2010 August
Preview: Shadowland: Moon Knight #1
Courtesy of the good folks over at Marvel, here’s a taste of Shadowland: Moon Knight #1 by Gregg Hurwitz and Bong Dazo. In it, Moon Knight enters the fray against the Man Without Fear, his deadly ninjas and a “new avatar of Khonshu.”
Check out the preview and book info after the jump. It comes out Aug. 25.
- August 4, 2010 @ 10:30 AM by JK Parkin
Yen Plus can be read by anyone, anywhere
![8.2010_Cover[1]](http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/8.2010_Cover1.jpg "8.2010_Cover[1]")
Manga blogger Deb Aoki talked to Yen Press senior editor JuYoun Lee recently, and she brought up an important point about Yen Plus, their manga magazine which shifted this month from print to online publication. Deb pointed out something I hadn’t noticed: Yen Plus is not region-blocked, which is huge. One big reason that people use scanlation sites like the recently defunct OneManga.com is that the “legit” online manga sites are available only in the U.S. and Canada. Says Deb:
So for example, when VIZ Media started publishing the current chapters of Rumiko Takahashi’s Rin-Ne simultaneously with the Japanese releases, I was telling readers, “Look, isn’t this awesome? It’s free, it’s available the same day as it is in Japan, and it’s legit.” I asked, “Why are scanlators still scanning and pirating Rin-Ne? VIZ and Shogakukan is going through the extra trouble to translate and post it on the same day as Japan to address fans’ complaints that they don’t want to wait to read the latest chapters of their favorite manga.”
Then I heard from fans who told me that the manga posted on the Shonen Sunday website was blocked to readers who aren’t from North America. They said things like “No, I can’t read it because I live in Mexico,” or “No, I can’t read it because I live in outer Tasmania.”
While the licensors are certainly entitled to demand separate licenses for different regions, that’s not really the way the internet works. And a lot of regions aren’t ever going to have a big enough market to support their own manga publishers, so including them in the potential audience for online manga may be the only way to capture their dollars (or whatever the local currency is).
The inaugural issue of Yen Press was also notable for only having American and Korean comics, however, Japanese licensors are notoriously sticky about terms and conditions, and it may be that the next issue, which will contain Japanese content, will be more restricted.
- August 4, 2010 @ 09:30 AM by Brigid Alverson
Comics A.M. | The comics Internet in two minutes
Action Comics #1
Comics | An anonymous family in the South was saved from foreclosure when, as they were packing up the home they had lived in since the 1950s, they discovered a copy of Action Comics #1 in the basement. The struggling couple contacted ComicConnect, which had brokered record-breaking sales of the June 1938 for $1 million in February and $1.5 million in March. The online auction company in turn convinced the bank to hold off on foreclosure. The couple’s copy of Action Comics has been graded Very Good/Fine, and is expected to bring upwards of $250,000 when it goes up for auction later this month. [ABC News]
Retailing | Barnes & Noble, the nation’s largest bookstore chain, put itself up for sale Tuesday as it struggles under economic pressures and the shift away from paper books. Company founder and chairman Leonard Riggio may form an investor group to buy the 720-store chain. [The Wall Street Journal]
- August 4, 2010 @ 08:58 AM by Kevin Melrose
Food or Comics? | This week’s comics on a budget
Baltimore: The Plague Ships
If it’s Tuesday, it’s time for Food or Comics? Every week we talk about what comics we’d buy if we only had $15 to spend, if we only had $30 to spend and if we had extra money to spend on what we’re calling a “Splurge” item.
So join Brigid Alverson, Chris Mautner and me as we run down what we’d buy this week, and check out Diamond’s release list to play along in our comments section.
Brigid Alverson
If I had $15…
I’d start with the first issue of Baltimore: The Plague Ships ($3.50), because it’s written by Mike Mignola and it has Europe flooded with vampires. Looks like fun. And then, because I can’t get enough Mignola, I’ll take issue 2 of Hellboy: The Storm ($2.99).
Dark Horse is launching its updated Magnus: Robot Fighter series, written by Jim Shooter, this week. Issue #1 looks pretty sweet, and it’s 56 pages for $3.50 (including the original Magnus story from 1963), so I’ll give that a try.
- August 3, 2010 @ 08:19 PM by JK Parkin
The Middle Ground #15: Too Much Information
Maybe it’s just me, but publishers have personalities to me or, at least, they should have. In my potentially lonely definition of a perfect world, you should be able to look at a publisher and think, “Oh! They do <em>this</em> kind of a book,” or “Well, if I’m looking for [Comic Y], I shouldn’t look to [Publisher X].” It’s neater that way.
- August 3, 2010 @ 05:30 PM by Graeme McMillan
Scott Pilgrim vs. the snarky movie review
The Scott Pilgrim cast
I always find it difficult to critique a film when I’m a fan of the source material. Playing the continual game of compare and contrast in my head tends to leave me a bit muddled. Am I appreciating the film on its own merits or do I just like it because it’s a spin-off of something I’ve really, really like a whole lot? Am I griping about it because it’s legitimately flawed or because it doesn’t match up with the perfect movie version I’ve been playing in my head for months on end? Are my criticisms fair and balanced or sloppily biased? Am I just playing yet another round of “Well, it’s not how I would have done it”? Obviously any review is subjective, but am I being subjective in a totally objective way? ‘Tis a puzzlement.
So I’m not sure what to say about the new Scott Pilgrim Vs the World film, which I happened to catch a preview of at my local cinema center last week. I liked it; it’s peppy and entertaining and, at least on a surface level, extremely faithful to Bryan Lee O’Malley’s work. Yet I’d be lying if I didn’t say it didn’t have flaws — flaws that, depending upon what drew you to the graphic novels, may sink the movie for you.
Spoilers await after the jump.
- August 3, 2010 @ 02:00 PM by Chris Mautner
Tobin and Coover catch the Gingerbread Girl
Gingerbread Girl
During their panel at Comic-Con International last month, Top Shelf Productions highlighted several projects they’ll publish next year, including Gingerbread Girl, a new graphic novel by the husband-and-wife team of writer Paul Tobin and artist Colleen Coover.
The duo, probably best known for their respective work at Marvel right now, took the time to answer a few of my questions about the new project, how they collaborate and what else they’re working on.
JK: What’s Gingerbread Girl about?
Paul: At heart, it’s a strange bird of a character study focused on the main character, Annah, with a changing group of narrators (including a boyfriend, a girlfriend, a magician, a pigeon, a thug, a store clerk, a doctor, an English bulldog, and many more) searching for the truth behind our “Gingerbread Girl,” who believes that her mad scientist father extracted a part of her brain (the Penfield Homunculus) and used it to create a sister for Annah.
- August 3, 2010 @ 01:00 PM by JK Parkin
Dark Horse apologizes for use of fan-film ship models in Serenity one-shot
"Serenity: Float Out" (top), and the "Bellflower" ship model
Dark Horse’s Scott Allie has apologized to the creators of a Serenity fan film after an artist mistakenly used their ship models as reference for the Serenity: Float Out one-shot.
“While preparing to draw Serenity: Float Out, artist Patric Reynolds researched ships from the ’Verse online, and mistook some ships designed for the fan film Bellflower for canonical ships,” Allie, senior managing editor, wrote on the Dark Horse blog. “The ships were designed by John Douglass, S. E. O’Brien, Sam Osbourne, and filmmaker Mark James. Their work is terrific, and completely professional, like so much of what the Browncoats do, so no one realized the mistake. … We understand that this was a serious oversight on our part. We want to assure everyone that this is not a usual occurance [sic], and we will make sure to be more careful in the future. Please accept my most sincere apologies, on behalf of Dark Horse and artist Patric Reynolds.”
Members of FireflyFans.net noticed the use of the ship designs within two days of the comic’s June 2 release.
On June 28, Mark James posted that he had written Dark Horse “stating they are in breach of bellflower copyright and that action will be taken. I havent spent this much time on this film to see my ship and verse used in this manner.” He offered an up an update the next day stating he had been in contact with Allie, who had pledged an official apology, artist credits and a donation in charity on behalf of Bellflower.
“Scott Allie and Darkhorse have been absolutely wonderful in regard to this matter,” James wrote, “and I can only say thank you to them for their respect and support. Bless them.”
- August 3, 2010 @ 12:00 PM by Kevin Melrose
Daniel Clowes, Ben Katchor top Pantheon’s publishing plans
It’s always exciting to get the quarterly publishing catalogs from Random House in the mail and see what Pantheon, the best of the major New York City-based book publishers when it comes to graphic novels, has in store. And yesterday’s special delivery of the Spring 2011 catalog to “Fort Collins” was a real doozy: Major new works are on the way from a pair of alternative-comics titans, Wilson‘s Daniel Clowes and Julius Knipl‘s Ben Katchor.
First up is Daniel Clowes’s Mister Wonderful
Next is Ben Katchor’s The Cardboard Valise
- August 3, 2010 @ 11:00 AM by Sean T. Collins
Ruling in Gaiman vs. McFarlane case spawns a Twitter feud
Spawn: The Dark Ages #1
In the days following last week’s ruling in the long-running copyright dispute between Todd McFarlane and Neil Gaiman, we heard from Gaiman, countless fans on both sides, and an Image Comics founder. However, we didn’t get comment from McFarlane — that is, until last night.
“Neil Gaiman has the absolute right to defend his position,” he wrote on Twitter. “That’s one of the great privileges we all have in this country.”
That’s it; just two sentences. That’s in stark contrast to Erik Larsen, who has tweeted on the subject more than 50 times since early Monday. His flurry of comments, which were largely critical of Gaiman, drew a few replies from the writer.
“Waves. Hi Erik,” Gaiman tweeted last night. “When Todd comes out of bankruptcy you owe me $40,000. [...] Of course @erikjlarsen is grumpy over me winning again. He ran Image when the 1st round of the case gave me a $40,000 judgment against them. Last time @erikjlarsen blamed the loss not on Todd breaking the law, but on a female jury (& now on a female judge?) http://bit.ly/cbrs8i.”
This morning, Larsen fired back at Gaiman’s initial tweet with, “what did *I* ever do to you? Seriously. What was it that *I* personally did to you which would warrant such a thing?” Minutes later, he added: “How did you ever come up with Spawn on a horse, @neilhimself?”
When one Twitter follower, Brandon Fox, replied, “Dude, a judge, a jury, & the court of public opinion ALL believe @neilhimself deserves a portion of a characters he CO-created,” Larsen answered: “and a jury decided OJ Simpson didn’t kill his wife. What’s your point?”
- August 3, 2010 @ 10:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
Interview: Phil Foglio on the many lives of Girl Genius
Last week, Phil and Kaja Foglio announced a whole slew of new projects tied to their long-running webcomic Girl Genius: Prose novels, audiobooks of the prose novels, games, a Danish translation of the comic, and a full-color omnibus edition of the first three volumes of the Girl Genius comic, to be published by Tor to kick off their new graphic novel line. Come 2011, it seems, Girl Genius will be everywhere.
Curious about how this came about and how it will play out, I called Phil yesterday and asked a bunch of questions. Here’s what he has to say.
Brigid: Why are all these things happening at the same time?
Phil: I was working with our agent ages ago, and the first thing of course we sent out were the graphic novels, and they got circulated around, everybody looked at them and were like, “Wow, we love this story but this isn’t what we do.” Then when we had the novel finished, or finished enough, we sent that to the agent and he sent it around, and one of the responses we got was, “You know, we read the novel and we remembered how much we loved the graphic novel. We aren’t interested in publishing the novel, but we would like to publish the graphic novels.” So the one reminded them of the other.
- August 3, 2010 @ 09:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Gary Friedrich’s Ghost Rider lawsuit against Marvel lives on
A lawyer for Ghost Rider co-creator Gary Friedrich asserts the writer’s copyright-infringement lawsuit against Marvel will proceed, despite reports in June that the action had been dismissed.
Friedrich sued Marvel, Sony, Hasbro and other companies in April 2007, arguing the copyrights used in the Ghost Rider movie and related products reverted to him in 2001. He sought unspecified damages for copyright infringement, and violations of federal and Illinois state unfair competition laws, negligence, waste, false advertising and endorsement, and several other claims.
His attorney Charles S. Kramer now tells Digital Spy the order of dismissal, issued in late May, relates to the claims made under state law. A reading of the order by U.S. District Judge Barbara S. Jones supports that. She upheld the 2009 recommendation by Magistrate Judge James C. Francis that the state law and Lanham Act claims be dismissed. However, Francis also determined the Copyright Act of 1976 is the relevant federal statute.
“Gary’s case was originally filed asserting claims under both federal and state law,” Kramer tells Digital Spy. “The court’s ruling was only that this is a question of federal law only, under the federal copyright law, and that the case should thus proceed only on the federal law issues. [...] The federal copyright claim was always the main part of our case, and this is really more of a procedural ruling than anything else.”
In the 2007 lawsuit, Friedrich claimed he created Johnny Blaze/Ghost Rider in 1968 and, three years later, agreed to publish the character through Magazine Management, which eventually became Marvel Entertainment. Under the agreement, the publisher held the copyright to the character’s origin story in 1972′s Marvel Spotlight #5, and to subsequent Ghost Rider works.
However, Friedrich alleged the company never registered the work with the U.S. Copyright Office and, pursuant to federal law, he regained the copyrights to Ghost Rider in 2001.
- August 3, 2010 @ 08:02 AM by Kevin Melrose
OneManga.com calls it a day
They kept updating right to the end, even squeezing in one last chapter of Naruto for their hard-core fans, but on Monday the shadowy forces behind OneManga.com kept their word and removed all the online manga from their site.
This is not goodbye, however: Site administrator Zabi says OneManga will continue to post manga lists and series information, although it’s debatable how useful that information is without the scans to go with it. Both OneManga and its competitor MangaFox (which has also pulled down most of its licensed manga) have active forums, which may keep readers coming back even without the free manga.
Meanwhile, anyone who can operate a search engine can still read plenty of licensed manga online, including weekly updates of popular Shonen Jump series like Naruto and Bleach. OneManga and MangaFox don’t actually do scanlations; they are simply sites where the scanlation groups who translate those weekly chapters upload their work, to build a better audience. Several scanlation sites already have their pages prepped for this week’s chapter of Naruto, and last week’s is widely available.
Ironically, one of the reasons OneManga was established, according to this interview with one of their forum administrators, was to combat a site called Narutofan, which enraged readers by charging for high-quality downloads of the scanlations — again, scanlations that were made by others and intended to be distributed for free. Yet Narutofan is still up and running, making money from both the ads on its online manga reader and the paid downloads, while OneManga is gone.
Incidentally, I checked my iPod Touch app that draws from a variety of scanlation sites, and it will no longer load manga from OneManga.com. So it looks like the manga really is gone from that site.
- August 3, 2010 @ 07:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Talking Comics with Tim: MK Reed
Americus excerpt (Chapter 1/Page 17/Panel 1)
Writer MK Reed and artist Jonathan Hill are looking forward to when their First Second graphic novel, Americus, is released in Fall 2010. In the meantime, as part of a build-up to the book’s release, the creators are pleased to serialize the book online here. The book is about “Neil Barton, a teenager growing up in Oklahoma, and his fight to keep his favorite fantasy series, The Chronicles of Apathea Ravenchilde, in his public library.” Recently I was fortunate enough to do a brief email interview with Reed about the book and serializing it online in advance of its release.
Tim O’Shea: How did you and First Second decide upon serializing the story before printing it?
MK Reed: My editor (the fabulous Calista Brill) called me up in June and asked if Jonathan & I would be interested in putting it up on the web. We’ve been working on this book together since 2007, and besides the one chapter that was published in Papercutter, no one’s seen any of it, nor would they for another year. So we were psyched to get it out early, and they were psyched to start promoting two of their lesser known artists.
- August 2, 2010 @ 02:00 PM by Tim O'Shea
DC Universe Online to feature magic, shapeshifting and more
DC Universe Online game director Chris Cao and creative director Jens Andersen regularly answer questions about the upcoming game that they receive on Facebook, and in the latest episode of “Inside the Studio” they cover a lot of game mechanics. Like, can you shapeshift in the game? Yes. Can you use magic? Sure. Will there be real-time day/night cycles? Nope, as Gotham and Metropolis have their own persona — the Bat Signal doesn’t work quite as well during the day, after all.
If you’re curious about DCUO, it’s a nice primer on how some of the more specific elements of the game will actuality work.
- August 2, 2010 @ 12:00 PM by JK Parkin