Charles-Soule

Join Andrew Maclean, Meredith Finch, Charles Soule, Nikki Ryan, and Justin Jordan to talk about new series they’re starting at Image. Two things emerged from this panel: These creators are fun people whose work I’d love to read These new books sound so great and creative - I can’t wait to read them. https://youtu.be/gChx7xW9g1U Comic POW! readers will remember we covered Soule’s Letter 44 last year. The Family Trade just came out this week! You can buy it here and one of the best things about Image Comics is that their digital comics are DRM-free! YOU OWN THEM! And Image Comics respects your rights! (So, of course, respect their awesome DRM-free choice by not uploading to file-sharing networks) ...

Comics might not contain music, but music can be a big part of comics. This panel discusses all the ways music intersects with comics - inspiration, background noise to help the writers, and as the subject of comics themselves. https://youtu.be/0xv3_OIE6Bo This is another one of those panels I wish lasted longer. Here are some topics I wanted to bring up: Had Amy Chu heard of or read Hip Hop Family Tree by Ed Piskor and did it inform her musician-based comics. What they thought of the soundtrack that accompanies Kyle Higgins’ C.O.W.L. How the music writers felt about the parallels between the fact that despite only a few possible chord progressions we have so many creative songs and the fact that there are only like five story archetypes, but we still have such fabulous stories in comics.

There’s a quote people like to throw around on the Internet, “Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.” Some attribute this to Napoleon, but it doesn’t matter if he actually said it, it’s a pretty good maxim to help people out when they’re finding themselves engulfed by the temptation to believe in conspiracies. It’s certainly something that got many a person through the George W Bush presidency. But in Letter 44, author Charles Soule flips the saying on its head. What if all the crap you hated about Bush - all the wars he started seemingly just to get back at the guy who flipped the bird at his dad - what if it was all just a coverup? What if the president was actually just using that as an excuse to pump up defense spending budgets in order to get the technology needed for a top secret space mission to meet the first intelligent life humanity had discovered? It’s certainly a tempting premise - it makes all the destruction and lives lost no longer meaningless.

A few weeks ago She-Hulk made headlines for all of the wrong reasons. David Goyer, writer of the upcoming movie Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, made some truly indefensible and ignorant comments about her on the Scriptnotes podcast. He glibly insulted her by reducing her entire character down to a sex object for the Hulk in much less polite language than I’ll use here (for more details you can read this article on IGN). ...