PLEASE Consider Supporting CBO
Please consider supporting Comic Bits Online because it is a very rare thing in these days of company mouthpiece blogs that are only interested in selling publicity to you. With support CBO can continue its work to bring you real comics news and expand to produce the video content for this site. Money from sales of Black Tower Comics & Books helps so please consider checking out the online store.
Thank You
Terry Hooper-Scharf
no
ReplyDeleteI read CBO when I can - the issue I have with CBO and some other sites in relationto making a "comment" is you provide so many updates/ news items (this is not a critisism, actually its a good thing) and some are in French, German etc (hey Im Scottish I barely speak English). But the point is I cannot always comment on them as I've either just compelted a 65 plus hour 5 day week at work and dont have much time when I get home (or Im out and about at the weekend at the footy, pub, etc) and next thing its 10 blogs later. But i hope youmanage to keep CBO open i I know its been a tought year,
ReplyDeleteHi. No, I appreciate you, TwoHeadedBoy and Ja D etc., when you make comments and you make the point of the foreign language items -that draw in a lot of views from Italy, France and Germany -so many countries! I think that 2 or 3 of the couple thousand a day on CBO (excluding other feeds) MUST have a question or point or -and this happened with the old WordPress CBO)- even a "I like seeing this" or "I like this post" and that I liked because it showed someone read the item. I just realised, though, some people are asked to "prove you are not a robot" (yeah, a robot cannot click on a box!!) or in some places do not have online IDs because of, uh, "government problems" but you look at all time total views from the USA and I don't think I've had a comment from there. Certainly not China. Subzero comments from Germany but that's it yet Germany and France provide high viewing figures....oh, and little got done during the rugby world cup here. But life is ebb and flow!
ReplyDeleteOh, and, Stransky, like your mother told you: you have the RIGHT to say "No!"
I would really hate to see closed on ComicBits Online. I know how much the whole medium means to you and know the talent that would be closed off with CBO finishing. I would beg you also NOT to destroy ANY of your work! Giving in lets the pissarts win. Peter has even suggested that I should take over. I didn't laugh at him for suggesting it, but painfully said that in no way have I the background knowledge, the absolute savvy and skill to do a comprehensive comics page as you have. And I know, yes, you have all the views from all over the damn shop, yet, with everything else, not the support! Unfortunately us creatives are constantly on the edge of having nothing to sustain us because of our love for this medium and constantly we are undervalued. This medium produces some clunkers, but also some damn fine work, but we are constantly under the cloud of being, as Moebius admitted " in the hierarchy of the arts, rather near the bottom . . less spectacular than cinema " I suspect this dismissal to be within the hands of both illiterate snobbery of those who consider themselves the 'literate elite' who consider our medium to be throwaway rubbish, and the similarly illiterate at the other end who would struggle to read the contents of a cereal packet and who expect to be spoon fed sensation with no effort at all. However one is heartened where the medium is appreciated and one looks to a letter in one of the Bone comics many years back where a young man who was struggling with his reading took to the strip very quickly after his tutor introduced him to it. At the time he was an "eighth grader, with the reading ability of second or third grade and the improvement was dramatic. In a short time, he was not only reading the strip, but performing it and drew his own version of the strip. There is something about the theatricality of sequential art that engages people, even those struggling with basic reading and every opportunity should be made to push this unique language which actually, I believe induces a skill in the reading of it of bilinguality and people in their ignorance are blind to it. The sheer range of skills that go into a page, especially when care goes into the creation with the writing and the drawing, I believe, in the end, is reflected in the quality of the response from people reading it and I believe a great mistake has been perpetuated in Great Britain when the publishing houses that brought us so many weeklies closed up. The dearth of reading matter at a critical age of this innovative form of literature is tragic and really I think that the people that made the decisions didn't know what they were throwing away, as I believe that well put together entertainment such as comics wire the brain to think in a unique and clever way as long as the ideas that us creators put in are placed with care and love, not in a cynical way to create mounds of easy profit! Note Disney! That's my rant. Take it how you will. It is said and done. Hopefully I can get on with some drawing now. I may be getting the tremors under control. The tablets may be working. Something is. That's a change.
ReplyDeleteLots of good points there, John - I turned 30 a couple of months ago, and count myself lucky by the amount of comics that were available to me as a nipper... not nearly as many as previous generations, but enough variety to keep me happy! Similarly, at the age of seven my reading level was behind everyone else, until getting my first Beano - the antics of the Bash Street Kids soon helped to put me AHEAD of most of my peers!
DeleteComics are wonderful and important things, and blogs are a fun way of finding out about (and telling others about!) otherwise unknown wonders...
There's less comics about nowadays but obviously MORE blogs... Long as we're all educating each other, there's a lifetime of new things to enjoy!
I sometimes wonder whether the University presses and such, if they really wanted to get involved in pushing up the literacy of the young, should have taken a leaf from the Rev Marcus Morris and got involved in comics literature and had them on sale within the schools themselves. If they didn't want to use superheroes, then there are many works of literature which would happily adapt into comics format. One only has to look at the Shakespeare adaptions to state the obvious, but other works such as Mice and Men etc. Will Eisner has shown that these adaptions work. Unfortunately an anti-comics bias that sees only one message it seems , that comics are throwaway superhero rubbish for the semi-literate, prevails and the messenger which is a marvellously broadly theatrical medium is thrown out along with it. It is a terrible shame and waste of potential.
DeleteI'll have to look up Marcus Morris... It was the comic adaptations of the Discworld books that got me into reading Terry Pratchett books.
DeleteHunt Emerson's done some fantastic comic versions of a few classics, Martin Rowson managed to make a readable comic version of Tristram Shandy and Gahan Wilson did a good job on a selection of Edgar Allen Poe pieces... comics are a great way of tricking people into becoming more widely read than they ever thought they could be!
Ah yes, I have the Hunt Emersons. Of Eisner's work I have Moby Dick and Don Quixote. He also wrote and drew a prequel to Oliver Twist entitled Fagin the Jew, amongst other original graphic novels such as Contract With God, Life On Another Planet, Last Day In Vietnam and Dropsie Avenue: The Neighbourhood.
DeleteI've got/read Contract With God, beautiful thing, that is - Fagin the Jew sounds good, I'll be on the lookout for that!
DeleteHi. Marcus Morris is the guy who created the Eagle back in...1951? Even I wasn't born back then....interesting to see what got people into comics!
ReplyDeleteA time before Terry?!? I jest, obviously...
DeleteComics and people's taste in comics are easily as personal as people's tastes in music - some things "click" and some things don't. Magical things all round.
I remember getting bought several issues of 2000AD, Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles and Real Ghostbusters before entering Beano/Dandy-world, but I'd only ever look at the pictures in those (monster/Turtle-obsessed as I was). Something about the Beano and the Dandy made me pay all the more attention, somehow...
DeleteThe variety available to this medium. My favourites were the Eagle and Countdown, which later was TV Action. I followed the comics that had Doctor Who and Dan Dare, but American comics were available three miles away in our local market town and I would hunt those out every Saturday with my pocket money which would limit me to one or two. DCs were there mainly, no Marvels that I remember until the Black and White reprints started to appear and the first one I saw and bought was Spiderman Comics Weekly No: 30: 'When Falls The Meteor' drawn by Steve Ditko because the lead character and the drawing style looked so different from what I was used to from Batman, Superman, Flash, etc.
DeleteI only ever had one Dandy Annual though. Only a few of the characters and again the drawing styles appealed to me. I really couldn't get into the 'jolly japes' of schoolboy pranksters type of strips, basically I suppose because I felt that the real life counterparts of these characters were a pain in the neck.
Delete