Posted in: AWA, Comics | Tagged: Akira Yoshida, AWA, bill jemas

AWA Wants New Voices for iPOP – So Why Is Bill Jemas Writing Them?

Last week, Bleeding Cool scooped a new digital comics publishing line iPOP from AWA or Artists, Writers & Artisans. Not everything was ready for primetime when Bleeding Cool posted, referencing what had been published on the AWA website – which was rapidly withdrawn.

Bleeding Cool also reported that the authorial name for all of these, Yoshida, was actually AWA Publisher Bill Jemas, using a pseudonym as a reference to that controversially used by Marvel EIC C.B. Cebulski as a deliberate dig.

AWA/iPOP has you to confess to that tidbit, still crediting the writer as 'Yoshida' A new press release reads as follows.

For the past two months, post Upshot's print and digital launches, a tiny team of AWA's in-house artists and artisans – the iPOP! team – has turned our attention to launching iPOP!– working on stuff we've been brainstorming and sketching on and off for the past two years.

iPOP! shows and tells three kinds of iopening stories:

1. True: working with new voices to weave stories from headlines into fictional storylines:

e.g. Cruel & Usual – mass incarceration of Black Americans – the new Jim Crow Stories of teenage children of poor black people who are unjustly imprisoned and cruelly punished by our criminal justice system.

e.g. I Hear You Clean Machines – mass misinformation and targeted assassinations
Stories of Russian manipulation of democratic election processes and assassination of political rivals.

2. Kids – starring Beasts and Monsters in stories that hold a fun-house mirror up to adult foibles.

3. Disruptive – eye-catching, experimental, disruptive.

In a perfect world, iPOP would launch in the order above, but a perfect world, this is not.

1. True story development has been slow – easy to find new voices, hard to find anyone with the visual chops you need for great graphic fiction.

2. Kids & Family – development is coming along nicely, and we expect to set free the Beasts and Monsters later in this month

3. Disruptive – our Monsters and Beasts are super sweet and generally gentle, but we also have some Very Bad Babies on our hands.

About AWA – AWA is different

We are not cowering at the sight of our crashing industry.

We are mobilizing and put more creators to work scripting and drawing more and more stories to publish to a vast, diverse and growing market of people who read comics online – many of whom also buy print versions of their favorite stories.
We define our art and craft as storytelling, not as digital or print book publishing; that would be akin to defining the art and craft making music as the vinyl record or the phonographic cylinder industry.

About iPOP! – iPOP! is different – please take a look at these links, and stay tuned.

iPOP! Website: https://awastudios.net/series/be-wawa/ + https://awastudios.net/series/raider-babies/
WEBTOONS: https://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/bad-babies/list?title_no=454005
Tapas: https://tapas.io/series/BadBabies/info
YouTube:

Social Accounts, just in case:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ipop_iopening
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/iPOPiopeningstories
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ipop_iopening/

Ifs it so easy to find new voices, they why do they just have to use their own publisher under a pseudonym? Bill Jemas has always fancied himself as an inspirational writer, whether on Marville at Marvel, or his poetry on the backs of naked women at PeacePaint and now, it seems, short comics stories at AWA. They are currently offering interviews with Jemas, can I suggest that anyone who get chosen ask the question about just who Yoshida really is and how the name was chosen?

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