Paul Levitz on "The Craft of Comics Writing"

For those of you in New York on Dec. 6th, Paul Levitz will be teaching a class at MoCCA, the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art.

THE CRAFT OF COMICS WRITING:
THE LONG AND SHORT OF PLOTTING
Instructor: PAUL LEVITZ
One session, MONDAY December 6
6:30 pm-8:30 pm
Admission $40 | $35 for MoCCA Members

From one of comics’ undisputed master plotters, PAUL LEVITZ, a discussion of how to construct plots to suit story structures long and short, building ideas from character, and tools for analyzing the form to develop your goals. Everything you ever wanted to know about plotting comics but were afraid to ask!

Go to this page and scroll down until you see a familiar cover.

Saturn Girl's new TV ad

Not sure quite why Saturn Girl dyed her hair brown or why she's advertising for T-Mobile, but there she is.

Computo, the iPad

If you follow Mark Waid on Twitter, you might have heard that yesterday he left his iPad on a plane and it was stolen. The interesting thing (and the relevant part, here) was that he posted a screen shot of the location where the MobilMe service said it was, and that's when I found out Waid named his iPad "Computo". I later asked him if he had any other geek tech with comic book names, and he said that his iPhone is named "Omnicom" (after the device, not this site, I'm sure).

I asked my readers a few years ago what Legion-related names they have for their tech stuff. Here's my current listing:

• my desktop computer is "LSH-HQ"
• my laptop is "Computo"
• my network is "Sleepnet"
• my wireless router is "LegionOutpost"
• my iPhone is "Omnicom"
• my flash drive in my briefcase is "Brainiac5"

What do you guys have?

Unofficial election results: Mon-El projected as new leader

First things first... The Legion Omnicom is projecting Mon-El as the new Legion Leader for election 2010.

The Legion Election is over. According to my unofficial election poll, Mon-El is the new leader with Phantom Girl as the new Deputy. Here are my final results, with over 760 voters (which is a good 2% of the actual readers). Using the Associated Press method of calculating margin of error, the numbers here are likely to be correct to within plus or minus 5 percentage points.

Although Mon-El leads Phantom Girl by only 2.5 points, which is within the margin of error, trends over the course of the polling leads The Omnicom Network to call Mon-El the winner of Legion Election 2010, with Phantom Girl as the runner-up and thus the Deputy Leader.

Official results are still being tallied, and the actual winner will be announced in-story in the issue coming out in December 2010.

	Percentage	Votes
Mon-El	16.28%	126
Phantom Girl	13.70%	106
Gates	7.49%	58
Brainiac 5	6.33%	49
Tyroc	5.81%	45
Shadow Lass	5.04%	39
Sensor Girl	4.13%	32
Lightning Lass	3.62%	28
Quislet	3.62%	28
Shrinking Violet	3.49%	27
Polar Boy	3.10%	24
Dream Girl	2.97%	23
Dawnstar	2.58%	20
Element Lad	2.58%	20
Chameleon Boy	2.45%	19
Cosmic Boy	2.20%	17
Timber Wolf	2.20%	17
Ultra Boy	2.07%	16
Earth Man	1.94%	15
Colossal Boy	1.55%	12
Invisible Kid	1.55%	12
Sun Boy	1.55%	12
Tellus	1.42%	11
Wildfire	1.42%	11
Chameleon Girl	0.90%	7

I have to assume that this is a legitimate tally with no shenanigans (though I have heard anecdotal evidence of people voting more than once).

Some observations:

• Interestingly, Phantom Girl led from day 1 up through about a week before the election closed, when Mon-El surged ahead. I'm not sure what got people voting for him - was there some online effort in a forum that urged voters to choose him or something? Or is it just that more people are familiar with him because of his 21st century "Superman" appearances?
• Gates' showing here was, I believe, a way of throwing Paul Levitz a curveball - "Let's see what he can do with THIS!" type thing. I voted for Gates for that reason.
• Tyroc too. When has he been popular enough to have people vote for him? I think this was a vote for "Let's pick the character that Levitz has said that he dislikes the most."
• Towards the low end of the voting, we have many characters who are actually in the spotlight, like Sun Boy, Earth Man, Ultra Boy, and Polar Boy. That's puzzling, unless these are characters that the readers think are being OVER-used. Yet Brainiac 5, also in the spotlight, is near the top of the votes.
• Wildfire, second from last? He has always been one of the MOST popular Legionnaires.

Now, on the other hand, not sure how Mon-El and Phantom Girl fit when Paul Levitz wrote that he "is busy tearing up his Legion plot charts and figuring out how to accommodate the will of the masses!".