as the characters themselves, such as in the setting of Tokyo in the works of Yoshihiro Tatsumi or the planets of Apocalypse and New Genesis in the works of Jack Kirby. Or, perhaps most famously, Hill House in the novel by Shirley Jackson.

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Every Monday, Matt. Murray reviews, revisits and rambles about comics, cartoons and their interactions in and with related media.

by Matt. Murray

A little more than ten years ago, the mis-identified “genre” of comic book movies entered a new phase with the release of the first Blade.  Declared dead in 1997, thanks largely to the efforts of Joel Schumacher and Akiva Goldsman, movies based on superhero comics bounced back a summer later thanks to the underestimated efforts of and a lot of luck riding on the side of  screenwriter David Goyer, actor Wesley Snipes and director  Stephen Norrington.  Blade opened the door for not only two sequels, but for the development and final greenlighting of several other Marvel Comics properties including X-Men and Spider-Man.

Now, as we have either just left or recently entered a newer cycle thanks to Iron Man and The Dark Knight, and the just released Watchmen looms in the collective consciousness – splitting the ranks of film and comics fans a like, I feel that its a good time to take a look back at what I believe to be the true crap that emerged from the shadows of Blade.

This isn’t a list of “the worst” super hero movies per se, but rather a brief look at films I really didn’t like from the past ten years and why I didn’t care for them.

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Strip Search features reviews and recommends comic strips available in print and on the web.

by Jennifer M. Babcock

Piled Higher and Deeper is a webcomic drawn by a good friend of mine, Jorge Cham. He started drawing PhD Comics as a graduate student at Stanford University. For about a year, my alma mater UCLA ran his comic in their paper (I believe on Wednesdays) and it has since been syndicated in several university newspapers and in three published book collections. On top of all that, Jorge gets to run around the country giving lectures about how to cope with being a grad student – using his comic as visual aid.

In a nutshell, PhD is a pretty big success. I don’t think it’s listed as a webcomic that is self-sufficient (meaning that the profits Jorge receives via merchandising and advertising can fully support him without a “day job”) but I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t.

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