Posted in: Comics, Recent Updates, Run Around | Tagged: china, Comics, duncan fegredo, entertainment, hentai, india, lenny henry, Mark Millar, scott mccloud, sculptor

Thursday Runaround – The Lenny Henry Spider-Man

MILLARWHIRLED

Mark Millar and Duncan Fegredo are launching their new Image comic, MPH, at Forbidden Planet in London on Saturday 24th May from 1 till 2pm. That's right, it's rather a speedy signing as well.

SCULPTED

Scott McCloud returns to comic book fiction. The New York Times reports,

The cartoonist Scott McCloud, who wrote about what makes comic books tick in "Understanding Comics" and speculated about their future in "Reinventing Comics," is returning to fiction for his next project, "The Sculptor," a graphic novel to be published in February 2015 by First Second.

SUPERHEROES TAKE TO THE AIR

College students Johnny Robinson and Jelmer Lelieveld bonded over comic books upon meeting in college and mixed it with their study of radio broadcasting. The duo asked their classmates to voice the characters and the adventures of Code Red and Crucifix Amber were born.

"Johnny said: "We have tried to make the story a little bit different to your regular comic book plot. Where the character normally works for a newspaper or a radio station, we have made our main character the director of a social media site, to bring it into the modern era.

So, like Clark Kent now then…

SPIDER-FAN

British Comedian Lenny Henry has an Amazing Fantasy cover for his iPhone…

INDIAN COMICS GET POLITICAL

Well, it worked for IDW and Bluewater. Now India is profiling politicians in its comic books.

The 45- page comic book depicts Modi rescuing a drowning boy, swimming in crocodile-infested water, serving tea and food to soldiers going to war in 1962, taking on school bullies, helping his father sell tea, acting in theatre, strategising his team's kabaddi win and saving a trapped bird. The book, interestingly, shows young Modi sharing a single family room with six members. One of them is a sister whom he feeds though none of his siblings have been named in the comic.

The two other comics, 'Bhavishya Ki Asha – Narendra Modi' and 'Kahani Narendra Modi Ki' have been published by Prabhat Prakashan and are quite popular among customers. "Readers are curious to know about Modi's childhood activities and are asking for comics. The list of buyers includes people of all age groups," said Kumar at a book depot adding, "The comics are based on 'real incidents in the early life of Narendra Modi," he claimed.

CHINA IN YOUR HENTAI

China cracks down on locally produced slash fiction and hentai…

A Chinese crackdown on pornography is taking a creative turn. Authorities have arrested over 20 women in Henan province for writing gay erotic fan fiction online, according to a report (video in Chinese) from Anhui Television.

As we've pointed out, China launches periodic crackdowns on pornography—which is ostensibly illegal—that often have more to do with censorship than protecting the country's youth. In the case of the Henan arrests, officials seem to now be targeting people's imaginations and possibly homosexuality in general.

Exported from Japan in the 1990s, slash, a subset of fan fiction that usually focuses on attraction or sexual relationships between people of the same sex, has taken on a cult following in China. Chinese Slash or danmei—literally "indulging in beauty"—focuses almost exclusively on relationships between men. Sherlock and Watson on the BBC show Sherlock have made for prime Chinese fan-fiction material, for example.

The writers for danmei blogs and websites are usually heterosexual women in their 20s who make a few yuan on each of their stories. Comics, videos that embellish story lines from favorite TV shows, and stories circulate on Chinese social media regularly.

WHATCOMICS

WhatCulture looks at 13 truths that comic fans won't admit to themselves. And they get rather specific…

And then there are characters that people hate when they're around but then suddenly have legions of fans when the character is killed. This happened with Maggott, one of the X-Men from the 90s who was the subject of legions of hate mail. After being killed after a long absence, forums suddenly erupted with support for the character.

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