2011 January
Comics A.M. | Day-early debut axed for Formic Wars, more on Wizard World
Formic Wars: Burning Earth #1
Publishing | Citing “distribution concerns,” Marvel has canceled plans to allow members of the ComicsPRO retail trade organization to sell the first issue of author Orson Scott Card’s Formic Wars: Burning Earth on Feb. 15 rather than Feb. 16. Announced last Friday, the move was designed to take advantage of Diamond Comic Distributors’ new day-early delivery program, which allows direct-market stores to receive comics on Tuesday for sale on Wednesday. It’s what just this week enabled the early release of the heavily publicized Fantastic Four #587. According to Rich Johnston, complaints from DC Comics and other publishers over that promotion are what led to cancellation of the ComicsPRO incentive.
But publishers weren’t alone in protesting Tuesday releases: On the retail-oriented news and analysis site ICv2.com, store owners complained about “special treatment” for ComicsPRO members, and criticized Marvel for already authorizing day-early sales. “At this rate, by the end of the year, Tuesday will be new comics day,” wrote Ed Sherman of Rising Sun Creations. [Marvel]
- January 27, 2011 @ 07:21 AM by Kevin Melrose
Eric Powell enlists Evan Dorkin for an issue of The Goon
Crossovers are no uncommon thing in comics — but some are more strange than others. If you thought the recent Hellboy/Beasts of Burden one-shot was something, wait until you see what Evan Dorkin has planned next.
The Goon creator Eric Powell tweeted Wednesday that Dorkin will be coming in to work on his series. Described as one of Powell’s “funny book heroes,” Dorkin is stepping in to write The Goon #35, and Powell has even shared a peek at the cover. Dorkin, Powell and Carnies — It’ll be real interesting to see what Dorkin brings to the already off-kilter title.
My own personal opinion here, but I think Evan is very underused in comics — he did one of the best Deadpool stories ever in two issues of Agent X. If you’ve caught up on Dorkin’s major works, this little-known gem is definitely worth a look in your local store’s back issue bin!
- January 27, 2011 @ 06:00 AM by Chris Arrant
Gorillas Riding Dinosaurs | Harryhausen’s Sinbad: Movies to comics to movies again [UPDATED]
Bluewater sent out a press release last week to announce that Morningside Entertainment has optioned the film rights to Bluewater’s Sinbad: Rogue of Mars comic from 2007. There are several interesting things about that.
According to the press release, Morningside has optioned the comic in order to adapt it into a feature film for 2012. Not a reboot, the movie is intended to be an extension of the Sinbad films that started with 1958’s The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and continued into the ‘70s with The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.
The release went on to quote Executive Producer Barry Schneer as saying that Rogue of Mars would be the first film in a new trilogy. “I’m thrilled to continue the amazing legacy my uncle, Charles Schneer began with 7th Voyage and to bring to the screen the Sinbad movie that he and Ray Harryhausen never got to make.”
Since Bluewater published Sinbad: Rogue of Mars as part of its Ray Harryhausen Presents line of comics, I started wondering how this fit together and who owned the rights to what. I assumed that Morningside already owned at least a portion of the rights to the Sinbad films. Since Rogue of Mars was based on those movies, why would Morningside need to option the story from a comic book company that had bought the license from them in the first place? What exactly was Morningside optioning? And how does Ray Harryhausen himself fit into all of this?
- January 26, 2011 @ 04:30 PM by Michael May
Alamo Drafthouse’s awesome artistic interpretations of Hellboy movie posters
Mondo's Hellboy poster
We’ve sung the praises of the awesome posters that Mondo, the collectible art boutique arm of the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, has done for various film debuts like Scott Pilgrim and Iron Man 2. In December, the site announced a “Director’s Series” of posters from director Guillermo del Toro, and this Friday will see the release of two posters that should be popular with fans of his adaptation of Mike Mignola’s signature character — Hellboy and Hellboy 2: The Golden Army.
The poster above for Hellboy is by Florian Bertmer and will be limited to 240 copies. The poster for its sequel, which you can see after the jump, is by Ken Taylor. It’s limited to 360 copies, and each of them costs $45. Look for them on the site this Friday, or follow them on Twitter to watch for an “on sale now” announcement.
- January 26, 2011 @ 04:08 PM by JK Parkin
Binky Brown Meets the Blogosphere: Underground comix pioneer Justin Green’s new website
"Expressive Markings" by Justin Green
Great catch by Jeet Heer of Comics Comics: Underground comics legend Justin Green has launched a blog, with three comics up so far and counting. Green is credited with more or less inventing the autobiographical comic — a staple of alternative comics ever since — with Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, his exceptionally and hilariously frank 1972 comic chronicling his adolescent battles with sexuality, Catholicism, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. I first saw his work back in the ’90s, when his Justin Green’s Musical Legends strips graced the pages of Tower Records’ late, lamented Pulse! magazine. (You might also know him as cartoonist Carol Tyler’s on-again, off-again husband from her own autobiographical comic series, You’ll Never Know.) Whatever he’s selling on this thing, I’m buying.
(via our own Chris Mautner)
- January 26, 2011 @ 03:00 PM by Sean T. Collins
Jeffrey Brown takes aim at the Transformers again in Incredible Change-Bots Two
Or does he? According to cartoonist Jeffrey Brown’s interview with CBR’s Alex Dueben, the upcoming sequel to his hit transforming-robot action-parody Incredible Change-Bots owes a bit less to the robots in disguise and more to his desire just to play around some more with the characters he concocted for Volume One — and to spoof the Superman mythos, of all things…
There are a lot of superhero parodies, but not a lot of transforming fighting robot parodies. Does it help, knowing you’re treading on ground no one’s covering?
[Laughs] It’s hard to say how much that helped. I think especially with the second book, it became less a parody of Transformers and more just being interested in these characters…who just happen to have the same functions as Transformers. It becomes more of its own thing. I think it’s one reason why I’ve enjoyed the Change-Bots stuff more than I enjoyed doing [the superhero parody] “Bighead.” It doesn’t feel as much like it’s something that’s been done to death already.
- January 26, 2011 @ 02:30 PM by Sean T. Collins
Comic-Con registration to open on Saturday, Feb. 5
Comic-Con International
Following a series of failed attempts that dates back to Nov. 1, organizers of Comic-Con International announced today they will open online registration for this year’s event on Saturday, Feb. 5, at 9 a.m. Pacific.
The news comes six weeks after a successful test run released 1,000 weekend passes through the TicketLeap web service. The trial wasn’t without problems, but it was dubbed a success by convention organizers.
“There were a couple of bumps, and that’s why we decided to do a test first,” CCI Director of Marketing and Public Relations David Glanzer told Comic Book Resources on the day of the test. “But it seemed that within the first 15 minutes all the tickets sold out, and most of those were sold in the first minute or two. But it gave us a lot of information where we’ll be pouring over that information for the next few weeks, but it’s also been a success.”
Registration is for daily passes and four-day memberships without Preview Night. Those with the Wednesday preview sold out on the final day of the 2010 convention (more could be released later, depending on returns and cancellations). Prices have increased slightly, from $100 to $105 for four-day memberships and from $35 to $37 for single-day passes ($20 for Sunday). Comic-Con International will be held July 20-24 in San Diego.
- January 26, 2011 @ 02:00 PM by Kevin Melrose
Zampano brings BDs to the web
The European webcomics site Zampano, which has been running for about two years in German, is now available in English as well (and French, if you happen to swing that way). David Boller, the mind behind the site, is a Swiss creator who lived in the U.S. for 16 years; his credits include work on Spider-Man, Witchblade, and Elfquest, and he and his wife Mary Hildebrandt wrote and drew manga (under the imprint Lime Manga) that were published in Germany by Tokyopop but never made it over here.
The site is currently featuring six comics, each of which updates at least once a week. Four are by Boller: Endless Sky: A Swiss in America is an autobiographical comic about Boller’s experiences in the comics industry; Aïr is a story of the political and economic struggles of the Touareg people of Niger; Bakuba is a collection of African folk tales; and Tell: The Legend Returns! is an ambiguous-superhero story about a William Tell-like figure who appears in a future Switzerland to fight for the common man… or maybe not.
Also on the roster are Don Caneloni: Gang War in Little Italy, a gangster comic by the singly-named René, and Katastropolis: The City Below the Dam, an urban-fantasy tale by Rudolph Perez.
The styles and subjects are varied, but the stories all show an overall air of professionalism; judging from the vertical layouts, all are intended as print comics either now or in the future.
Boller says that Tell and Endless Sky will be available for iPad, via Graphicly and the Australian publisher Cloud 9 Comix and as downloads from Wowio and DriveThruComix.
- January 26, 2011 @ 01:00 PM by Brigid Alverson
Death and the superhero: The teens ‘had dollar signs, not tears, in their eyes’
Fantastic Four #587
Amid the flurry of media coverage of the death in this week’s Fantastic Four #587 — Has it been spoiled for everyone yet? No? — comes two brief but solid pieces that lay out the great circle of life (and death, and life) of mainstream superhero comics.
Warning: If you don’t want to know which member of Marvel’s First Family bites the dust, don’t click on any of these links!
The first is by George Gene Gustines, The New York Times’ go-to guy for comic books, who delves into the newspaper’s archives for Frank Rich’s coverage of the frenzy sparked by 1992′s “Death of Superman”: “The teen-agers who lined up at the nation’s newsstands and comic book stores on Wednesday had dollar signs, not tears, in their eyes. The issue of Superman in which the superhero from Krypton is killed by Doomsday, a villainous escapee from a cosmic insane asylum, was bound to be worth more than its face value of $1.25 someday. Or so its publishers would have young consumers believe.”
The second is by comics critic Douglas Wolk, who narrows his focus from the history of superhero deaths to just those involving members of the Fantastic Four. (Spoiler alert! There have been several.)
- January 26, 2011 @ 12:00 PM by Kevin Melrose
Prominent fantasy writer China Miéville jumps into comics
After his prospective Swamp Thing series was canned due to a shake-up at DC, fantasy novelist China Miéville has struck out on his own into the comics world with a webcomic. Over on the author’s tumblr blog, six pages have been serialized on almost a daily basis since Jan. 20 — all tagged “London Intrusion.” Miéville is handling both the story and the art, owing to his background drawing for fanzines years ago. The author hasn’t spoken publicly about the series and has opted to let it speak for itself.
Although Miéville’s spent the majority of his career writing a string of successful prose novels he dubs “wierd fiction,” the writer did his first official comics work years ago in Looking for Jake with artist Liam Sharp. Expect to see more on “London Intrusion” and possibly other comics over on China’s tumblr.
- January 26, 2011 @ 11:30 AM by Chris Arrant
Quote of the day | Tom Brevoort’s bad-comic blind item
Yesterday in Reading Circle, we read a competitor’s book that was one the absolutely most amateurish pieces of drek I’ve ever seen. I don’t really want to name the book or the creators, because that feels like a different sort of bashing, but this book embarassed itself. From the folks involved and the company involved, you’d expect a better minimum set of standards. Made worse by the fact that one of the principle creators is a key player at the company, and displayed an utter lack of storytelling knowledge or understanding of how comics work. We put out our share of stinkers, but if one of my editors turned this book in, they’d be on probation, at least. Comics are expensive these days, and so every issue, every shot, must count. We need to have better minimum standards. All of which is hopelessly cryptic without naming the book, of course, but there you have it. It made me want to slap someone.
There’s more craft evidenced on the plastic bag of FF #587 than on the whole of the issue we read yesterday. One of our editors read it and was appalled by it, so I thought it was worth further study by the group. Sometimes, a bad example teaches more by example. An absolute lack of understanding of character, theme, scene, pacing, lousy tinny dialogue, incompetent artwork…it was just a red hot mess. And editorial oversight was ineffective, if even engaged. The editor in question is now in my mind, so if he ever applies over here, he’d better have a good story to tell.
–Marvel Senior Vice President of Publishing Tom Brevoort in a no-punches-pulled (except the name of the book, of course) Twitter takedown of a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad comic from some other publisher. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s a pretty harsh thing to say about Drawn & Quarterly and Adrian Tomine’s Scenes from an Impending Marriage. Haha, jk, LOL — what book do you think he’s talking about?
- January 26, 2011 @ 11:00 AM by Sean T. Collins
Women in Comics Wiki debuts
An image from the wiki
Why are there no great women comics creators? That’s a trick question, of course. What makes a creator “great” is recognition as much as ability. The Women in Comics Wiki is, as you might guess from the name, a collaborative effort to publicize the work of the many, many women who have worked as writers, pencilers, inkers, colorists, letterers, and other types of creator throughout the history of comics. One good starting point: A list of women who were active during the Golden Age, drawn from David Hajdu’s book The Ten-Cent Plague.
This isn’t an ancient history wiki, though—contemporary women are included as well, and creators are welcome to create or edit their own pages, as long as they follow the general Way of the Wiki and aren’t too self-congratulatory. The Wiki was started by the Ladies Making Comics Tumblr but anyone can play, and it has the potential to become a useful resource if enough people contribute, so go, look, write.
(Via The Beat.)
- January 26, 2011 @ 10:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Digital comics math—and an example
Marooned: Out of Orbit, one of the comics in new The Illustrated Section store
At Publishers Weekly Comics Week, Todd Allen does the math on digital comics to see if it is possible for publishers or creators to actually make $1 per issue. Most publishers are going with a distributor such as comiXology and sales through the iTunes store, who between them take 65% of the cover price, leaving the creator/publisher 35 cents on a 99-cent download. The other extreme—publishing comics as downloadable PDFs and accepting micropayments through PayPal, the “not .99 method”—nets the publisher up to 89 cents for the same comic, and there are several alternatives in between.
Allen acknowledges that digital sales are only a fraction of print, and these numbers matter more if readers start migrating away from print to digital—in that case, you want to make the same amount of money from your comic in either channel. On the other hand, if your print sales stay the same, digital is added revenue, and maybe it’s less important to make a dollar a comic.
However, Allen looks strictly at the yield per comic sold, without considering the question of whether cover price affects the overall number of comics sold. A high-selling comic with a low per-issue yield could bring in as much as a lower-selling comic with a higher yield if that is taken into consideration.
As it happens, there’s a new site out there selling comics downloads as PDFs: The Illustrated Section, which seems to focus on webcomics (Nathan Sorry, Ellie Connelly) and includes some former Zuda titles (In Maps and Legends, Marooned). The site has a nice, calm interface and an interesting collection of comics, so if you’re interested in trying an alternative digital comics store, give it a whirl.
- January 26, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Jeff Lemire and Sara Quin discuss Canada Reads finalist Essex County
Essex County
When last we left Jeff Lemire’s acclaimed Essex County Trilogy, it had been named as one of the five finalists for the CBC’s prestigious Canada Reads program, the first time a graphic novel has received the distinction. The next step is a series of debates, set to air on CBC Radio One on Feb. 7-9, in which celebrity panelists defend their choices on the way to determining the essential Canadian novel of the decade.
To prepare for the debate, Essex County‘s champion, Sara Quin, one-half of the indie-music duo Tegan & Sara, explains in a video why Jeff Lemire’s look at life in a rural Canadian community deserves the Canada Reads honor. (Watch the video after the break.)
Lemire also recounts the book’s creation: “At the time I was still working a day job as a line cook at La Hacienda restaurant on Queen Street West in Toronto. I’d work the night shift, which left me with my days free to draw. Generally I’d try to get a page a day drawn. Some days I’d do more, some days less. Doing comics is a marathon, rather than a sprint. It takes time…hours upon hours to render the same fictional moment that a prose writer might dash off in a few minutes. But to be consumed by something as big as Essex County was full of rewards as well.”
- January 26, 2011 @ 08:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
Food or Comics? | This week’s comics on a budget
Infestation #1
Welcome to Food or Comics?, where every week we talk about what comics we’d buy on Wednesday based on certain spending limits — $15 and $30 — as well as what we’d get if we had extra money or a gift card to spend on what we call our “Splurge” item.
Check out Diamond’s release list or ComicList if you’d like to play along in our comments section.
Graeme McMillan
If I had $15 to spend at the comic store this week, the first thing I’d grab would be Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly’s New York Five #1 (DC/Vertigo, $2.99), the follow-up to New York Four (obviously), their contribution to the much-loved-by-me-at-least Minx imprint. Really, almost everything else pales into comparison, but I’ll also go for IDW’s Infestation #1 ($3.99, which I was convinced came out last week), the fun opener for the zombie crossover that’s about to go across their licensed line for the next few months. My superhero fix for the week comes from Paul Cornell and Pete Woods’ always-entertaining Action Comics (#897, DC Comics, $2.99), which pits Lex and the Joker against each other, and Age of X: Alpha #1 (Marvel Comics, $3.99), which starts off another reality-altering timequake or something for the X-Men. I’m not expecting much from this, to be honest, but Mike Carey has proven me wrong before…
- January 25, 2011 @ 03:00 PM by JK Parkin