K-THOOM

Crowded #2 P: Ro Stein C: Triona Farrell W: Christopher Sebela

We’ve got 12 days to go in our LAZARUS - BELIEVE HER campaign we’re running through Bonfire. We’ve sold 75 shirts as of this writing and now have raised over $800 for RAINN - so, yeah, you guys are amazeballs.

Shirts are available in a variety of styles and colors, all with Michael Lark’s art and the straightforward message “Believe Her.”

Any support for our campaign is appreciated, be it through purchase, reblog, or just emailing links to your friends.

Thank you from all of us on Team Lazarus!

CROWDED - Ongoing from Image Comics - 1st issue out August 15th

Ten minutes in the future, the world runs on an economy of job shares and apps, including Reapr: a crowdfunding platform to fund assassinations. Charlie Ellison leads a quiet, normal life until she’s suddenly targeted by a million-dollar Reapr campaign. Hunted by all of Los Angeles, Charlie hires Vita, the lowest-rated bodyguard on the Dfend app. As the campaign picks up speed, they’ll have to figure out who wants Charlie dead before the campaign’s 30 days—or their lives—are over.

From Eisner-nominated writer Christopher Sebela (Heartthrob, We(l)come Back, Harley Quinn), Ro Stein & Ted Brandt (Captain Marvel, Raven: The Pirate Princess), Triona Farrell (Runaways, Mech Cadet Yu), and CARDINAL RAE (Bingo Love, Rose).

It’s been a while since I’ve tumbled, but I have a comic to promote... or in this case SELF promote!

CROWDED is my first foray into the creator side of comics-ing. I’m editing this book and I couldn’t be more proud of the team or excited for everyone to see it!

Issue #1 is out Wednesday August 15th! Please give it a try!

Hold it...

I know that WicDiv B covers often have an alternate back cover quote, but 455′s A cover has multiple back covers? Has this been a thing before?

I am delighted that this passed for an actual legit back cover! Especially as I threw it together in photoshop over a lunch break at work and printed it on our store printer.

But no, as Kieron explained in the replies to the OP, this was a very silly present I made for my coworker as a joke. Definitely not officially sanctioned by any part of Team WicDiv.

This picture shows you some of the blemishes, how I forgot to include a bar code, etc. Still, for a rush job I don’t hate it. :)

In celebration of BITCH PLANET: TRIPLE FEATURE (Out June 15th), Craig Yeung (@csyeung) made us these amazing Eleanorian avatars.  

Use them as you see fit.  

xo

Kelly Sue and Valentine

#EleanorLives

Small break in the commission month to say I have done a short story of wonder woman for DC comics with Michael Moreci for the wonder woman annual, on store the 31 may

So About That Whole Thing

LONG COMIC BOOK RANT INCOMING:

Okay some things need to be said:

1. If you’re going to write a smug thunk-piece about the “failure” of “diversity” in comics, maybe don’t use the cover image of a book that’s had 4 collections on the NYT graphic books bestseller list, won a Hugo and cleaned up at Angouleme. Just because you HOPE it’s on the chopping block, oh Riders of the Brohirrim, doesn’t mean it is.

2. I will tell you exactly why Ms Marvel works: it didn’t set out to be Ms Marvel. We were originally going to pitch it as a 10 issue limited series. I had a 3 issue exit strategy because I assumed we were going to get canned. There was no “diversity initiative” anywhere–getting that thing made at all was a struggle. It was a given that any character without AT LEAST a 20-year history would tank. Everybody, myself included, assumed this series was going to work out the same way.

3. That freed us–by “us” I mean the whole creative team–to tell exactly the story we wanted to tell. We had nothing to lose, nothing to overcome but low expectations. That gave us room to break a lot of rules.

STUFF THAT IS DIFFICULT TO REPLICATE AND IMPOSSIBLE TO PLAN:

1. Unexpected audiences. We are at a point in history when the role of religion is at a tremendous inflection point. What I didn’t realize was that the anxieties felt by young Muslims are also felt by young Mormons, evangelicals, orthodox Jews, and others. A h-u-g-e reason Ms Marvel has struck the chord it has is because it deals with the role of traditionalist faith in the context of social justice, and there was–apparently–an untapped audience of people from a wide variety of faith backgrounds who were eager for a story like this. Nobody could have predicted or planned for that. That’s being in the right place at the right time with the right story burning a hole in your pocket. Plenty of other stuff I’ve written and liked has fallen with a huge thud. That’s the norm. Exceptions are great when they happen, but hard to plan.

2. The paradox of low expectations. The bar was set pretty low for Ms Marvel, but because of Ms Marvel’s success, that bar got set much higher for similar books that came later.

STUFF THAT IS ENTIRELY AVOIDABLE:

1. This is a personal opinion, but IMO launching a legacy character by killing off or humiliating the original character sets the legacy character up for failure. Who wants a legacy if the legacy is shitty?

2. Diversity as a form of performative guilt doesn’t work. Let’s scrap the word diversity entirely and replace it with authenticity and realism. This is not a new world. This is *the world.*

3. Never try to be the next whoever. Be the first and only you. People smell BS a mile away.

4. The direct market and the book market have diverged. Never the twain shall meet. We need to accept this and move on, and market accordingly.

5. Not for nothing, but there is a direct correlation between the quote unquote “diverse” Big 2 properties that have done well (Luke Cage, Black Panther, Ms Marvel, Batgirl) and properties that have A STRONG SENSE OF PLACE. It’s not “diversity” that draws those elusive untapped audiences, it’s *particularity.* This is a vital distinction nobody seems to make. This goes back to authenticity and realism.

AND FINALLY

On a practical level, this is not really a story about “diversity” at all. It’s a story about the rise of YA comics. If you look at it that way, the things that sell and don’t sell (AND THE MARKETS THEY SELL IN VS THE MARKETS THEY DON’T SELL IN) start to make a different kind of sense.