Welcome to the weblog of the writers and artists of Ferret Press (a publisher of fine comix) and PANEL (a Columbus, Ohio comic creators collaborative.) Here you will find our musings on comics, art, the creative process, politics, the web, and life.
During the "bad girl" craze of the 90s, venerable indie sexpot character Vampirella made a big comeback, and it seemed like every other month she was involved in some sort of crossover or "special issue". This week, we take a gander at Pantha vs. Vampirella.
Yep, this very special issue was written by current Marvel darling Mark Millar. And no, I don't know how Pantha gets into (or keeps on) those crotch-high boots. It's probably part of her panther powers. Or something.
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Thursday, July 09, 2009
Posted by
Dara
on
7/09/2009 05:44:00 PM
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Ferret Press on CowTV
No, it's not a weird veterinary school prank. The guys at CowTV Productions were at Comfest 2009, interviewing various vendors and festival attendees. Ferret Press is featured prominently in their video diary, starting at the 7:00 minute mark (Tom Williams makes a cameo at around 8:00).
I usually feel uncomfortable being filmed, but for once I feel like I was pretty coherent.
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Wednesday, July 08, 2009
Posted by
Tony
on
7/08/2009 09:36:00 AM
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Best wishes to Derf
I was flipping through Derf cartoons today and just saw this one:
Get well soon, Derf!
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Tuesday, July 07, 2009
Posted by
Craig
on
7/07/2009 09:36:00 AM
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I'm calling this early...
You might recall that last year I promised to administer brutal punishment to anyone I saw dressed as the Heath Ledger Joker at MidOhio Con (fortunately, Tony was there to physically restrain me.) This year, I've already decided to issue a warning to this fall's candidates: anyone showing up wearing this "Wolverine Collector's Accessory" deserves whatever happens to them. Even when I was ten I would have called the guy wearing this a douchebag.
The most tragic thing about this? Most of these will likely be sold in adult sizes.
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Sunday, July 05, 2009
Posted by
Dara
on
7/05/2009 09:41:00 PM
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Weekend Versus
This weekend's comic book crossover that nobody asked for: Venom vs. Carnage
Also known as:
Inkblot vs. Spilled Ink
Venom vs. Venom Too
Venom vs. Son of Venom
Venom vs. Hey, That Venom Character Is Pretty Popular So Let's Make A Rip-off Character Exactly Like Him, But You Know, Red Instead Of Black, Yeah, That's Why We're "The House Of Ideas"
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Friday, July 03, 2009
Posted by
Dara
on
7/03/2009 11:06:00 AM
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Michigan vs. Ohio
Friend of the Ferret and kick-ass gig poster artist John G. (he of Cleveland, OH) drew this cool poster for a Michigan vs. Ohio rivalry...in a Scrabble tournament!
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Posted by
Dara
on
7/03/2009 10:48:00 AM
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Dara on the DSi
Robot Comics is bringing my comic book adaptation of "Anda's Game" to your Nintendo DSi. That's right, you can now read my various comic book works on your Sony PSP, iPhone, Android phone, and now the Nintendo DSi.
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Wednesday, July 01, 2009
Posted by
Tom
on
7/01/2009 06:55:00 AM
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Dave McKean on the nets
Dave McKean doesn't have a blog to my knowledge but he does tweet. And he tweets often. Posting up works in progress, and new stuff.
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Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Posted by
Dara
on
6/30/2009 10:33:00 PM
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Brainbot Jr. on your smartphone?
Maybe, if our pitch is accepted. I just sent a proposal to iVerse Media, Robot Comics, and Keenspot. We’ll see if anything comes of it.
In the meantime, you can catch up on the 20+ strips here.
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Posted by
Dara
on
6/30/2009 08:14:00 AM
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Harvey Awards nominees for 2009
The Harvey Awards nominees have been announced. Congrats to fellow PANELista Tom Williams, for being part of the Comic Book Tattoo book, nominated this year for Best Anthology.
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Monday, June 29, 2009
Posted by
Dara
on
6/29/2009 10:40:00 AM
:
Fun with keywords
So I was just checking my server referrer logs and came across a couple of funny keyword searches which led people to our blog:
cake justice league - I don't get it, do they mean the musical band or the dessert product?
sense of right alliance -not familiar with that, but have you read that sweet new superhero comic Premonition of Righteousness Confederation?
comfest - well, sure. After all, this was the weekend for our big outdoor festival.
comfest boobs - to be expected.
comfest boob pictures - oh, you don't want to read about the boobs, you want to see actual pictures?
And my favorite:
playboy ferret faucet - see kids, spelling does matter
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Sunday, June 28, 2009
Posted by
Tom
on
6/28/2009 11:18:00 PM
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That's a wrap!
Over the course of the weekend, I've been taking pics of the show. Life's not work safe so you'll probably want to view this one at home, to be on the safe side. (Comfest comes with a PG-13 rating) Fun times. Exhausting. Hot. There were snakes and a certain funk in the air.
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Posted by
Dara
on
6/28/2009 09:50:00 AM
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Comfest Body Painting
Here's Tom at Comfest yesterday, with his first body painting customer. Although the young lady was quite lovely and more than happy to pose for a photo with the artist, in deference to her privacy I'm not going to post her face all over the Internets.
(Warning: partial nudity, for those of you who are offended by the sight of boobs...)
But since she was sharing her boobs with the whole Comfest crowd, I think it's ok to post the rest of the picture. Right?
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Posted by
Dara
on
6/28/2009 09:37:00 AM
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Weekend Versus
To make up for last weekend's by week, here's another two-fer. This weekend's theme: bad 90s parody comics: Loco vs. Pulverene and Wolverbroad vs. Hobo.
One parodies Lobo and Wolverine, and the other parodies Lobo and Wolverine and the whole 90s "bad girl" craze. Who wins? U Decide!
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Friday, June 26, 2009
Posted by
Dara
on
6/26/2009 08:13:00 AM
:
Comfest
Comfest starts today and runs through the weekend. Once again, Ferret Press and the PANEL gang will have a booth. Come and visit us and enjoy music over the 3 days from 200 bands!
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Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Posted by
Matt Kish
on
6/24/2009 01:25:00 PM
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Question about making art
Do any of you out there - Panelistas or anyone reading this - make art, specifically comic art, using brushes exclusively? I'm familiar with some of your art styles and I've seen a lot of you draw, including watching Andy do amazing things with a brush pen, but I'm wondering if any of you have ever done a complete story or project using only pencil, brushes and ink. No pens.
If so, please comment and let me know how it went. Did you like it? Did it work well for you? Anything I should know? Any hints for using brushes only? That kind of thing. I appreciate it!
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Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Posted by
Tom
on
6/23/2009 07:08:00 PM
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*I thought this is why we voted a Democrat in... guess not.
Part of Ohio Governor Strictland's cuts in the budget is a 50% cut to Ohio libraries. The Columbus Metro system has been dealing with a 20% cut so this would be devastating. This will aggrevate the recovery in progress. Library foot traffic is at an all time high with the economy. People are coming in looking for escape or to job hunt. Surely this will close branches, cut staff, hinder their buying new material, and cut services. For one thing, you can kiss the free internet service good bye at branches.
The Library has set up a modifiable form to fill out and send to your representative or you can call the Governor's office line at 614-466-3555. The window to act is small. Voting to pass this cut is on the 30th. Personally I don't get the obvious disconnect with Strictland. Libraries and education go hand in hand so why cut this service? I wouldn't mind a bump in my state income tax, if it means keeping the libraries funded.
*While Strictland was a better choice than the one we had at the time. I'm open to a third party candidate in the next cycle.This pretty much clinched it for me.Yes he'll take some heat with bumping up taxes but you can't run a state on fumes. Or maybe you could if you legalized and taxed the crap out of pot.
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I haven't seen the commentary myself, but this bit seems to encapsulate the experience:
Weirdly, they proudly point out several touches taken directly from Will Eisner’s original Spirit comics—always ridiculously minor things, like The Spirit tripping at one point, or Commissioner Dolan having a pipe, or the precise construction of a sewer grate—as if those things compensated for the fact that the film otherwise in no way resembles Eisner’s work.
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Monday, June 22, 2009
Posted by
Tony
on
6/22/2009 01:54:00 PM
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Lights ... camera ... snikt!
So, we haven't talked about "X-Men colon Origins colon Wolverine," have we?
I saw it a few months ago with Tommy Ray, and I gotta say ... it was fine. I enjoyed myself, didn't look at my watch too much, laughed a couple of time ... fine.
It survives mostly on Hugh Jackman's charisma. Somehow, you root for the guy -- but you still enjoy seeing him get beat up. Wolverine is a combination between a tough guy and someone you could hang out with, and Jackman embodies that. That guy does exasperation better than anyone in the business.
I'm told that you'll enjoy this movie a lot less if you're a longtime Wolverine fan, or someone who cares about his life more than I do. The movie is basically a Reader's Digest abridged version of the last 30 years of continuity. If you wanted to see something really new -- or if you wanted something even more familiar -- you're probably out of luck.
Another problem is that certain things that look badass on the comic page look a little silly on the big screen. When you're reading a comic, you mentally fill in some of the badassedness. One of those things, unfortunately, is the line "I'm the best there is at what I do, and what I do isn't nice."
Here are three other things you could complain about, if you were so inclined:
1. Wolverine doesn't need an origin. He works better as a tough guy with a mysterious past. 2. Too many last-minute twists. 3. We never see Wolverine being "the best there is." He basically follows Sabretooth around and looks vaguely disapproving. Likewise, we never see the berserker rage. 4. Gambit doesn't bother me personally. But if you need Will.I.Am to tell you he's cool, he's probably less cool than you thought. 5. Will.I.Am.
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Sunday, June 21, 2009
Posted by
Dara
on
6/21/2009 10:11:00 PM
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More protests, more government clampdown
Glued to the TV most of the weekend. Like everyone else, I fear things will get worse before they get better (if they ever do). The only thing I know for certain is that Iran won't go back to how it's been for the past 30 years. Change will come. Maybe not this week or this month or this year, then sooner than the mullah's would like.
"Les despotes eux-mêmes ne nient pas que la liberté ne soit excellente; seulement ils ne la veulent que pour eux-mêmes, et ils soutiennent que tous les autres en sont tout à fait indignes." --Alexis de Tocqueville, L'Ancien régime et la révolution
("Despots themselves don't deny that freedom is a wonderful thing, they only want to limit it to themselves; they argue that everyone else is unworthy of it.")
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Friday, June 19, 2009
Posted by
Craig
on
6/19/2009 01:38:00 AM
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I know I said I wouldn't do this, but...
EDIT: after re-reading the comments critiquing the Toddler's cover below, I finally remembered someone else had taken the same idea and done it correctly a couple years later:
**********
Here's the most bestest Marvel Comics cover EVER, as voted by people who enjoy comics that suck:
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Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Posted by
Craig
on
6/17/2009 12:39:00 AM
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Way Back Machine
Tony has his Geo-Force, but I've got Machine Man...
There are great cosmic mysteries that baffle our minds, from the secrets of Stonehenge to male nipples, but none are so puzzling as the D-list status of Aaron Stack, aka X-51, aka Machine Man. Birthed in a premise taken from a Clarke & Kubrick movie masterpiece, translated onto the page and injected into the regular Marvel universe by Jack Kirby, picked up by Steve Ditko before being passed on to the hands of Barry Windsor-Smith; in terms of pedigree alone, Machine Man has enough going for him to make him ten times as popular as Wolverine, yet somehow he has been relegated to the sidelines, a blip on the radar less impressive than a third string Defender. In an ordered, sane universe, the character would occupy the center of our cultural consciousness. Instead, he has as much credibility as a prototype Inspector Gadget. Go figure.
2001: A Space Odyssey #8
It's a new Friday the 13th, only instead of the Knights Templar being put to the sword by the Vatican, it has been decreed that the new X-series robot, built for deep space exploration, must be destroyed en masse by the U.S. military. Like their predecessor the HAL 9000, these mechanical men have developed a rudimentary sentience, which leads to psychosis brought on by existential angst. The first fifty robots perish when their self-destruct mechanisms are triggered, but X-51 has bigger things in store for him.
Brought into the home of Abel Stack, one of the X-project's chief scientists, the robot has been named Aaron and "raised" as a human being, even coming to address his creator as "Dad." This foster father removes X-51's self destruct device when he hears of the order and sends his robot progeny away, sacrificing himself in the detonation of the bomb without Aaron being aware of his fate. The military hunts the fugitive robot down when he is spotted flying over an unnamed city (he flies by "cancelling the gravity equation"-- flight powered by math!) and he is quickly recaptured.
Mister Machine, as he will come to be called in another issue or two (the name Machine Man following a couple issues after that), is stripped of his human face and brought to a military lab where (in accordance with science fiction plot #317) his human tormentors are revealed to harbor less actual humanity than their inhuman captive. As X-51 gives voice to his tormented soul, a mysterious black monolith appears before him as it has during numerous pivotal points in human evolution. Breaking free of his bonds, he approaches it-- running straight into this issue's cliffhanger.
Kirby explored the stranger-in-a-strange-land aspect of the character through a few issues of 2001 and then into Machine Man's own title. Marv Wolfman and Steve Ditko followed him, putting the character into more conventional superhero settings, and a couple years later Barry Smith (aided by Herb Trimpe!) moved the character back into a beautifully illustrated Blade Runner-esque future dystopia. Despite all of this, the character never set the world on fire and is not the subject of a summer movie starring Hugh Jackman, a fact which underscores what a horribly flawed universe we inhabit.
