Awards | John Broome and Frank Jacobs will receive the 2009 Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing. The award is named in memory of Bill Finger, whose role in the creation of Batman, and many of the associated characters and concepts, went unacknowledged for years.
Broome, who passed away in 1998, wrote for DC Comics from 1946 to 1970, working on such titles as Green Lantern and The Flash. Jacobs' byline has appeared in more than 300 issues of MAD since he began writing for the magazine in 1957.
The Finger Award will be presented July 24 during the Eisner Awards ceremony at Comic-Con International. [press release]
Legal | A federal appeals court on Monday upheld the 2005 conviction of Dwight Whorley, a Virginia man sentenced to 20 years in prison in part for possessing child pornography. However, the Justice Department also prosecuted him under the PROTECT Act for receiving cartoon (manga/anime) images via email depicting the sexual abuse of children. Whorley's conviction was the first under the 2003 statute that was not based on photographs of children.
In a 10-1 decision, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to rehear Whorley's case. In his dissent, Judge Roger Case encouraged the Supreme Court to take up the case. [Threat Level]
Creators | Cartoonist Derf is recovering from quintuple-bypass surgery, an operation made necessary by radiation treatments for cancer. [Derf's blog, via SLG Publishing]
Creators | Ed Brubaker chats about the creation of Sleeper, the 2004-2005 Wildstorm series that received a new collection this week: "I've always been really proud of it. It's strange, because I've been in a lot of meetings in Hollywood the past few years, and every single person I meet there has read Sleeper, which was easily my worst-selling title ever." [io9.com]
Creators | Fart Party creator Julia Wertz gets the spotlight. [San Francisco Examiner]
Creators | Justine Sharrock briefly profiles Adrian Tomine and Seth. [San Francisco Chronicle]
Creators | Writer Landry Q. Walker talks about his latest gig with collaborator Eric Jones -- DC's all-ages Batman: The Brave and the Bold: "We had actually spent a bit of time before San Diego ComicCon last year formulating a pitch for an all-ages reinterpretation of Batman based off a combination of the 1940's Dick Sprang art style and the 1960's television series. We then arrived at ComicCon to see images everywhere of this cartoon series and immediately scrapped the proposal. ... And now we're doing a comic that is fundamentally the same as the series we spent the summer quietly creating. Strange world." [X-Ray Studios]
Comics | With the relatively speedy return of Steve Rogers, Glen Weldon considers the "deathspans" of other heroes, including Superman, Hawkeye and Jericho: "You've never heard of him: A Teen Titan. Blond muttonchops. Turned evil, then died. I'm not saying the muttonchops were responsible, exactly. But you have to wonder." [NPR]
Comics | Mike Romo comes not to praise Marvel's Ultimate line but to bury it. Okay, he praises the line-ending Ultimatum ... a little. But then: "That being said, there is a certain ... exploitation, perhaps? An exploitation of killing characters in particularly ruthless ways that seems almost cheap to me. Yes, there is poetry in the death of a hero. There is a cruel irony when his or her death is truly meaningless. But when you start using these deaths as advertising for the book, then there is a insensitivity that verges on tastelessness going on." Almost cheap? [iFanboy]
Fandom | Is "fanboy" an insult? [Hero Complex]