2011 April
Infestation: Outbreak | Meet Yumiko
Yumiko
Today Yumiko joins Britt, Cross, Isaac and Nikodemus in IDW’s upcoming series Infestation: Outbreak, which kicks off in June. The comic is co-written by Chris Ryall and Tom Waltz, with art by David Messina.
And we’re not done yet. We have two more that’ll pop up here over the weekend next week, so stay tuned.
- April 15, 2011 @ 10:00 AM by JK Parkin
Sarah Glidden looks at the life of a refugee
Sarah Glidden is winning plaudits all over for How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, and while that title is obviously facetious, here’s another project of hers that uses comics to explain a complex situation: The Waiting Room, a non-fiction webcomic about the lives of Iraqi refugees in Syria. If your mental picture of refugees includes skeletal people huddling in mud-spattered tents, go read this comic; these refugees are living in an urban area, but they are still trapped in limbo, unable to work or leave. Sarah “puts a face on the problem,” as we say in the newspaper biz, by allowing several of the refugees to tell their own stories. It’s great documentary comics and well worth a look.
- April 15, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Lights go out on Taymor’s version of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark
Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark
This weekend will provide audiences with their last chance to see Julie Taymor’s version of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, warts, shoe-shopping numbers and all. When the curtain comes down on Sunday afternoon, the $70-million musical will go on a three-week hiatus, during which an expanded creative team, headed by new director Philip William McKinley, will make sweeping changes.
When the lights come back on May 12, The New York Times reports, Spider-Man will be vastly different from the show Taymor developed for the better part of a decade (until her firing early last month) and that critics savaged in February.
The newspaper confirms that many of Taymor’s signature elements will be stripped, including the four-person geek chorus — described in some reviews as “useless” and “utterly superfluous” — and “Deeply Furious,” a widely panned number in which the eight-legged villainess Arachne goes shopping for shoes with her minions.
Green Goblin’s Act I death has been cut — the classic villain previously died in the first act, only to return, to some confusion, in the second — and his role expanded. However, Arachne, a character created by Taymor in 2002, as expected doesn’t fare as well. Inspired by Greek mythology, the villainess was depicted as responsible for Peter Parker gaining his powers, and came to dominate Act II. Now Arachne has been reduced to a kind of guardian angel.
According to The Times, the new creative team aims to make Spider-Man less dark and more family-friendly in an effort to fill the Foxwoods Theatre. While the show as grossed about $1.3 million a week in its unprecedented preview period, that’s barely enough to cover production costs. And the musical needs to be at least moderately successful on Broadway to ensure future productions in Las Vegas and London.
- April 15, 2011 @ 08:15 AM by Kevin Melrose
Grumpy Old Fan | Life, liberty and the pursuit of DC Comics Solicitations for July 2011
Doc Savage, still not cancelled
For most of us, it’s getting to be the middle of April. Everything is blooming and getting greener. Our thoughts turn to familiar rites of spring like baseball, taxes, and that new Green Lantern preview.
On Earth-Solicits, of course, it’s July. The greenery is withering in the heat, the tax refund is spent, and half the Reds are sick thanks to being downwind from the Proctor & Gamble plant. Nevertheless, the residents of Earth-Solicits are just bursting at the seams, excited to tell you all that’s been happening in their world …
… but they can’t tell you everything, because then you’d have no reason to visit.
This sort of fan dance is especially pronounced in the current crop of solicitations. When something like a third of DC’s superhero line is taken up with titles like War of the Green Lanterns: Aftermath, Brightest Day Aftermath, and especially the cottage industry which is Flashpoint — titles which jump off from endings readers have yet to see, and/or which go deeper into books yet to begin — it’s hard to get excited, because right now it’s all hype for hype’s sake.
Thankfully, that’s not all there is to the July solicitations, so let’s cruise on….
- April 14, 2011 @ 03:00 PM by Tom Bondurant
Ooh, a sale! 30% off everything from PictureBox
This Mat Brinkman monstrosity can be yours for 30% off
The taxman cometh, and that, says publisher Dan Nadel, is why boutique comics publisher PictureBox Inc. is having a 30% off sale for the rest of April. In addition to acclaimed comics like Renee French’s H Day, CF’s Powr Mastrs, and Brian Chippendale’s If n’ Oof and various art prints and music projects by their affiliated cartoonists, PictureBox also offers everything their book about the album art of legendary Pink Floyd/Led Zeppelin designers Hipgnosis to a vinyl statue of Beat icon Allen Ginsberg designed by Sof’Boy creator Archer Prewitt. If you can’t find something to buy, that’s on you, man.
- April 14, 2011 @ 02:30 PM by Sean T. Collins
Wonderful tonight: Two interviews with Daniel Clowes on his new book
from Mister Wonderful by Daniel Clowes
Part one-crazy-night comedy of errors, part Curb Your Enthusiasm-style comedy of discomfort, part heartwarming second-chance romance, part cartooning master class, Daniel Clowes’s new book Mister Wonderful packs a lot of delights in between its long covers. The book began life as a weekly strip in The New York Times Magazine‘s “Funny Pages” section before Clowes reformatted, edited, and expanded it for its new incarnation from his frequent publisher Pantheon. Now the misadventures of Marshall, a middle-aged divorcé with a penchant for second-guessing pretty much every word out of his own mouth, and his fateful blind date can sit comfortably on your bookshelf instead of lying in your recycling bin after the weekend’s over. And the added bonus to any new Clowes comic, of course, is new Clowes interviews.
Over on the CBR mothership, Clowes spoke with Alex Dueben, who elicited from the cartoonist a provocative take on the much-lamented demise of the alternative comic-book series (a la Clowes’s own Eightball):
- April 14, 2011 @ 02:00 PM by Sean T. Collins
I want to break free: Gilbert Hernandez on leaving Palomar for the wild frontier
from Love from the Shadows by Gilbert Hernandez
Interviews with Love and Rockets co-creator Gilbert Hernandez are increasingly rare treasures. It seems the man behind the decades-spanning Palomar/Luba/Fritz saga — a story at first centered on the people of a remote Latin American village, then on one of its more irascible and memorable leading ladies, then on her irresistible but troubled sister — has preferred to let his work speak for him. So I was delighted to discover that he’d opened up again, this time to our own Chris Mautner. And in Chris’s interview with Beto over at CBR, Hernandez is not mincing words. He speaks like a man fed up with restraints of any kind — those placed on him by his early, beloved “Palomar” tales, or by his fans and critics, or by the financial limitations of professional cartooning, or by the shape of the market, or by what he sees as the timid state of contemporary comics itself. None of this all that surprising given his ever more savage, unsparing work, particularly in the “Fritz” cycle of graphic novels ostensibly adapted from the low-budget films in which the character starred, but hearing him say it all in so many words makes for a bracing read. Take a look:
- April 14, 2011 @ 01:30 PM by Sean T. Collins
Duncan Fegredo sketches up a storm at KAPOW!
One of the fringe benefits to going to a convention is seeing some of the best artists in comics bust out some quick sketches of fan-favorite characters and some of their own. Robot 6 friend Mark Kardwell passed along some pictures of Hellboy artist Duncan Fegredo’s work at last weekend’s KAPOW! convention — and boy, do they live up to the convention’s name.
Rush over to Kardwell’s website to see a photo of Fegredo hard at work on some sketches, and a peek at the portfolio he brings with him to cons.
- April 14, 2011 @ 01:00 PM by Chris Arrant
Becky Cloonan brings the (God of) Thunder
To celebrate yesterday’s release of the Thor By Walter Simonson Omnibus, the good folks at Deep6 and Hypothetical Island Studios decided to draw themselves some thunder god. Look at what Becky Cloonan did, then click through to see George O’Connor, Simon Fraser and Tim Hamilton’s versions.
- April 14, 2011 @ 12:00 PM by Michael May
Talking Comics with Tim | Dan Parent
Kevin Keller 2: Variant Cover Exclusive
Response to the new Archie character, Kevin Keller, has been so strong that starting this June he will be starring in his own four-issue miniseries by writer/artist Dan Parent. If you had said to me two years ago that Archie Comics would one day build a miniseries around the first openly gay character in the company’s history, I would not have believed you. But clearly (as noted in this 2010 CBR News Parent interview) the fine folks at Archie Comics want “to make Riverdale more diverse while avoiding the pitfalls of stereotypes and parody”. So to find out more about Parent’s plans for this new miniseries, we conducted a quite enjoyable email interview. As an added bonus, Archie’s Alex Segura was generous enough to share an exclusive preview of issue 2′s variant cover. If you happen to be at the Pittsburgh Comicon this weekend, be sure to visit Parent in Artists Alley, where he’ll be doing sketches and signing books.
Tim O’Shea: Is it challenging to build comedy around an openly gay character, or is it a non-issue as if I was asking you “is it hard to build comedy around a left-handed character”?
Dan Parent: It’s not really that challenging, since we have the core Archie characters to play off of. Their familiarity helps us build a story around Kevin.
- April 14, 2011 @ 11:00 AM by Tim O'Shea
Infestation: Outbreak | Meet Isaac
Isaac
Isaac joins Britt, Cross and Nikodemus in IDW’s upcoming series Infestation: Outbreak, which kicks off in June.
The comic series is co-written by Chris Ryall and Tom Waltz, with art by David Messina. The series will feature covers by Messina and Davide Furno, with a special retailer incentive cover for issue #1 by Ben Templesmith.
- April 14, 2011 @ 10:00 AM by JK Parkin
Wertham documentary drive tops goal, still wants more
The Kickstarter campaign to fund the documentary Diagram for Delinquents, the story of anti-comics crusader Fredric Wertham, has hit its goal of $6,000, so the film will definitely be made. Now it’s just a matter of making it better: The creators are continuing to accept donations, which will be used to buy equipment, presumably to make the film more professional. A $50 donation gets your name into the credits (and on IMDB!) and for $70 or more, they will draw you into one of the animated sequences.
Produced by Sequart Research & Literacy Organization, the short film will put Wertham’s comics commentary into the context of his life’s work, which included fighting segregation and working with juvenile delinquents (which may have led to his erroneous conclusion that comics make good kids go bad—the problem is that he never got to see the good kids). Robert A. Emmons, Jr., will direct. Regardless of whether or not they get that extra handheld, it sounds like it’s going to be a good flick.
- April 14, 2011 @ 09:30 AM by Brigid Alverson
American cartoonists’ untold European adventures
Although they may be at the top of the charts in American comics, some of the biggest artists today have some books out that most American have never seen. For years, artists working in the Anglophile comics market have moonlighted in European comics, probably most memorably with Travis Charest leaving for years to do a volume of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Metabarons.
But Charest isn’t the only one — John Cassaday did the series I Am Legion for Humanoids while working on Planetary and Astonishing X-Men, Geoff Johns and Red Star artist Christian Gossett did a story in Metal Hurlant, Terry Dodson worked on a graphic novel called Songes: Coraline, Kurt Busiek wrote a book called Redhand, and Fear Itself artist Stuart Immonen did a little-known book called Sebastian X which follows a surfer turned freedom fighter in the near future.
Yeah, I’d buy that.
And this isn’t past tense — Criminal and Incognito artist Sean Phillips spoke last month about a graphic novel he’s doing for France’s Delcourt called Void 01, which he describes as “a cat and mouse sci-fi story set on a prison ship in the depths of space”.
Yeah, I’d buy that too.
There’s no word yet on any English — American or otherwise — release of these stories.
- April 14, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by Chris Arrant
Comics A.M. | Borders seeks bonus approval; Marvel’s ‘Point One’ sales
Borders
Retailing | A bankruptcy judge is expected to hear arguments today from the bankrupt Borders Group, which is seeking to pay $8.3 million in bonuses in a bid to retain key corporate personnel. The struggling bookseller says that 47 executives and director-level employees have quit since the company declared bankruptcy on Feb. 16 — two dozen just this month — leaving only 15 people in senior management positions. In a court filing last week, U.S. bankruptcy trustee Tracy Hope Davis objected to the bonus proposal, characterizing it as “a disguised retention plan for insiders, which also provides for discriminatory bonuses for non-insiders.” [The Detroit News]
Publishing | Todd Allen looks at sales estimates for the first issues in Marvel’s “Point One” initiative, which featured self-contained stories designed to serve as a jumping-on point for new or lapsed readers: “With the sole exception of Hulk, retailers ordered less copies of the ‘jump on’ issue, than the regular series. If you figure people picking up the title would also pick up the ‘.1′ introductory issue, this is a flaming disaster and there aren’t going to be a lot of these comics finding their way into the hands of new readers. It smack of very low buy-in from the retail community.” [Indignant Online]
- April 14, 2011 @ 07:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
Viz announces kids’ titles—and goes global
Viz, the largest publisher of manga in the U.S., announced five new additions to its Viz Kids line yesterday, and they quietly added a twist: Several of the new series are not coming from Japan.
This is news because Viz is really a Japanese company operating in the U.S.; its parent companies are the Japanese publishers Shueisha and Shogakukan and their joint licensing company, Shogakukan-Shueisha Productions. Naturally, Viz has always focused on Japanese manga, and when every other manga publisher in the U.S. started publishing global (non-Japanese) titles, Viz announced its willingness but hung back.
The new Viz lineup changes all that. The press release lists four graphic novels, and three are created specifically for Viz:
Mameshiba on the Loose!, a graphic novel featuring Mameshiba, creatures that are a cross between a bean and a dog. While Mameshiba are popular in Japan (and, like Domo-kun, not necessarily a children’s product), Viz’s graphic novel is a homegrown effort; the Amazon page lists James Turner as the writer and Jorge Monlongo and Gemma Correll as the artists.
Mr. Men and Little Miss: The Japanese do love their adorable, rounded, anthropomorphic creatures, but Mr. Men and Little Miss were created by British author Roger Hargreaves and have a huge fandom in the U.S. and Europe. Why did Viz choose these? Maybe because there’s an animated film in the works, maybe because they are just so awesome. Expect to see Little Miss Sunshine, Mr. Bump, Mr. Strong and Little Miss Daredevil books pop up next spring.
Voltron Force: This is a straight-up tie-in with the Nickelodeon animated series of the same name, which in turn is an updated version of the 1980s cartoon Voltron. I know someone out there is going to be made very happy by this. I couldn’t possibly describe it any better than whoever wrote the press release:
- April 14, 2011 @ 06:00 AM by Brigid Alverson