2010 June
What Are You Reading?
Afrodisiac cover
Welcome once again to What Are You Reading? Our guest this week is Van Jensen, writer of Pinocchio, Vampire Slayer and Pinocchio, Vampire Slayer and the Great Puppet Theater. To see what Van and the rest of the Robot 6 crew are reading, click below.
- June 20, 2010 @ 11:00 AM by JK Parkin
The Fifth Color | Forward Into the Past with Marvel Solicitations for Sept. ’10
Marvel editor and all-around snazzy guy Axel Alonso said something super-important at WonderCon this year. I’ve written it down and taped it to the inside of my wallet so I never forget these words of wisdom at the most crucial of times. With the $3.99 standard, reprints and the multiple titles you’re about to see, I wanted to pass this knowledge on to you. It may sound blasphemous, it may even be madness, but trust me on this one. These words could save your comic collection:
“You don’t have to buy all of them.”
Madness! You’re going to be seeing a lot of repeat faces in here – the obligatory bevy of Deadpool books, our masses of Avengers, the Shadowland tie-in that grows stronger every month, etc. But just remember this: You don’t have to buy them all.
Is it true? Stay sharp and come with me down the path to Marvel’s September comics. And may God have mercy on our souls.
- June 18, 2010 @ 04:00 PM by Carla Hoffman
Nominees announced for 2010 British Fantasy Awards
FreakAngels, Vol. 3
The British Fantasy Society has announced the finalists for the 2010 British Fantasy Awards, which will be presented in September at FantasyCon 2010 in Nottingham, England.
The nominees in the Best Comic/Graphic Novel category are:
• Fables, by Bill Willingham and Mark Buckingham (Vertigo)
• FreakAngels, by Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield (Avatar)
• The Girly Comic, edited by Selina Lock (Factor Fiction)
• Locke & Key, by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez (IDW Publishing)
• Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?, by Neil Gaiman and Andy Kubert (DC Comics)
Members of the British Fantasy Society, FantasyCon 2009 and FantasyCon 2010 can vote online or by email. A voting form will also be included in the June mailing to BFS members. Voting deadline is July 31.
(via Locus Online)
- June 18, 2010 @ 02:51 PM by Kevin Melrose
Collect This Now! The Complete Carl Barks
Someone please explain to me why, in this golden age of reprints, when every 20th century cartoonist under the sun and their dog is getting the lavish, fancy-shmancy book collection treatment, do we still not have a decent, definitive collection of Carl Barks’ work?
- June 18, 2010 @ 01:15 PM by Chris Mautner
Con report: Kids Read Comics
Matt Feazell at Kids Read Comics last weekend
I’m really getting addicted to Roger Langridge’s journal-style writeups of the cons he goes to. His latest one is of Kids Read Comics, which took place in Ann Arbor, Michigan, last weekend, but to get the full effect, you should also read his account of the trip from North Carolina to Ann Arbor via Greyhound bus, which is sort of a worst-case scenario.
Those who couldn’t be there can experience the con vicariously through podcasts; the KRC folks recorded their panel on Comics Programming in Libraries, and TGT Webcomics podcaster Kurt Sasso has video interviews up with a number of guests, including Sara Turner (The Ghosts of Pineville) and Krishna Sadasivam (PC Weenies). Sadavisam checks in as well with his own con report, and Ryan Estrada wraps it up with a truly awesome story about a kid cartoonist. There’s more at the official Kids Read Comics website and Twitter feed.
- June 18, 2010 @ 11:30 AM by Brigid Alverson
Quote of the day | George Gene Gustines, on Justice League: Cry for Justice
Justice League: Cry for Justice
“Despite some often-beautiful artwork by Mauro Cascioli, the series, written by James Robinson, was almost universally derided. [...] Such vitriol! If Cry for Justice was on Facebook, it would be de-friended, yet here it is on the hardcover list. Is its best-selling status the equivalent of gawking at a traffic accident, or are comic-book fans complaining even as they vote the opposite way with their dollars?”
– New York Times writer George Gene Gustines, on the debut of the Justice League: Cry for Justice hardcover
at No. 6 on the newspaper’s graphic novel bestseller list
- June 18, 2010 @ 10:30 AM by Kevin Melrose
Catch a glimpse of the actual Blue Beetle live-action test footage
From the Blue Beetle live-action test footage
For those itching to get a look at actual footage from the live-action effects test for a proposed Blue Beetle television series — even before it can be unveiled next month at Comic-Con International — here’s your chance: Video-effects artist Rommel Calderon has included a snippet from the sequence in his latest demo reel.
The all-too-brief clip, which looks much better than those low-quality screencaps lead you to believe, starts at the 50-second mark. You can watch the video after the break. Geoff Johns, chief creative officer of DC Entertainment, plans to screen a longer video during Comic-Con.
- June 18, 2010 @ 09:27 AM by Kevin Melrose
Comics A.M. | The comics Internet in two minutes
Captain America #400
Passings | Kaylee Byram reports that Richard “Rik” Levins, an artist best known for his work in the early 1990s with Mark Gruenwald on Marvel’s Captain America, passed away on June 12 at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida. He was 59. Levins also penciled covers and interiors for Acclaim’s X-O Manowar and The H.A.R.D. Corps, AC Comics’ Dragonfly and FemForce, and Marvel’s The Avengers. In more recent years he worked as a game developer and modeler. [ComicMix, via Journalista]
Passings | The editors of Monthly Shonen Magazine announced that Tadashi Kawashima, writer of Alive: The Final Evolution, passed away on June 15 from liver cancer. He was 42. The science fiction/supernatural series, which concluded in January in Japan, is licensed in North America by Del Rey Manga. [Anime News Network]
Legal | In response to a complaint filed by Marvel, federal police in Mexico City have seized from vendors more than 100 illegally produced piñatas, many of which featured Spider-Man — aka Hombre Araña — Captain America and the Incredible Hulk. [The New York Times]
- June 18, 2010 @ 08:30 AM by Kevin Melrose
Publishers score a direct hit on pirates [Updated]
From the latest chapter of Naruto, no longer available on MangaFox
The manga publishers who have banded together to form an anti-piracy group have scored a direct hit on one of the biggest manga scanlation sites: A MangaFox administrator announced in a forum thread that they have pulled a number of manga, and a list of deleted titles shows they are mostly from Viz Media and include the powerhouse series Naruto, Bleach and One Piece. MangaFox is one of the sites that hosts scanlations of the most recent chapters of those series, so this is quite a blow to them; fickle readers, however, will be able to find them, at least for now, on other sites.
Deb Aoki, who broke this story at About.com, notes that Viz wasn’t the only protester: Apparently a number of scanlation groups have asked for their work to be pulled as well, presumably because they are worried about the publishers’ reactions. Interestingly, some of the scanlators had already requested that their work not be reposted on others’ sites, and now they are forcefully restating their requests. Since the original scanlations are themselves copyright infringements (although on a smaller scale, and more benign, than MangaFox), the whole situation reeks of irony.
UPDATE: Deb talked to a former MangaFox staffer who revealed that many senior staff have retired from the site, due not only to the anti-piracy coalition but also to some dissatisfaction with the parent company. Click the link above and scroll down for the conversation.
- June 18, 2010 @ 07:01 AM by Brigid Alverson
Rantz Hoseley on the launch of Longbox
The Longbox start screen
The Longbox digital comics distribution system was first announced in June 2009 and was universally described as “iTunes for comics.” In fact, it is much more than that: A platform-independent application that allows the user to buy and read comics digitally and move them from one device to another. Unlike the iTunes store, Longbox won’t have strict content restrictions, but users can create subaccounts that will only allow browsing, purchase, and reading of comics below a given age rating. The public beta version becomes available today with a handful of titles, and developer and CEO Rantz Hoseley says new content will start appearing on a weekly basis beginning on June 29 and available at a discount “in recognition that we are still in beta.”
I tried out the private beta last weekend, and the experience was pretty seamless: You look at a display of covers, buy the ones you want, download them, and read them in a comics reader on the screen. Hoseley talked to me last week about how Longbox will evolve as a platform for readers and for publishers.
What devices will Longbox launch on?
The upcoming launch is Mac and PC. Tablets, both in terms of the Apple generated ones and the Android and Windows Mobile 7 powered ones, will be early fall. We hope to be able to announce the date on that by San Diego, but the contract negotiations are taking a little longer than we would prefer. At the very least, in a worst case scenario we will be having it installed on the devices in question by New York Comic-Con.
- June 17, 2010 @ 05:43 PM by Brigid Alverson
Grumpy Old Fan | Hot comics for cooler days: DC Comics Solicitations for September 2010
The Return Of Bruce Wayne #6
Here in Memphis, the heat index has been over 100 degrees for the better part of a week, and it’s not likely to let up anytime soon. If it’s this hot during the last week of spring, I can’t imagine what summer will feel like.
September seems very far away indeed.
And yet, it’s that time again, when we look ahead two-and-a-half months and try to figure out what will still hold our interest when summer ends, football starts, and the days grow ever shorter. Maybe by then it’ll only be in the 80s.
BRIGHTEST DAY
I’m probably not the first person to suggest this, but why not have a group of white supremacists, skinheads, etc., gather expectantly (if misguidedly) around the unfortunately-named White Power Battery, so that they might subsequently receive an appropriate beatdown? That would let Geoff Johns and Peter Tomasi distinguish between the mission of the white-light Lantern — white light being a mix of all the spectrum’s colors — and our society’s odious “white power” ideology.
- June 17, 2010 @ 02:30 PM by Tom Bondurant
I am the Pirate King! I can wear anything!
Straw Hat Pirates Jeans
For a little more than $200, you can strut around with the familiar One Piece slogan “I’m gonna be the Pirate King!!” emblazoned across your denim-clad behind.
Anime News Network reports that beginning in late August Japanese retailer Cospa will offer Straw Hat Pirates Jeans, featuring buttons engraved with the figurehead of the Thousand Sunny, the front-right pocket and waistband imprinted with a straw hat-wearing Jolly Roger, and pants legs printed with the names and positions of each of the Straw Hats. Oh, yeah, plus that big stylized lettering across the butt.
- June 17, 2010 @ 01:00 PM by Kevin Melrose
Read Jon Adams’ Dead Space 2 comic from E3
Truth Serum creator Jon Adams teamed up with writer Nick Braccia to create a Dead Space 2 comic that was distributed this week at E3, the big video game expo in Los Angeles.
“What do you get when you combine Jack Chick, fake religions, Dead Space 2 and a free comic? Not surprisingly, a free Dead Space 2 comic about a fake religion in the style of the Chick Tracts called The Big Game,” Adams said.
He added that “it’s the story of a man playing space basketball, and finding his way to the Church of Unitology.” You can check out a preview after the jump, or read the whole thing online at deadspace.ea.com.
- June 17, 2010 @ 12:00 PM by JK Parkin
Now that’s what I call a rogues gallery
Batman rogues by Dennis Culver
Bat-villains ahoy! Artist Dennis Culver has been posting a sketch a day to his Flickr stream, and lately his subject has been Batman bad guys, and lots of ‘em. To date, he’s drawn (deep breath) Hush, Killer Croc, the Ventriloquist and Scarface, the Terrible Trio, Doctor Phosphorous, Mister Freeze, Poison Ivy, Lady Shiva, the Scarecrow, Egghead, Harley Quinn, Black Mask, Bane, Calendar Girl, Professor Hugo Strange, the Mad Monk, the Penguin, Jeremiah Arkham, Firefly, Solomon Grundy, and Clayface (phew) for the series, and given many of them sartorially stylish makeovers to boot. (Dig that Terrible Trio up top!) Plus, if you dig deeper into his archives, you can check out his takes on even more — Catwoman, Man-Bat, the Riddler, the Gentleman Ghost, the Mutant Leader, different versions of Grundy and the Penguin, (of course) the Joker, and even Billy Dee Williams as Two-Face. (Haha, remember that bit of casting from the first Tim Burton Batmovie?) There are even some Bat-allies, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Obviously, there are plenty more second-stringers and big guns alike left for Culver to tackle in his new series. And given the gorgeousness of his efforts so far, I’ll be tuning in to see ‘em — same Bat-stream, same Bat-Flickr!
(Via Andy Khouri)
- June 17, 2010 @ 11:00 AM by Sean T. Collins
New international Scott Pilgrim vs. the World trailer: Now with 300% more amazingitude
If you only watch one trailer for Edgar Wright’s adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series, make it this one. If the previous trailers had a face, this one would punch it. It would punch the previous trailers in the face.
(Via Bryan Lee O’Malley)
- June 17, 2010 @ 10:00 AM by Sean T. Collins