Greetings! Just in time to close out the first weekend of December is Wait, What? Ep. 238! Here’s a quick breakdown of what Graeme and Jeff talked about in their two and a half-hour episode, in more or less the order they talked about it in:
Advent calendars;
Some of the best books of the year Graeme’s been reading;
Frankenstein’s comic book swap;
What we bought in the recent DC Sale;
Cinder and Ashe;
Batman Annual #2;
speculation about the end of Doomsday Clock;
Bug: The Adventures of Forager by the Allreds;
revisiting Multiversity;
Grant Morrison and Dan Mora’s Klaus and the Crisis in Xmasville;
C.B. Cebulski and the legacy of Akira Yoshida;
and a little bit more!
And if that wasn’t enough for you, all you have to do is wait a week and we’ll do it all over again! (Well, different topics next time, one would hope.) Thank you so much for joining us, and we hope you enjoy!
And for your cutting and pasting pleasure:
http://theworkingdraft.com/media/podcasts2/WaitWhat238.mp3
The part where I generally disagree with the pod about Moore (well at least Graeme) is that I generally find more of his comics hopeful and may not have happy endings but the themes of them are largely about what is important within the life you live.
Watchmen is a prime example of this where from a narrative point of view the ending is that the world is chaotic terrain that will continue to change and be different however what is important and constantly focused on especially near the end is that you have to give a shit and his comics are often about finding love and an affirmation of life.
Watchmen to me reminds of a lot of other things I like which have a very Anime trope of characters coming to amazing incredible realizations about what is important in life just a minute or two too late or as the the world is about to implode all around them. Even if those people in the story die like in Watchmen’s “Stronger Loving World” those themes resonate to the reader and largely I feel that is more important than the story itself having a happy ending.
I think the one that has the most unambiguous happy ending at the moment is LoEG (unless you are a big Harry Potter fan I guess), also For the Man Who has Everything and actually a lot of the ABC stuff is upbeat or at least wraps up in a feel good kinda way.
Just to be very clear, I feel terrible for mis-identifying Jeff. The post is legitimately labeled as being by Hibbs, and I didn’t read any of it other than the Wolverine capsule. In summary, I am the worst and also the worst.
And just to be super-clear, I am in no way blaming Matt for any identification problems: those are almost entirely my fault for a plethora of reasons. (Among other things, as Matt said, the post was totally labelled as being by Hibbs.) I’m actually really grateful he spotted it and got it out into the world!
I have to admit to being inexplicably fascinated by the “Yoshida incident”, more so than I’ve been by any comics Marvel has published in a while. I wonder if Cebulski’s contract with Marvel will let him do an issue of Wanderlost about it…
The reactions have been especially fascinating, the need that so many people (many who would benefit from being in good with the new EiC for work or access) seem to have to dismiss it as no big deal. I suspect that will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. I’m not sure how he
A few things…
To put a scope on the fraud, the best count I could see (http://www.dcindexes.com/features/creator.php?creatorid=6306) has “Yoshida” writing 41 comics over 20 months, just over 900 pages. If you figure a (low) minimum of $50 a page, that’s over $45k (and I imagine he was probably closer to $100 a page, or $90k), plus later reprint money. Plus the money he’d have gotten writing for other publishers while on staff at Marvel. I wonder if the alleged “substantial” punishment he got (substantiated only by second hand at best gossip) was even close to that, and how much of that it wiped out by the pay raise for his new job? (and assuming everything was reported right for tax purposes in whatever convoluted payment arrangement Cebulski was able to set up)
And listening to Gregg Schigiel’s anonymized account, he seems pretty confident that multiple other people knew about the ruse from the start, and actively worked to cover it up. I’m not familiar enough with Marvel staff of the era to know who’s who, but I wonder if any of them are still at Marvel.
Lastly for now, in over a decade since “Yoshida” broke that glass ceiling, has there been any actual Japanese-born creator to write for Marvel? Only one I could think of was Kazuo Koike, but it looks like his story was before “Yoshida” (and edited by Cebulski, no less).
I have to admit to being inexplicably fascinated by the “Yoshida incident”, more so than I’ve been by any comics Marvel has published in a while.
Nothing inexplicable about that!
That X-Men/Fantastic Four miniseries might just be the most ethically-problematic thing Marvel have published this century. Written by Cebulski in yellowface, drawn by Pat Lee just after the collapse of Dreamwave.