2011 July
Invincible’s Ryan Ottley gets his sketch on with Violence & Pinwheels
Artist Ryan Ottley has been knocking it out of the park for the past eight years on Invincible with writer Robert Kirkman. No disrespect to original artist Cory Walker, but Ottley quickly made a name for himself in a world of super-heroes who aren’t afraid to pull punches. Despite his busy schedule he’s found time here and there to do one-shots like Sea Bear & Grizzly Shark, and now he’s unveiling something he’s spent the past two years working on — his sketchbook!
Titled Violence & Pinwheeels, it mixes the gruesome and bloody details from those “special” moments of Invincible with some of the more innocent moments the artist is capable of. This hardcover book clocks in at 72 pages, and includes one-off sketches as well as character designs from Invincible and Haunt. The book is priced at $25 with an additional $7 for shipping inside the U.S., and Ottley is offering an additional signed Invincible comic to offset those charges.
To check some of Ottley’s sketches and to order a book for yourself, head over to the artist’s website for more details.
- July 27, 2011 @ 11:00 AM by Chris Arrant
Bam! Pow! Doorstops aren’t just for kids!
I don’t even need doorstops in my house and I want these. I wonder if they make good paperweights.
You can buy the set at Chiásso ($24.0o) or just the Pow one at Kikkerland ($13.00). [Geek Alerts]
- July 27, 2011 @ 10:00 AM by Michael May
Marvel, DC meet LEGO for the League of Little Superheroes
Superheroes are coming to the world of LEGO, as the Danish toy company signed deals with DC Comics and Marvel Entertainment this month that will allow their characters to be used in a LEGO Super Heroes line. Lego already has a Batman line, but the deal with DC gives them access to every character in the DC canon, including Superman, Wonder Woman and Green Lantern. The Marvel line will focus on the Avengers, the X-Men and Spider-Man, and it will launch in May 2012, at the same time The Avengers movie opens. Both the Marvel and the DC line will include both minifigures and buildable figures.
Update: JK Parkin returns from Comic-Con with pictures from the LEGO booth! Check’em out after the jump.
- July 27, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Siegel & Shuster Society campaigns for Superman license plates
The Siegel & Shuster Society's concept of what the Superman plate might look like
A Cleveland group dedicated to celebrating the city as the “Birthplace of Superman” is leading a campaign to get the familiar “S” insignia emblazoned on Ohio specialty license plates.
The Plain Dealer reports that the nonprofit Siegel & Shuster Society, founded in 2008 to commemorate the creation of the Man of Steel in the city’s Glenville neighborhood by a teenage Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, has to collect 500 names on a petition as the first step toward the plate. A state senator has agreed to propose the plate in the Ohio legislature once the signatures are gathered.
The organization hopes to have the plates available by 2013, the 75th anniversary of Superman’s debut in Action Comics #1. Specialty plates, sold by the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles, typically cost anywhere between $25 and $35 more than standard plates. A portion of sales would go to the Siegel & Shuster Society to fund Superman projects.
- July 27, 2011 @ 08:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
Raina Telgemeier follows Smile with Drama
Raina Telgemeier has been busy — it seemed like she made it to every single comic convention in the United States and several in Canada over the past year — and last weekend she capped it off by picking up the Eisner Award for Best Publication for Teens for her graphic novel Smile. Despite all that traveling, she has managed to start work on her next graphic novel, and she announced it over the weekend: It will be called Drama, and, she says, “It’s about middle school theater geeks, stage crew, putting on a play, love and hate and friendship, and that’s all I can talk about for now.” The book is due out in fall 2012 from Scholastic/Graphix.
- July 27, 2011 @ 07:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Food or Comics? | The League of Spontaneous Olympians
Welcome to Food or Comics?, where every week we talk about what comics we’d buy at our local comic shop 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 a “Splurge” item.
Check out Diamond’s release list or ComicList, and tell us what you’re getting in our comments field.
Spontaneous #1
Graeme McMillan
If I had $15 this week, the first thing I’d grab would be a complete nostalgia-buy: DC Retroactive: Justice League of America – The 70s #1 (DC, $4.99), because I am a complete and utter sucker for JLA stories, and grew up reading old back issues of the title I found at used bookstores. This would be worth it for the reprint at the back alone, never mind the new story by Cary Bates that looks like it’s playing around with the multiverse one more time. To accompany that, I’d also pick up the first two issues of Joe Harris and Brett Weldele’s Spontaneous (both $3.99), because – even though I missed the Free Comic Book Day release of the debut – I’m a fan of Harris’ Ghost Projekt and Weldele’s work on The Surrogates, and curious to see just where a book about spontaneous human combustion can actually go.
- July 26, 2011 @ 04:00 PM by Michael May
The Middle Ground #62 | See that cat (yeah, I do mean you)
Thinking about some of the news from SDCC this year — specifically, the Sixth Gun news, about it being made into a television series by the Syfy network — it struck me: Indie comics are the small-screen Marvel. And I’m not quite sure what that’s going to mean for their future.
- July 26, 2011 @ 03:00 PM by Graeme McMillan
Kerry Callen’s Super Antics
If you’re not following Kerry Callen’s blog, you really really should be. As an example of the kind of stuff the Halo and Sprocket creator does there, his recurring (well, he just posted a second one, so that hopefully makes it recurring) strip Super Antics pokes good-natured fun at some of the more ridiculous aspects of the Man of Steel.
The first one was about a little-discussed hazard of being able to deflect bullets, while this one…well, you can guess what this one’s about from the few panels above. Head to Callen’s site to read the rest.
- July 26, 2011 @ 02:00 PM by Michael May
SDCC ’11 | Shepard Fairey covers Tom Morello’s Orchid
"Orchid" variant covery by Shepard Fairey
OC Weekly has a look at Shepard Fairey’s variant cover for Orchid, the debut comic by Rage Against the Machine guitarist and Audioslave frontman Tom Morello and artist Scott Hepburn announced last week at Comic-Con International by Dark Horse. Morello stopped by the Comic Book Resources yacht at the convention to talk with CBR TV about the 12-issue series, which involves 16-year-old prostitute in a dystopian future leading a revolt.
“When the seas rose, genetic codes were smashed,” so the premise goes. “Human settlements are now ringed by a dense wilderness from which ferocious new animal species prey on the helpless. The high ground belongs to the rich and powerful that overlook swampland shantytowns from their fortress-like cities. Iron-fisted rule ensures order and allows the wealthy to harvest the poor as slaves. This is the world of Orchid.”
Orchid debuts from Dark Horse in October.
- July 26, 2011 @ 01:00 PM by Kevin Melrose
Colleen Doran’s JMS Wonder Woman that you didn’t see
Collen Doran's Wonder Woman
When J. Michael Straczynski was still the writer of Wonder Woman, he approached Colleen Doran about developing a new, “fantasy-oriented” look for her. He’s given Doran permission to share what she came up with, which she’s done on her blog.
She clarifies a couple of things in the comments section of her post. First, that she wasn’t hired to draw the actual comic; just to design the look. But more importantly, that this look would’ve been for a story after the one in which Wonder Woman wore Jim Lee’s controversial redesign.
- July 26, 2011 @ 12:00 PM by Michael May
Quote of the day | Tom Brevoort on what fans are entitled to
Tom Brevoort
[Reader question:] Why do writers persist on doing controversial directions/stories that are disliked by fans? We pay good money for these books, so we should naturally get something we enjoy. Consumers shouldn’t feel compelled to vent frustration about their purchases.
[Tom Brevoort:] Writers don’t do stories specifically to piss off fans. Writers write stories about which they feel passionate and invested. As a reader, you’re entitled to one thing and one thing only: a reading experience in exchange for your purchase. And if you like that reading experience, the expectation is that you’ll come back for more. But the audience does not and should never be in control of the stories. Writers are writers because they know how to do what audiences don’t know how to do—tell stories that affect you and move you. It’s way tougher than it looks. Storytelling isn’t a democracy, you don’t get a decision in how the stories go. All you get is your one vote, with your dollars or your feet.
— Marvel Senior Vice President of Publishing Tom Brevoort, drawing the line on fan entitlement. See also Grant Morrison on nerd culture and Bryan Lee O’Malley on A Song of Ice and Fire. There’s something in the air.
- July 26, 2011 @ 11:00 AM by Sean T. Collins
Preview: Sail the high seas with Betty and Veronica
Another Comic-Con is over, and even those of us who didn’t go are probably suffering convention fatigue from the deluge of news and awesomeness. Time for a break! Here’s a quick preview of B & V Friends Double Digest #216, which is out in comics stores tomorrow — but here at Robot 6 today!
- July 26, 2011 @ 10:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
The Dark Knight Rises may or may not involve economic crisis, S&M
Leave it to Next Media Animation, the Taiwanese studio last seen on Robot 6 explaining the history of the danger-fraught Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, to view the trailer for The Dark Knight Rises through a fractured prism that makes Grant Morrison’s wildest of storylines seem humdrum by comparison. Judging from this video, the conclusion of Christopher Nolan’s movie trilogy has something to do with the bankruptcy of Wayne Enterprises, rising food prices at Wal-Mart, a lovesick Batman, and the return of Halle Berry as a whip-cracking Catwoman.
(via io9.com)
- July 26, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
SDCC ’11 | Ape to release Cut the Rope comic based on game
Following on the success of its Pocket God comic, which was one of the top book apps of 2010, Ape Entertainment is doing another digital comic based on an iOS game: Cut the Rope. Like Pocket God, Cut the Rope will be a standalone app (although Pocket God is also available through iVerse’s Comics+ reader). No talent was announced, but the art here and in the slightly longer preview at Mashable looks more than competent.
- July 26, 2011 @ 08:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Digital comics: Turning the tables
Letterer Jim Campbell takes a run at the problem with digital comics at his blog, and he comes to the conclusion that distributors (such as comiXology, iVerse, and Graphicly) are taking too big a cut.
First, he calculates the cost of labor to produce a single comic, then he looks at the way the various partners take their cut, as described by Mark Millar earlier this year:
1/ Apple take 30% right off the bat.
2/ In the case of Wanted, Comixology then splits 50/50 with the publisher.
3/ Then the publisher pays the agent and creative team out of the remaining cash depending on their deal.
If the comic is priced at 99 cents, then Apple gets 30 cents, the digital distributor takes 35 cents, and the publisher is left with 35 cents (yeah, there’s an extra penny there—I’m rounding, OK?). Under this scenario, the publisher would have to sell over 17,000 copies, Campbell reckons, just to pay their talent—forget the editors, marketers, accountants, and all the other necessities a publisher has, as well as any notion of profit. Looked at from that point of view, it’s pretty hopeless.
Campbell’s great insight is that this process is reversing the traditional model. Continue Reading »
- July 26, 2011 @ 07:00 AM by Brigid Alverson