sonic-powerzone digest, Vol 1 #131 - 4 msgs

Rick2Tails Rick2Tails at msn.com
Mon Mar 19 00:30:19 CET 2001


That`s a very interesting theory Dan.But isn`t it just much simplier and
more likely he quit for better paying work?As far as I understand,Archie
pays worst among the big to medium publishers (many of the small don`t pay
at all ,just comp copies )If one can get work for Nick or Disney or DC or
Marvel ,then unless they are very fond of the characters  ,then they`ll
split for greener pastures.

> Message: 2
> Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2001 21:29:04 -0500
> From: "Daniel J. Drazen" <drazen at andrews.edu>
> Organization: Andrews University
> To: sonic-powerzone at franken.de, rdbauerle at juno.com
> Subject: Fry Burned?
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> Reply-To: sonic-powerzone at franken.de
>
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>      In case you haven't heard, Jim Fry has been sacked.  After
> about S97, his art work will no longer appear in the comic.  Ron
> Lim will take over the cover story art after S98's Sonic
> Adventure 2 adaptation, with Pat Spaziante acting as artistic
> back-up.
>      As there have been no officials explanations as to what
> happened, I can only conjecture.  If I'm wrong, Archie is free to
> step in at any time and set the record straight.  That's what the
> Internet is all about: the free flow of information.
>      I'm one of those who believes that the most obvious
> explanation for anything is probably the correct one unless the
> evidence is pretty darn convincing.  I therefore think that if
> you want to find the reason why Fry was let go, you only need
> look at page 11 panel 4 of S94's "New Order."
>      Archie has made it clear that they're running a wholesome,
> family-type establishment.  A visit to their Web site
> (http://archiecomics.com/arcade/sunday_stumper/forparents.html)
> lists the DOs and DON'Ts one can encounter when reading any comic
> published by Archie.  And according to clause (d), smoking is a
> big DON'T.
>      Let me get this on the table right now: I am NOT about to
> argue with Archie's editorial policy in this regard.  I have no
> intention whatsoever of justifying the nicotine habit.  I never
> viewed smoking as something glamorously grown-up, possibly
> because one of my childhood chores was making sure that the
> ashtrays around the house were emptied.  I presently belong to a
> denomination (Seventh-day Adventist) which has been preaching
> against the use of tobacco since its inception in the mid-19th
> century, a teaching I fully support.  Finally, I have lost two
> close family members prematurely to smoking-related cancers: my
> mother died at age 51 and my younger brother at age 46.  In both
> cases, the cancer started in the lungs and lodged in other parts
> of the body (the esophagus and brain, respectively) with fatal
> results.  So I have no problem whatsoever with the fact that
> Archie Comics are a smoke-free zone.
>      Still, the dismissal of Fry because he violated the No
> Smoking rule raises more questions than it answers.  Why did Fry
> draw a character smoking in an Archie comic at all?  Didn't he
> know better?  Did he know about the DOs and DON'Ts and simply
> didn't care?  Was this his way of giving notice and getting out
> from under his Sonic commitments?  And how did the offending
> panel get into the comic in the first place in spite of company
> standards?  I can't presume to answer all of these questions, but
> I can say (pending a public explanation by the Powers That Be at
> Archie Comic Publications) that this episode is consistent with
> two weaknesses in its corporate style that the company has
> recently demonstrated:
>      1. A BREAKDOWN IN THE PRODUCTION PROCESS.  Time was when
> Archie exercised an iron-fisted control on their product.  It was
> so severe that the original Princess Sally miniseries as
> envisioned by Mike Kanterovich and Ken Penders (wherein Sally was
> supposed to have discovered a literally underground group of
> roboticized Mobians dwelling beneath the city, including Queen
> Alicia) was 86ed by both Archie and Sega, and Mike and Ken had to
> start all over again; that's why the miniseries rolled out behind
> schedule.  Yet another infamous example of Archie's artistic
> heavy-handedness can be seen at the bottom of page 29 of Ken
> Penders's "Brave New World" special.  The figure of Sonic in the
> last panel of the page looks different from the Sonics appearing
> in other panels on the same page, as well as how he appears in
> the rest of the book.  The reason: someone in Editorial decided
> that Sonic looked too depressed.  Well, duh!  He'd just
> discovered that Uncle Chuck had been lying to him all these
> years, and that his parents were alive and well and roboticized.
> Who wouldn't be depressed?  But someone in their infinite concern
> for the sensibilities of the comic's young readers more or less
> ordered Pat Spaziante to redraw the Sonic at the bottom of page
> 29.  Thus was born the stylistic tradition of making Sonic look
> sleepy/apathetic when he's supposed to look sad.
>      Since then, however, there has been a serious slippage in
> enforcement of Archie standards.  The smoking teacher panel
> represents the second time in three issues of Sonic where any
> kind of system of artistic/editorial oversight has broken down
> (the first incident was the infamous panel in S92's "Wrath of
> Khan" where Tails was drawn without his trademark tails).
>      As with the tailless Tails incident, this could have been
> rectified so easily, and the fact that it wasn't raises even more
> questions.  Why didn't the picture of a Mobian smoking raise a
> red flag with Pam Eklund, the inker of record?  Or with Frank
> Gagliardo, the colorist?  Didn't either one of them have the
> authority to erase, white out, or otherwise delete the offending
> pipe?  Certainly Justin Gabrie had the authority, in his dual
> role as Editor and Art Director.  He could have ordered Spaz to
> white out the pipe and its smoke, then bawled Jim Fry out over
> the phone and let him off with a warning.  That would have been
> the end of it.  But it didn't work out that way, and thus we come
> to the second characteristic of the dysfunctional management
> style at Archie Comics:
>      2. OVERREACTION.  This isn't the first, or even the second,
> time in recent history that Archie Comics has taken an
> unnecessarily harsh line toward a real or perceived infraction.
> Michael Silberkleit publicly chastised Melissa Joan Hart, star of
> the live action "Sabrina, The Teenage Witch" television series,
> for her photo shoots for certain men's magazines.  Silberkleit,
> as I pointed out in my Best/Worst List for 1999, was presuming to
> lecture Hart as if she were directly under contract to Archie
> Comic Publications and not just portraying a character that
> appeared in an Archie Comic publication.  Even though the
> magazines that ran the pictures exploited the Sabrina connection,
> the consensus was that Archie's criticism of Hart was more than a
> little out of line.
>      This perception was deepened when, after over 40 years of
> helping to define the Archie Comics house style and receiving a
> lifetime achievement award at that year's San Diego Comic Con,
> Dan DeCarlo was fired.  The immediate cause: there was a "Josie
> and the Pussycats" live action movie in the works, and DeCarlo
> felt he was entitled to a piece of the action.  A rational
> company, taking an objective view of the service rendered by
> DeCarlo over the years, would have said: "OK, let's negotiate."
> A figure agreeable to all parties would have been reached and
> DeCarlo would still be rendering his services to Archie Comics.
> Instead, he was sacked as Archie claimed that they alone are
> entitled to call themselves the creators of Josie et al.  This
> action, coming on the heels of the Melissa Joan Hart brouhaha,
> recalls the words of cartoonist Dan O'Neall: "If you do something
> stupid once, it's stupid.  If you do something stupid twice, it's
> a philosophy."
>      And now the Archie management philosophy has struck again
> with the firing of Jim Fry.  As I pointed out above, it would
> have been far simpler for SOMEONE to have short-stopped the
> offending page, altered the artwork, and dressed Fry down over
> the phone or even in person.  The offending panel would have lost
> its offensiveness and Archie would still have the services of one
> of the better artists for the series.  Instead, as atonement for
> letting the panel get through, Archie can seem to think of
> nothing better to do by way of expiation than to sack Fry.  This
> isn't a matter of locking the barn door after the horse has
> gotten out; it's more like forgetting about the barn door
> entirely and shooting the horse!
>      As I said at the beginning, all this is speculation on my
> part, absent of Archie's coming forward to give their side of the
> story.  And frankly, I don't expect them to be forthcoming any
> time soon.  Not that I wouldn't welcome their attempting to set
> the record straight.  It's just that I've done enough research on
> dysfunctional families (after having spent the first 16 years of
> my life in one) to know that sick families tend to live by
> certain rules, one of those rules being "Don't communicate with
> anyone outside of the family."  Given Archie's recent track
> record, why should we expect any signs of corporate mental health
> at this late date?
> --------------F7CE42FAA783C078F8C06589--
>
>
>
> --__--__--
>
> Message: 3
> From: Rhauf1 at aol.com
> Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2001 21:52:34 EST
> Subject: Re: Sonic SATAM episodes up for download!
> To: sonic-powerzone at franken.de
> Reply-To: sonic-powerzone at franken.de
>
> > But think of the fact that the TV still uses safe framing and nonsquare
> >  pixels. Because of the safe frames that limit the TV CRT's picture to
only
> >  about 640x480, that's why.
>
>
> Um, safe framing?  you mean cropping?    an no, im not talking about what
> 'appears' to be left after cropping, on a television's tube.. i'm talking
> about the raw image, from top to bottom, with no cropping.  the actual
> technical specifications.  uh, a DVD is 500 lines of resolution.  that is
500
> viewable lines on a television which has no cropping, (a front projection
> television for example)    am i making any sence here?    hey, what were
we
> talking about with this here in the first place, anyway?      uh...  oh
well.
>
>
>
>
> >I don't like AIM's transfers.. they always eat up 101% of my bandwidth
even
> >when connected as 128kbps and sending at 1kB/s.. :P
>
>
> Hmm.. thats an interesting theory.   try clicking the "medium" or "slow"
> speed setting at the right of the file transfer.  then again... you dont
like
> aim, oh well. some people dont like icq either.. some people want ftp, or
> www, i cant cater to everybody. i do what i can do and thats what you get.
>
>    -ryan
>
>
> --__--__--
>
> Message: 4
> From: "Magnus Andersson" <rubens.barrichello at swipnet.se>
> To: <sonic-powerzone at franken.de>
> Subject: Re: Fry Burned?
> Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2001 06:38:31 +0100
> Reply-To: sonic-powerzone at franken.de
>
> >      I'm one of those who believes that the most obvious
> > explanation for anything is probably the correct one unless the
> > evidence is pretty darn convincing.  I therefore think that if
> > you want to find the reason why Fry was let go, you only need
> > look at page 11 panel 4 of S94's "New Order."
>
> I´m not saying that you are wrong about this, you could very well be
right,
> but if that is so, would it really be fair to fire Fry just for a simple
> pipe? Or has he done that mistake with smoking anytime before? If not, it
> is fascinating that you could get fired for just a 15 second-long drawing
> mistake.
>
> I understand why Archie is strict against having anything related to
> smoking in their comic, but this case is quite silly, IMHO. I mean, if we
> had seen for example a cute character like Tails, smoking, then the
> situation would had been so much different. But just one picture with the
> principal? Gee...that pipe was even suting his look, his personality.
>
> I´m not too unhappy that Fry is leaving the comic (well, of course it is
> sad for him as a person, but for the comic I think it was good.) His
> artwork was nothing but a pathetic attempt to ape the Japanese
manga-style.
> It looks terrible!!
>
> Magnus Andersson
> rubens.barrichello at swipnet.se
>
> ------------------
> Music drives out the devil and makes people cheerful.
> The devil, the originator of sorrowful anxieties and restless troubles,
> flees before the sound of music,
> almost as much as before the Word of God.
> ---Martin Luther
>
>
>
>
>
> --__--__--
>
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> sonic-powerzone at franken.de
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>
>
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