2011 May
Last Zuda winner comes back to life
Eldritch #1
Last year Drew Rausch and Aaron Alexovich’s Eldritch! was the winner of the final Zuda webcomics competition, but before the strip could begin its run, DC Comics shut down the site and imprint.
That might have slowed Rausch and Alexovich down, but it certainly didn’t stop them, as they plan to release Eldritch! “to every digital device known to God, Man, and Shoggoth alike, including your desktop, iPad/iPod/iPhone, Android, Nook, Kindle, and eNecronomicon (pending).” That includes Graphicly and comiXology, as well as directly from their website as a PDF.
The comic will debut on June 15 for 99 cents, and the first nine pages are available to preview now ontheir website.
You can find the press release, which is kind of a fun one as far as press releases go, after the jump.
- May 19, 2011 @ 02:00 PM by JK Parkin
Cameron Stewart’s pin-up for upcoming Mnemovore collection
Mnemovore
Artist Cameron Stewart shares a pin-up he created for a deluxe edition of Mnemovore, the Vertigo comic by Ray Fawkes, Hans Rodionoff and Mike Huddleston. Head over to Stewart’s blog to see the image in its various stages of creation. Stewart says the hardcover will be released by IDW Publishing in August.
The six-issue miniseries Mnemovore was originally published by Vertigo in 2005. The story revolves around a snowboarder who loses part of her memory after an accident and ends up battling a monster called the Mnemovore that eats memories. Rodionoff screened a sample reel for a proposed feature film adaptation of it at the 2007 H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival.
- May 19, 2011 @ 01:00 PM by JK Parkin
DMP brings manga to the Kobo
Digital Manga Publishing, which is certainly living up to its name nowadays, is now selling manga for the Kobo e-reader. This is a logical extension, as they already sell manga via the Kindle, the Nook, and their own eManga site, and Digital vp Fred Lui told me a few weeks ago that their revenues from the Nook are fast approaching their Kindle sales. And with Amazon removing some of their manga from the Kindle Store for reasons that remain unclear, it makes sense for them to diversify into as many channels as possible.
Since I haven’t heard about any graphic novels for the Kobo, I went to their store and poked around a bit. A search on “graphic novel” turned up Ted Dekker’s graphic novels, which seem to be on every medium, an adaptation of the children’s novel Artemis Fowl, and… Pokemon Graphic Novel, Volume 2: Pikachu Shocks Back, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. I was a little surprised to see that the guy who coined the phrase “It was a dark and stormy night” had written a Pokemon book, especially as he died in 1873, so I downloade it; alas, it turned out to be just another badly written 19th-centry novel. This suggests that the Kobo bookstore is not quite ready for prime time, but given that Digital is about to greatly expand its digital offerings, it makes sense to maximize the number of channels as well.
- May 19, 2011 @ 12:00 PM by Brigid Alverson
The Death-Day Interview: Sam Hiti and Joe Midthun
Joe Midthun and Sam Hiti
When Sam Hiti won the Xeric Grant and self-published Tiempos Finales, Book One in 2004, the comics world took notice. A unique combination of influences from Central and South American art to manga and Jack Kirby came together with Hiti’s own, self-taught style to earn him praise and respect from fans, critics, and fellow cartoonists alike. All of who rubbed their hands together and impatiently waited for him to continue the story with Book Two.
Though Tiempos Finales, Book Two hasn’t appeared, Hiti certainly hasn’t been resting. In between gigs for folks like Nickelodeon (A Series of Unfortunate Events) and Lerner (Life in Ancient Civilizations), he’s been steadily producing mini-comics and art books like The Long Dark Train and Ghoulash. And he’s also been working on his current, big project, the webcomic Death-Day, which just saw its first collection last fall. If you’re not familiar with it, there’s a non-spoilery summary in my review.
What surprised some fans was that after producing so many comics completely by himself, Hiti’s name isn’t the only one on Death-Day. Joseph Midthun is listed as editor and co-creator of the series, so I sat down with both men to talk about the project, their collaboration, what they’ve learned along the way, and yes, the future of Tiempos Finales.
Michael May: Sam, tell me the story behind the title Death-Day.
Sam Hiti: Well, when I was a kid, I remember not knowing what the “D” in D-Day stood for. Instead of asking, I came to the conclusion that it must stand for Death, because of all the dead they showed on the television when they honored the anniversary. Later on in life when I had begun to make comics, I thought if I ever did a war story, Death-Day would make a great title for a book.
May: What was the inspiration for the book?
Hiti: The basic idea started to form after 9/11 and more so with the wars that followed. I had finished my first graphic novel, Tiempos Finales and was working full time on comics.
- May 19, 2011 @ 11:00 AM by Michael May
Quote of the day | Sammy Harkham on Chester Brown’s big…dilemma
its a strange thing when the most visually exciting sequence in a chester brown book are of his dick being inspected. not bad, mind you. I think chester brown has a big dick. he keeps saying it’s six inches, but girls keep saying “ow”, so he’s measuring wrong.
–Via Twitter, Sammy Harkham, editor of Kramers Ergot and author of Crickets, asks the hard questions (sorry) about Chester Brown’s new memoir about his life as a patron of prostitutes, Paying For It. I’m enjoying Fear Itself and Flashpoint just fine, but as far as summer buzz books go, they sure don’t spark conversations like this.
On a more serious tip (sorry!), Harkham also echoes an observation I myself had about the book. I won’t spoil it lest I call down the wrath of Drawn & Quarterly (although Harkham does spill the beans in his tweet, so be warned, I guess?), but by far the most interesting aspect of his relationship with prostitutes, one that pretty much turns everything else in the book on its ear, is crammed into the final few pages and barely dealt with at all. “To me, that’s where the book should start,” says Harkham. “That’s a book.”
Have you read it? What did you think?
- May 19, 2011 @ 10:30 AM by Sean T. Collins
Save CF’s house by buying original Powr Mastrs art
Talk about a no-lose situation. CF (aka Christopher Forgues), the cartoonist behind PictureBox Inc.’s revisionist-fantasy masterpiece in the making Powr Mastrs, needs money to make some emergency house payments. To raise it, he’s selling nearly every page from the first three volumes for the pretty damn reasonable price of $200 for black-and-white pages and $300 for color pages. “Your purchases will enable him to save his home,” writes publisher Dan Nadel — it doesn’t get much more straightforward than that. If you’ve got the scratch and you want to hold CF’s delicately drawn decadence in your hands, you know what to do.
- May 19, 2011 @ 10:00 AM by Sean T. Collins
Gotham City Imposters lets everyone play as Batman, kinda
Warner Bros. and video game studio Monolith are working on a new downloadable, multiplayer, first-person shooter Batman game called Gotham City Imposters. The game will let everyone can be Batman, or at least “a Batman.” According to Destructoid:
The idea is this: regular, everyday folks — bored with their decidedly average vanilla lives — have decided to take things into their own hands. On one side, you have folks dressed like Bats, personalized variations of the Gotham’s crime fighting Dark Knight. On the flip side, you have the Jokerz, mischievous citizens who’ve identified themselves more with the Clown Prince of Crime himself, The Joker.
That underlying narrative lends itself to Gotham City Impostors’ reason for existing: team versus team online multiplayer shooting. It’s also a great setup for allowing a wide range of player customization, which will allow players to carve their owner Jokerz/Bats identity online.
I call dibs on this guy:
- May 19, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by JK Parkin
Archaia brings Days Missing to comiXology
Less than a year ago, Archaia signed an exclusive agreement with the digital comics distributor Graphicly, and Johanna Draper Carlson mused that this could be bad for the industry as a whole:
I wonder how online music would have developed if there were certain tracks you could only get through iTunes and others that you couldn’t listen to there, but had to install a different player.
She needn’t have worried: Yesterday the news came that Archaia would be putting the comic Days Missing on comiXology. Since the comic is also available on Graphicly, this may signal that exclusivity isn’t working all that well for them. And it looks like this is just the beginning. From the press release:
The digital release of Days Missing by Archaia on the comiXology platform is the beginning of a partnership to distribute more of its expansive library digitally. comiXology users will be able to enjoy a breadth of new Archaia comics digitally in the upcoming months.
- May 19, 2011 @ 08:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Green Lantern ‘stand-up thrill coaster’ debuts today
Green Lantern roller-coaster
With less than a month until the opening of the Warner Bros. movie, Six Flags Great Adventure today premieres its 15-story Green Lantern roller-coaster — excuse me, stand-up thrill coaster — in Jackson, New Jersey. Season pass holders get an exclusive preview through Sunday, with the ride opening to the general public on May 25. That is, as long as the rapture doesn’t arrive on Saturday, throwing a wrench into the rollout.
Designed by the engineers behind the DC Comics-themed Bizarro, Superman-Ultimate Flight and the unimaginatively named Batman the Ride, Green Lantern reaches speeds of 63 miles per hour, and features a 121-foot-tall loop.
Check out video of the ride after the break. The Green Lantern movie, which stars Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively and Mark Strong, opens on June 17.
- May 19, 2011 @ 07:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
Your Wednesday Sequence 11 | Dino Buzzati
Poem Strip (1969), pages 151-153. Dino Buzzati.
The action sequence is probably the type of comics-making that the greatest number of artists have engaged in (except maybe the gag), and it’s also one of the best tests of a cartoonist’s ability to do what they do convincingly. Action demands that an artist utilize a number of skill sets all at once: an understanding of the human figure to sell the gestures, composition to produce impact, panel-to-panel transitions to move the reader through it, attention to detail so that the action’s environment never gets lost behind it. Beside that, words on the page become meaningless at best during action, actual impediments at worst. Action is perhaps the facet of comics storytelling in which it helps least to be told what you’re seeing. The artist alone sells action. And as we know, sequencing is what sells comics art.
Dino Buzzati’s early graphic novel Poem Strip is sequenced with an incredibly loose touch, with long prose captions spilling over into poster-style full-page panels or irregular grids. The sequence above is really the only point at which Buzzati digs in and makes comics in a way that’s at least close to his era’s more typical Kirby/Ditko method. It’s striking to see kinetic, moment-to-moment storytelling from an outside-comics artist like Buzzati (who only ever made one entry into sequential art) — this is obviously not the work of someone who learned to block out a fight by standing at the foot of a journeyman cartoonist’s drawing table or poring through Mort Meskin back issues. Yet it gets so much of the grammar so right while evading the cliche musclebound drawing mannerisms, and beside that it brings an exhilarating sense of newness onto the page, a feeling that physical conflict and motion in space has never been done quite this way in comics before. It’s beautiful, violent poetry.
(Warning — nudity after the jump) Continue Reading »
- May 18, 2011 @ 03:00 PM by Matt Seneca
Kibuishi’s Amulet takes flight as movie with Will Smith and family to star
Ever-present story-breaker Variety has the scoop that Warner Bros. and Will Smith have picked up the rights to Flight founder Kazu Kibuishi‘s graphic novel series Amulet, tapping screenwriter Rob Edwards (The Princess and the Frog) to adapt the three-volume series. Will Smith will co-produce the film series and is rumored to be looking at the two key roles of brother Navin and sister Emily for his son Jaden (The Karate Kid) and daughter Willow (I Am Legend). In fact, Smith and his wife Jada Pinkett-Smith could find themselves in the film as well as the two siblings in the story chase after their parents.
Variety is framing this as a potential live-action vehicle, but I could see this going over better as an animated film in the vein of How To Train Your Dragon or owing to Kibuishi’s own Hayao Miyazaki influences. Still, great movies start from great stories, so a feature adaptation of Amulet is starting off on the right foot.
Originally debuting as a graphic novel back in 2008, Kibuishi’s graphic novel series has gone on to two further installments with a fourth scheduled for September 2011.
- May 18, 2011 @ 02:00 PM by Chris Arrant
This weekend, it’s MECAF
Stumptown is over, and now it is time for the other Portland—Portland, Maine—to host its comics festival. Unlike its West Coast namesake, Portland, Maine, is not well known as a teeming hive of comics activity, but there are some homegrown cartoonists, and this festival has attracted quite a few Boston and New York creators as well.
While it doesn’t advertise itself as a kids’ comic con, the lineup is heavy on all-ages creators: Andy Runton (Owly), Lincoln Peirce (Big Nate), Renae De Liz and Ray Dillon (The Last Unicorn), Rick Parker (Diary of a Stinky Dead Kid, Harry Potty and the Deathly Boring), and Colleen AF Venable (Pet Shop Private Eye) leading the pack. Maine’s own Jay Piscopo, whose Capt’n Eli books are inspired by a Down East root-beer mascot, will be there as well. The one headliner who is not best known for his children’s work is superhero artist Joe Quinones.
The full guest list reveals a wider range of creators, including Carol Burrell, Cathy Leamy, and Mike Lynch. MECAF promises the pleasures of a small con; it is creator-focused (no card tables full of longboxes), affordable ($5 admission for adults, kids are free), and likely to be blissfully free of large crowds, which makes for a more relaxed atmosphere for creators and visitors alike. If I were in Maine, I’d make a day of it.
- May 18, 2011 @ 01:30 PM by Brigid Alverson
Real-life Superman in our midst? Mysterious impact in New Jersey confounds authorities
Officials from a small township in New Jersey are standing around a mysterious crater and looking to the sky for answers, and what I’m wondering is this: is Kal-el here?
The Associated Press is reporting that a small crater was found in Liberty Somerset County with no word on its origin — or what it was exactly that crashed. The local township’s police captain Edward Byrnes said that the crater measures approximately 18 inches deep, and is roughly the side of “a coffee table,” the report says. A bomb squad sent out by state authorities says it wasn’t an explosive.
- May 18, 2011 @ 01:00 PM by Chris Arrant
Robot 6 presents Icarus #2, page 2
Icarus is a comic by Ryan Cody and is serialized here on Robot 6, with new pages every Monday, Wednesday & Friday. Comments welcome.
Ryan Cody is the creator, artist, writer, & colorist of ICARUS, a bi-monthly super-powered adventure/espionage book published through Super 75 Comics. Ryan’s past projects include illustrating the graphic novel VILLAINS forViper
Comics as well as contributing to the Eisner-Award winning anthology, Popgun Vol.3, from Image comics.ICARUS #1 is currently available as both a .99 digital download and in print. For more information or to order a print copy of ICARUS, please visit www.super75comics.com
- May 18, 2011 @ 12:00 PM by Ryan Cody
Your videos of the day | Comic Book Storytellers
Writer Michael “Frick” Weber has posted a couple of videos titled Comic Book Storytellers on YouTube that feature interviews with folks like Terry Moore, George Perez, Ron Frenz, Talent Caldwell, Pat Olliffe, Scott McDaniel and more at the Pittsburgh Comicon. In the first one (above), the creators talk about what they wanted to be when they grew up and how they got started in their careers. In the second one, they talk about their first breaks. Check out the second one after the jump.
- May 18, 2011 @ 11:00 AM by JK Parkin