31 October 2009

Did You Catch Our Halloween Re-Posts? FlashCAPTION Ends Friday

The NewsFLASH reposts went live on the comicsblog Halloween night - and even made it through most of the morning hours. Total posting time on abbracadabbling was approximately twelve hours.
The current hour is now (factoring in Daylight Savings, of course) 11:15am PST, and the re-posted clues are down for good.
Here's a brief summary of how to enter FlashCAPTION:
Compose a witty caption, read it aloud and share it with all the BFF's. Then write it in the large empty caption box beside Wally West's astonished face. Along with the most correct answer from the clues you've solved (which you've already jotted down in the upper left-hand corner caption box), download the Flash file and print a hard copy for yourself.
Then, mail your completed Flash JPG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, or BIT to presentmagiccomics@gmail.com -- and be sure to write FlashCAPTION in the subject line so we know you're not spam! Please feel free to send us a small photo of yourself, too. If you write "Ok to post on blog," we'll put your face next to your winning entry on our Saturday blog!!
Full contest details can be found here.
PS. For those of you who have been wondering as to the actual values of NewsFLASH Clues that have values exceeded and seemingly made irrelevant by a later post with a higher value, here's our rationale: The more valuable the NewsFLASH, the more difficult the Clue. Should no one be able to answer the correct clue, contestants who have answered the next most valuable clue will then be in consideration for the big prize. The numbers help sort all that out in the final analysis.
As posted below, all contest submissions must be received by 11:59 PM PST on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 . Preliminary winners will be selected from of all eligible contestants' emails containing the proper answer to Wally's 'Mystery City'. Entries will then be judged on their original caption, and criteria for selecting a one overall winner will be based on creativity, wit, and comic book 'appropriateness' of all captions submitted. Final Winner will be notified by email, and winner's entry will be posted along with their name (and photo, if submitted) on abbracadabbling by 3pm PST Saturday, November 7th, 2o09.

HALLOWEEN 09: Falling Back, Looking Ahead

Well, dabblers, we've been on the road to this Long Halloween (hint : remember to turn your clocks back one hour tonight at 2am) for a month now, and we hope you've enjoyed it as much as Raley, the Abbracadabbling Archivists, my Springfield home office support staff, and I all have. We had plenty of lofty ambitions to make our first Halloween here on the blog as magical as possible, and I think we did pretty well.
I know I speak for everyone here when I say we'd truly love -- and need -- to hear what our readers and visitors have to say about our efforts. Your feedback is invaluable, and the thoughts you share with us today will help us improve our daily blogs and the content we feature tomorrow. Let us know what you've got to say, as well as what you'd like to read, see, and experience when you visit abbracadabbling.
And dabblers, you know exactly how to reach us: just scroll down the blog to our Back Issues department and the rest is as easy as pumpkin pie.
October comes to an end tonight, but vestiges of this amazing Halloween Holiday will remain on the comicsblog for a good while to come. Along with those holdover treats, many of the amazing columns like Comic Meme, Industrial Vigilante, Vintage Comics Stuff, and Comics University that we gave you a taste of in October will be up to full speed next month, and they're all shaping up to be fantastic and informative reads.
Our special feature Building the Blackest Night is on track to finally make it's appearance in November, and the winner of our FlashCAPTION Contest will be also be revealed early in the month. We'll have found Wally West, but that doesn't mean our fun has to stop: November's contest kicks off November 11th with Thanksgiving-themed challenge that will put your taste buds and your intelligence to the test! And you'll have plenty of incentive to do just that, what with a Near Mint copy of Image Comics' CHEW #1 going to next month's winner!
Before we sign off for the night, we'd like to remind everyone to keep an eye out for our FlashCAPTION Contest repostings. We've been promising they'd find their way to the blog on Halloween Night...and if the clock we're looking at can be trusted, the night is still young.
Happy Halloween 2009, abbracadabblers! For Raley and the Gang, this is the Dabbler, signing off until next month. See ya!
Top 10 Reasons courtesy of ComicSpace
Abbracadabbling would like to add our voice to the Comics, Not Candy For Kids Movement.
Comics give paper cuts, but Candy has razor blades.

30 October 2009

Must-Read Recommendation: DCU Halloween Special

Coming at you just past Midnight on October 31st! It's early, but it's going to be one hella long and scary Halloween, dabblers!
Your favorite blogger's going to be one Busy Boy this Halloween. Shoot, when am I not? Still, everybody does loves that costume so. I was a Busy Boy last year, and the year before that, and it never gets old. Always the life of the party, that's me.
Even the busiest boys manage a little downtime on Halloween. So if you've got an hour or two to murder today then do as Dabbler does: fill it with a comic book instead of candy.
It's healthy, and it's Abbracadabbling's Must-Read Recommendation: The DC Universe 2009 Halloween Special!
DC Comics publishes a Halloween Special each year. For just six small dollars, you'll find more costumed fun than you can shake a batarang at, folks. At the very least, DC's holiday fare is way more fun than answering the doorbell.
And just like a jack o'lantern filled with treats, the DCU Specials always have something that appeals to everyone's tastes. This year's Annual features 13 different tales of horror. For folks who may not be as familiar with many of the newer DC heroes like Red Robin or the (barely) new Kid Flash, or who missed the New York Times article that told the world Bruce Wayne aka Batman is quite possibly dead, this year's collection is a fearsome way to get in touch with the current goings-on of the DCU. Because, frankly, you should know.
Here's how DC summed up this year's Halloween offerings:
Darkness falls across the land as the DC Universe faces its greatest horror in this Halloween special filled with all-new stories! Watch as Guy Gardner continues his quest to share Halloween with the cosmos and his fellow alien Green Lantern Corps members. In another tale, Red Robin finds the true, deadly meaning of the sinister holiday while overseas on his quest to find Bruce Wayne. Meanwhile, Bizarro receives neither trick nor treat in his own backwards celebration of the spookiest night of the year on his home world. Plus, 10 other ghoulish tales to fill you with fright this Halloween!
Want more? The always-fantastic peeps at ComiXology have a preview online which you can read right here.
The DC Universe 2009 Halloween Special went on sale last week, but we're betting most retailers stocked a few extra on their shelves for the last-minute Halloween crowd. (We know ours did!) If you're like Dabbler, the car can drive itself to the nearest LCS aka Local Comic Shop! But if not, don't trip. No matter where you are, finding the comics shop nearest you is simplicity itself: just click over to the Comic Shop Locator Service. One trip there, and you'll be in the dark no longer...unless you want to be.

HALLOWEEN 2009: The Walking Dead - 1953 Style

My favorite holiday of the entire year's just a mere 24 hours away, dabblers. We've been off the blog all week here in Springfield, and we know we're down to the wire. So expect to find as many Halloween Tricks or Treats as we can get posted right here before the Big Night descends upon us all.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
I get a kick out of the comics prose stories that used to appear in some of the Golden Age and Silver Age books, particularly from DC Comics as well as a few of the Charlton books. (Now that I think about it, I guess it's rather appropriate that Charlton sold their characters to DC after they closed their doors for good back in 1985. And just in time for the Crisis on Infinite Earths, too. But I digress...)
DC (and Charlton, to a lesser extent) used the one to three page prose stories as back-up features, primarily in their romance lines. Usually the tales were genre-based short stories, peppered with an odd assortment of educational material -- odd facts on subjects that probably seemed more than weird to the kids reading the books back in the day. Like how to fix a broken refrigerator, all about cold weather fronts, or the best days for sailing off the coast of Yucatan. Ok, kidding about that last one, but you never know - we could have missed it, too.
One of the old prose pieces our archivists here in Springfield offices found is spot-on for a creepy Halloween read. And after I spent a bit of blogspace bringing you the 411 on DC and Charlton, this baby was published by neither.
Let's put some hands together and thank Silver Age publisher Better Comics for their two-page prose addition to our abbracadabbling Halloween. From Issue #10 of Adventures into Darkness (1953), I hope you enjoy The Walking Dead....!
To get a closer look at The Walking Dead
find Page (1) here, and Page (2) here.
C O M I N G U P N E X T
More Halloween 2009!!!

26 October 2009

Comic Meme: Evolving The Comic Meme to Meaningful

I'm beginning to understand how the Meme-thing works, and to tell you the truth, I'm a little disappointed.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves. A definition is in order.
A meme is a theoretical unit of cultural information. Memes are the building blocks of cultural diffusion, propagating from one mind to another, analogously to the way a gene propagates from one organism to another as a unit of genetic information. Biologist and evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins coined the term in 1976 in his book The Selfish Gene. He illustrated some examples of "classic" memes: jingles, catch-phrases, beliefs, clothing fashions, ways of making pots, and the technology of building arches.
Meme-theorists contend that memes evolve by natural selection similarly to Darwinian biological evolution. Via variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance, some ideas propagate less successfully and become extinct, while others will survive, spread, and, for better or for worse, mutate.
If you Google 'meme,' you'll discover countless websites and blogs dedicated to Dawkin's concept. The internet's realm of meme discussion, specifically its prevalence as a subject of blogging in the blogosphere, has lead to the identification of a blogging sub-strata known as the 'memeosphere'. Memes, for many of us, have become things of serious study and objects of undeniable fascination. To me, and for the purposes of abbracadabbling the comics blog, what's most fascinating is the notion of what I call the Comic Meme.
The 'ideas of superheroes' that were once completely confined to the comic book realm have survived now for the better part of a century. Slowly but steadily, in their own abbreviated form of Darwinian evolution, 'ideas of superheroes' have evolved beyond their newsprint pages into the greater 'genetic' pool of Popular Culture. Some examples of this include the diversification of comic book readership, the San Diego Comic-Con's annual sold-out attendance, the billion dollar world-wide box office of Warner Bros' second Batman feature, this summer's Guinness Book of World Records' awards to the Batman Arkham Asylum video game as well as the game's sales of over two million units within two weeks after its release.
The popular CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory is another great example of my Comic Meme concept. The show's characters are all comic book fans, and even dressed up as superheroes for one of last season's episodes.
As one good turn deserves another, Howard Wolowitz, Leonard, Sheldon, and Koothrappali popped up in DC Comics fourth issue of Power Girl, trying to pick-up on the book's busty leading heroine inside a movie theater.
Your Dabbler doesn't need to point out the obvious (although he will): the Comic Meme has become extraordinarily virulent. We're all infected, even those of us who don't make weekly pilgrimages to the comics shop and so fall outside of the meme's primary risk group. Memes, and especially the Comic Meme, no longer require direct exposure to find a suitable host.
Memes and the Comics Blogosphere
Comics bloggers love memes as much as psychology bloggers, biology bloggers, IT bloggers, and lit bloggers. Comics Blogger Ryan Estrada's humorous Frank the Comic Strip uses the comic strip form to give us a better idea of the meme in this context:
Estrada cleverly shows the viral spreading of memes within the comics blogosphere, especially as a kinds of Dawkinsian comics 'jingles' or catch phrases. Most comics memes I've found are actually very similar to the idea I'm currently using for abbracadabbling's FlashCAPTION contest, in which I've asked you and all our other dabblers to creatively complete a caption box from a Flash comics panel in order to win a copy of Flash: Rebirth #5.
I don't consider this a meme; i consider it a contest. Maybe it would have been a meme if I'd labeled it as such and posted it as meme, perhaps without the other requirement of watching this blog to find clues about Wally West's current whereabouts. That's what makes it a contest, in my mind. Of course, even without asking folks to name the right 'Mystery City,' I'd never have thought this silly little exercise was a meme. At most, it's an exercise in creativity -- no matter how many other folks around the comics blogosphere jump aboard my magic party wagon and get involved.
If they had, however, FlashCAPTION would then certainly fit the comics blogosphere's concept of a comics meme. I've found a few examples of the comics memes that are currently floating around to illustrate my point (no pun intended). They're funny, yes. But I wouldn't call them 'memes.' Take a look:
With his Green Lantern cover, Bully at Comics Oughta Be Fun blog asks his readers in his "Bully's Activity Fun Time Page" post to create their own text for the cover's talking power ring. Bully titled this really fun idea as an 'activity,' but once it got out, it quickly then became - and was labeled as - a meme. Sleestak's Lady, That's My Skull is just one of the many comicsblogs that joined the fun with a post. (Ironically, by virtue of my own blog entry here, so have I.)
On his livejournal blog, Mooncalfe started a Power Girl meme back in 2007, asking readers and other comics bloggers to draw their own Power Girl, post it, and pass the idea along. Like a game of internet telephone, scads of folks did, too -- as the list on his blog attests. Mark Engblom, a popular blogger whose work I really admire, also got involved with his own rendition of DC's big-bosomed brawler:
Engblom's stuff is great, and this is no exception. His March 22nd, 2007 blog entitled "Meme Alert! Power Girl" clearly delineates that Mooncalfe's call for Power Girl pin-ups isn't an activity, it's a meme. And Mooncalfe's idea, which he wrote he got from dryponder, another livejournal blogger who posted his own earlier request for followers to "Draw Supergirl," certainly spread in its slightly mutated way across the 'net.
A couple other notable examples of self-labeled memes of this kind have included Batman -- a character that's extremely (and understandably) popular here as he is in so many other forms -- and J. Jonah Jameson, the always-irritated newspaper publisher from Marvel Comics' Spider-Man comic books. Let's examine, shall we?
The Batman example (above) was labeled as a 'Bat-Meme.' Along the same lines, then, the funny Batman panels I posted in an earlier LongBox Short blog also qualify as - and probably originated from -- Bat-Memes.
The JJ's below come from the Wordpress blog Simon Fitzkit...In The Field :
Simon Fitzkit is definitely a popular culture-influenced blog, but not one exclusively dedicated to comic books and all their glory along the lines of Engblom's Comic Coverage blog or even abbracadabbling. While the J. Jonah Jameson / Spider-Man 'meme' gained some small distance from the comics blogosphere by making it to Fitzkit, in all truth the 'meme' didn't really get that far, either.
In my estimation, the strength of a meme comes from how far from the tree it can fall. All the examples of 'memes' above, so named by their originators, have by and large circulated within the internet comics community. To me, this fact alone signifies these 'memes' aren't actually memes -- they're activities. Bully was right.
The comics blogosphere has been selling memes short. The activities are great, and I hope my fellow bloggers keep 'em coming. I'm sure I'll be posting some of my own, too. All this aside, though, I've yet to stumble across a site that takes a more meaningful approach to the comic meme.
Which means that Comic Meme on abbracadabbling might be the first and only place on the world wide that will endeavor to do just that. Not to be different or unique, not at all. Comic Meme exists simply because I'm fascinated by comic memes. At the heart of Comic Meme are questions like What about superheroes has become so required by society beyond the niche? and How are the specific comic memes functioning in the milieu to which they've spread? Not every Comic Meme will directly answer these or similar questions; it's more than likely my future blogs will serve more to present than to dissect.
I'll also do my best to stay away from the obvious examples -- video games, action figures, movie tie-ins, etc. They're the first non-comic book populations to have become infected by the notorious comic meme, but they're not too exciting anymore. At least, for the purposes of the Comic Meme blog.
Comic books remain the source of superheroes, and the comic meme phenomenon illustrates what could be the collective superheroes' greatest power -- to find relevance and become meaningful in places seemingly light years away from the nearest comic book shop or drug store spinner rack. Getting a handle on today's virulent comic meme may lead us to discover exactly what is the true foundation of superheroes in our contemporary society.
If you have some thoughts you'd like to share with me about comic memes, or have a great example of what I'm getting at here, please get yourself down to the our Back Issues and let me know. Comic Meme is still all about fun, but it'll be a little more than passing around the empty word balloon, too.
Next time in Comic Meme: Batman remains fashionable.

25 October 2009

Understanding Superheroes After Halloween

After having a great second day at the University of Oregon-sponsored Understanding Superheroes conference yesterday, the 'Dabbler was pretty darn pooped as Sunday rolled around. Snuggling beneath an old paisley comforter while under the covers of Mike Carey and Peter Gross' excellent The Unwritten as well as Phil Hester's The Anchor just proved way too tempting. So no apologies that the blog's running a little behind my own ambitious schedule.
I'll be posting my Understanding Superheroes after Halloween's hectic schedule is behind me. If you visit your favorite comicsblog during the first week of November, you'll find what you want.
Lastly, if you've missed any of our contest clues, remember to be back on the blog Halloween Night. I'll have each and every NewsFLASH reposted... but only for a very brief time. Look for all the clues to repost no later than 11pm PST.

24 October 2009

Mickey Mouse is Dead...and Dressed as Jack Skellington

What would a Halloween early bird be called? A wren? A raven? A vulture, perhaps? Or maybe a bat out of hell?
Whatever it's called, abbracadabbling knows there's more than one of us who prefers to plan ahead. By the time October 25th rolls around, the most enthusiastic Halloween early birds are ready to pick out next year's pumpkin.
We believe good behavior (and some very nasty behavior, too) should be rewarded with a Halloween Head's Up.
The guys over on Superpunch probably do, too. We figure that's why they gave us a great sneak-peek at the latest vinyl teaser from Medicom Toys: Mickey Mouse Jack Skellington.
Medicom's newest undead vinyl mash-up embraces pop culture zombie love with style. And we think it's a gloves-up winner, dabblers. Mylie mascots, vinlyphiles, and everyone who died watching The Nightmare Before Christmas should definitely get a kick from this reanimated rodent.
But take note, early birds: Mickey Mouse Jack Skellington won't be in stores until April 2010. Word on whether Mickey's a limited edition hasn't been said, and details are scarce. Keep checking the comicsblog for updates and pay Kid Robot a visit while you're at it.
The only thing we know for sure is that stashing your cash today ensures you'll be slipping yourself a Mickey tomorrow. It pays to be prudent, and I've already saved twelve cents.
How much have you got?