Support the Caravan of Comics 2013 [UPDATED 22/04/13]

Our friend and professional colleague Bruce Mutard is going on the road in this year's Caravan of Comics – a Melbourne based travelling comics contingent that is about to hit Canada and USA with their books.

Bruce emailed us with the following info:

You may have heard whispers in the wind that a submersible Winnebago was about to depart these antipodean shores for the northern New World. Yes, the proof is now in the pudding of mixed metaphors: the Caravan of Comics hits the road again for 2013. Myself, Mirranda Burton, Scarlette Baccini, Marijka Gooding, Patrick Alexander, Gregory Mackay and Dan Hayward will be hitting the Toronto Comics Arts Festival, Librarie Drawn & Quarterly in Montreal, Fantagraphics Bookshop in Seatle and myself to the International Comic Arts Forum in May. We are taking our comics,, the Graphic Novels! Melbourne! documentary and the idea of Australian comics, to show them we have the right stuff, we have the left stuff, we have the STUFF that comics are made of. Which is of course, the stuff of life. 

This is a deserved and worthy bunch of comics creators so we encourage you to stop by the campaign and support it if you can. I (julie) am about to pledge $40 for The Sound and Vision Book Club reward. Please head to http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/358899/emal/2677232 
For lots of info, please head to www.caravanofcomics.comCaravan of Comics is also on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/caravanofcomics (to be updated very soon) and on Twitter: https://twitter.com/caravanofcomics

CAMPAIGN NOW CLOSED! Over $6000 was raised.

Comic Gong Launch [UPDATED: 27/03/13]

There's a new comics event happening in Wollongong later this year – Comic Gong. It's the inaugural event in what is hoped to be an annual event.

Comic Gong aims to provide a fun and creative day out for children, youth and adults to immerse themselves in the dynamic world of comic books and pop culture. The day will include trade displays including Kings Comics and Film Ink, an artist alley showcasing various Australian comic artists including our friend and comics compatriot Marcello Baez, anime screenings from Madmen, a caricature artist, workshops for kids and young people, as well as great giveaways including comics and a major prize of an iPad. Also throughout the day there will be a costume competition, technology petting zoo, badge making, comic craft, circus performers, food stall, air brush tattoos and a photo booth.

Comic Gong will be the start of BMP's convention circuit as we have secured an Artists' Alley table and we'll be selling copies of Elf~Fin there amongst other goodies. So here's the important bit:

Date: Saturday 18 May 2013

Time: 10am to 1pm

Venue: Corrimal Community Centre and Library, 15 Short Street Corrimal

Further information: Phone (02) 4227 7414 (phone) or email  libraryenquries@wollongong.nsw.gov.au 

Elf~Fin Poll Results

We recently asked our readers to vote on a poll to determine whether they were interested in purchasing Elf~Fin: Hyfus & Tilaweed comics: (1)  solely in a US comics format which will be available through comics stores, (2) in a larger Treasury Edition which will be available directly through BMP, or (3) in both print formats.

52% of the respondents favoured the third option, 33% wanted the Treasury edition only, and 15% wanted the US standard size. What this means is that we're going ahead with the Treasury edition and the US standard size (pending approval from Diamond Distributors on the latter) so it's good news all round – a win / win / win situation!

Thank you to everyone for voting.

Mermaids in Comics 7 – The Devil from the Deep

"The Devil from the Deep" is a seven-page short comics story, which featured in the vintage anthology Nightmare #2 published by Ziff-Davis Publications in 1952. The comic book, which had 36 pages in all, sold for 10 cents. The short story is about – SPOILER ALERT – a rabid cannibalistic mermaid who bewitches the fisherman who catches her on his line off the Florida Keys and then proceeds to eat his friends.

We personally love these little gems both in prose and comics formats. Julie has a great collection of short story anthologies called 50 Great Horror Stories, 50 Tales of Terror and others. No mermaid tales amongst those. Good to find a horror mermaid story in comics.

You can read the full story on Comic Book Plus – just scroll down the page and use the NEXT button and go to page 9.

And a big thanks goes out to Marcelo Baez for alerting us to this great little treasure.

Dart Revisited

I (Jozef) recently received a Facebook post from a comics reader that started a conversation about the comics miniseries Dart, which Black Mermaid Productions worked on and which Image Comics published in the mid 1990s. 

The series revolved around Erik Larsen's famous female vigilante hero Dart who became the leader of Freak Force and used darts as her weapon of choice. Erik gave us a specific brief – he wanted a challenge on her name and indentify within the context of the story, as well as a bar-room brawl scene where she wards off her attackers by using the aforementioned darts. Everything else was up for grabs. 

The first story we pitched was sort of like a cross between Alias and Nikita (well before they came out on television), which featured Dart as a spy who was going to use her darts to assassinate a major baddie while he was performing in an opera or ballet under great security protocols (we're going to have to find the original source material to remember all the details). We do know that Dart wore her darts as fancy disguised earrings with her beautiful evening dress, which is why she sets off the metal detector but looked so innocuous that the guards let her through). 

Erik asked us to re-pitch because the first story didn't completely fit the brief and we came up with an alternative story which featured a team of fashionista superheroes called Blood Chic who help Dart resolve the issue of commercial identify theft and fight off the supervillains called Vogue Attack .

The series sold very well and we made the Wizard Top 100 but the story was met with a mixed response by Dart and die-hard superhero genre fans – some loved it and others disliked it intensely. And we get it! The story wasn't a spoof on superheroes as the dangers were very real, but our heroes didn't exactly stop the world from being destroyed – only a shopping mall with lots of innocent people so the stakes weren't as high as a Superman or Spiderman story. Our own characters were also a little out there, although we really wanted to honour Dart and Erik so we worked hard to get her psychological profile right through a series of flashbacks.

However, what was significant about the story – at least from our point of view – was that it introduced Deathgaze one of the first gay superheroes in comics of the day who unfortunately remains forgotten (that's him in the top cover at the extreme left hand side). The series also featured one of our signature mermaids but that's another story.  We invented backstories with a twist for each of the characters. We don't really know whether we will ever do anything with them in the future, as we want to focus on Elf~Fin, Mermist Seas and another property dear to our hearts. However, we think it's noteworthy to mention that gay superhero characters have only recently come out of the comics closet so to speak and have now been embraced by comics publishers and readers alike, which is pretty marvellous! (As an aside, we also featured a gay couple – Marron and Paffa – in WaveDancers).

To get back to the initial topic of conversation in the introduction to this blog post, we've been given permission to publish the abridged  Facebook conversation here by Stephane. We think it may be of interest to you. We've also published the Dart cover with all the girls he refers to in the conversation (Dart, who is copyright and trademark to Erik Larsen, is the centre figure with the blond hair and silver outfit).

February 2

Hi Jozef
Thanks for accepting my invite. The Dart comics you made is one of my favorite, I love how over-the-top gay and girly it is, completely different from the usual Image comics hehehe
Stephane

February 3

Hi Stéphane,
I'm glad you liked it in this way. So, what in Dart would you say was over-the-top gay and girly, I'm curious.
Thanks Stéphane.
Best,
Jozef

February 3

Stéphane
Hehe I hope you didn't take it in a wrong way
Well to answer your question, I loved your comics cover at the 1st sight because it looked so different from the other Image comics at that time, super colorful and the characters are super feminine like in a girl toy line.
Your women have plenty of girly details, detailed makeup and the outfits sure are very different from usual superheroes. And the men in the group, well... They sure don't look like your usual male superhero either! They look like girls toys too, but much more gay and sexy lol I totally loved your approach for sure!
I didn't see more about you at that time, without internet and everything.
But I was talking about your Dart comics to a friend yesterday, so that's how I searched and found you on facebook. I have yet to see your more recent work, but Elf-Fin sure looks amazing

Just a bit of nostalgia to give you an insight into our comics publishing history. We're really pleased that these stories are still conversation starters to this day.

PS Another piece of trivia about Dart is that the story featured several lines of dolls and toys. About ten years later, Jozef brought out his own line of fashion dolls. You can see them here on his Deviant Art page.

Real Life Royal Princesses Akin to the Little Mermaid

A Sydney Morning Herald article by Julia Baird compares current day royal princesses with Hans Christian Andersen's famous mermaid, insofar as they need to give up something of themselves and become the centre of relentless scrutiny about their physical appearance in order to marry the prince of their dreams.

Kate Middleton knows her fate, and appears to have stared it in the eye and made a pact, like the Little Mermaid who promised to swallow her voice so she could walk on land and marry her prince. Her body though, has already been stretched by the rack of public inquiry to what must be at times an unbearable extent, despite her public composure. We are all acquainted with her breasts, bikinis, and bumps, thanks to editors who pay richly for snaps of her bare skin.

The article come out in support of UK author and twice Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel who made a controversial speech recently at the British Museum that claimed the measure of a royal princess's worth was merely that of being a royal incubator and breeding machine. She was met with a vitriolic response and severely castigated on her own supposed lack of beautiful physical attributes. 

Feminists like Anne Summers have tagged the article on their social media pages as worthy of dissemination and debate. The well thought out opinion piece by Baird encourages us to approach the subject and enter the fray with common sense.

For most of our blog readers who have been brought up on a movie diet of Disney princesses (who have admittedly moved from passive players to complex heroines of note), we think this cultural exploration on the reality of today's real life princesses is something to explore. We personally think being a royal princess brings privileges but demands sacrifices such as loss of independence and privacy which are a big price to pay.

You can read the full Hilary Mantel speech on the London Review of Books website.

You can read Julia Baird's response "Listen, and let the woman speak" here.

Elf~Fin: Hyfus & Tilaweed #1 Publication Date Announced

To our many readers who have been following us through our Facebook page or who have subscribed to our Black Mermaid Mermerings ezine, we thank you for your patience. 

Here is the information you've been waiting for for a long time – our target publication date for Elf~Fin: Hyfus & Tilaweed #1 is 1 May 2013. It will contain 48-pages (fully coloured) of story and eight supplemental pages of additional material.

We need your help in the decision-making process so we can get you what you want.

Here are our thoughts and intentions...

1. We would like to release the print series to a world-wide audience but need to go through Diamond Distributors to do so. There is quite a rigorous submission process involved in order for the title to be accepted, and we need to send in a completed comic book sample with the application. If Diamond takes on the book, then it would next need to be solicited to the retailers, In all likelihood, the book would probably not be available  until the fourth quarter of this year. We would probably get it printed in the USA or Canada and publish it on good quality stock in standard US comic book size. 
2. To get the book out immediately to our readers, we would like to release it in a Direct Exclusive Treasury Edition. This is a larger format than the standard US comic book size and measures around 13" (33cm) x 8.5" (21.5cm). It would be printed on premium quality glossy paper stock with glossy card cover, and would showcase Jozef's sumptuous artwork to its best advantage. It will contain exactly the same material as the standard book but is oversize and the retail price would be higher than the standard version. The postage from Australia would probably be quite high because we anticipate that the weight would exceed 500gm. Furthermore, any US readers would incur an additional surcharge of around $9 per parcel (yes, we know this is singularly unfair but blame the terrorists and the postal security system. See: "Postage Rates to US Rise Over Security Fears"). This means, that the postage to US readers would probably match or perhaps even exceed the purchase price of the book.

So with full disclosure and transparency and all this information in mind, we put it to you. What do you want? 

Here are your choices:

1. Purchase the standard comic book through a comics retailer
2. Purchase the Direct Exclusive Treasury Edition through the Black Mermaid Productions / Elf~Fin websites
3. Both.

Please vote on the poll in right hand column to give us your feedback. PLEASE ONLY vote once so we can get an accurate representation of demand and desire.

Thank you.