Spotlight on: Spinnerette

There's a new hero squirting sticky white fluid everywhere: meet Spinnerette

I've never been an enormous fan of superhero comics; far be it from me, a fan of super-sonic hedgehogs and bright blue weapon-stealing robots, to say that adults can't enjoy something fundamentally aimed at children, but therein lies the problem - Marvel and DC tried to grow up with their audience, and it went about as well as you'd expect for adults clinging to their childhood. Trying to slap a welcome layer of self-knowing deprecation on top really doesn't help either; it just adds layer after ridiculous layer to a pair of universes that manage to reboot and retrograde themselves all the time, yet can never bear to completely drop something from the increasingly tangled Christmas lights that are their respective continuities. I'd go on, but this paragraph ended up running to five hundred words more before I deleted it in favour of simply moving on to today's comic, Spinnerette.

Tongue firmly in cheek, Spinnerette avoids the trap of straight-up parody, instead playing out as a relatively by-the-numbers comic that comes with its own collection of quirks, be it the League of Canadian Superheroes announcing themselves in both English and French or lead girl Heather being sued by Marvel after using a fancy dress costume for her disguise. Everyone has their own quirks; the male Green Gable is forced by tradition to follow his female superhero ancestors by wearing a dress, and Kat O'Nine Tails uses her prehensile tails to be a part-time masseuse. Heather, meanwhile, learns to her dismay while trying to shoot webs from her wrists that, true to a spider's anatomy, her webbing shoots out from her butt; close enough, at least, to make using it an off-puttingly awkward affair in early chapters.

Author KrazyKrow apparently has plans for the future, including a spin-off featuring the lead trio's Canadian counterparts, but none of it is likely to see the light of day without support and recognition. So, head on over to http://www.krakowstudios.com/spinnerette/ to start reading.

Skullkicking some sense into publishers

Well there's a first. In a staggeringly gutsy move, a Russian comic book fan has contacted the creator of Skullkickers and asked if he would provide textless copies of the comic, to make it easier for him to translate it into Russian and pirate the series across the internet.

What he says does make sense, though; with no translation of Skullkickers available, the only reasonable way for Russians to read it is by wiping the comic clean and re-writing the dialogue from scratch. What I want to know is, why hasn't the comic book industry thought to do this themselves?

Manga is by far the best example to look at; despite a strong fanbase in the west, manga publishers often take months to translate and release English language copies; in the case of Fullmetal Alchemist, Viz Media played catch-up for a while after obtaining the rights to the series several years after its original publication, then slowed the pace until US volumes were coming out at a steady pace, a little over a year after Japan. When teams of unpaid amateurs are buying, scanning, emailing overseas then scrubbing, translating and re-writing mere hours after release, it seems incredible that the actual, paid translators aren't able to bash out an English copy in a week, even accounting for quality control and general bureaucracy.

I've long used the rampant piracy of manga as a prime example of the folly of failing to secure a narrow window for international releases, as well an excellent argument for allowing fans more participation in the things they love. Why turn up your nose at free labour? By all means give us professional, localised releases, publishers, but in the space between international releases, sell the blank slates and let the fans fill them themselves; they sure as hell aren't going to stop doing it if you don't, and recognising their efforts brings the potential for greater profits, a better relationship with readers and a stronger, more enduring fan base. And isn't that what we all want?