2011 September
DC editor Chris Conroy takes to Twitter with art, news and more
Demon Knights #4
DC editor Chris Conroy took over DC’s Twitter feed today, and he’s been sharing concept art, pages and tidbits about some of his books all day. Conroy edits Superboy, Wonder Woman, Swamp Thing, Legion of Super-Heroes and Demon Knights, and here are a few of the tidbits he’s shared:
–Mike Choi will draw Demon Knights #4 (that’s his cover at the top of the post).
–Walt Simonson will draw Legion of Super-Heroes #5.
–The red-head in Superboy #1 is who most people seem to think it is.
–Cliff Chiang’s original artwork from Wonder Woman will be on display at Bergen Street Comics in Brooklyn beginning Sept. 24.
–Jeff Lemire and Scott Snyder have “big plans” for when Animal Man and Swamp Thing meet up.
And after the jump you’ll find a whole bunch of art, which I’ll update if he posts more.
- September 16, 2011 @ 01:45 PM by JK Parkin
Susie Cagle cartoon exposes fake women’s clinics
Susie Cagle’s What Every Woman Should Know is a good example of how sequential art can mimic a documentary film. Cagle herself went to a First Resort clinic, a “crisis pregnancy center” that provides no medical care, just encouragement to go ahead and have the baby. She brings in big-picture statistics about contraception and abortion rates and interviews with representatives of First Resort and Planned Parenthood to provide a surprisingly complete story in just 18 pages.
The comic has a point of view, but Cagle doesn’t go over the top. She actually makes the point that First Resort does have its place, providing support for women who decide to go ahead with their pregnancies. At the same time, she takes issue with their deceptive practices, advertising themselves as more than they really are and giving women misinformation about their choices.
While I’m a fan of Darryl Cunningham’s non-fiction science comics, often they end up being text boxes with pictures. Cagle takes a more flexible approach, composing each page differently and offering information in different ways. I think this comic shows how powerful sequential storytelling can be—simply reading an article about the First Resort clinic wouldn’t have had the same impact.
Cagle’s comic is hosted at Cartoon Movement, which has become an interesting hub for editorial cartoons and journalistic comics. It’s a site well worth bookmarking.
- September 16, 2011 @ 01:00 PM by Brigid Alverson
Rick Geary sets the scene
Rick Geary shares some pencils from the next volume in his Treasury of 20th Century Murder series. This one takes as its subject the double murder of Rev. Edward Hall and Mrs. Eleanor Mills in New Brunswick, NJ, in 1922. What’s interesting is how just the frontispiece and two maps present so much information in such a compact form. I know absolutely nothing about this murder, but now that I have a few glimpses, I’m looking forward to reading the book and finding out who the victims were (obviously married, but not to each other) and what the significance is of the crab-apple tree.
- September 16, 2011 @ 12:00 PM by Brigid Alverson
DC’s push for New 52: Blue Beetle, Ted Kord, Static Shock and more
Blue Beetle #1
As DC Comics, retailers and fans prepare for another round of New 52 titles next week, here’s a collection of the latest news and such …
• DC’s Bob Wayne told CBR’s Kiel Phegley that they planned to extend certain sales incentives to retailers through December, and this week DC released more details on what exactly that means — additional discounts for qualifying retailers on certain books, returnability on many titles and variant covers for several books, including the fourth issues of Justice League, Batman, Action Comics, Flash and Green Lantern.
• Wired’s GeekDad talks to Tony Bedard about the relaunched Blue Beetle series, which is due in shops next Wednesday. Bedard notes that the new series will be “less convoluted” than the last one in terms of Beetle’s origin, noting that this time around it isn’t tied to Infinite Crisis. He also notes Ted Kord won’t figure into the new series: “I loved the Ted Kord Blue Beetle as much as anyone. But he doesn’t figure into this new Blue Beetle series at all. My mission right now is to make 15 year-old El Paso high school student Jaime Reyes into the best character and the best Blue Beetle imaginable. And I have really good material to work with there. As anyone who read the last series or caught his appearances on Brave & The Bold will tell you, Jaime is a character teens and twenty-somethings can really latch onto. He has a terrific supporting cast and I’m building a ‘rogues gallery’ for him that will knock your socks off. None of this means that Ted Kord never existed. It’s just that before we go back and rehash the past, we are going to build a solid future for DC, and Jaime Reyes is the future.”
- September 16, 2011 @ 11:00 AM by JK Parkin
Huizenga, Yokoyama and Marra oh my: Things I bought at SPX
The Body of Work
I suppose on a certain level running through all the loot you nabbed at this or that convention seems a bit like bragging, even if the intention is merely to say, “Hey, here’s some cool comics you should check out.” That being said, it seems like a while since anyone’s done one of those “here’s the stuff I bought” posts, so I thought I’d run down some of the more interesting-looking books I nabbed at SPX this past weekend. Forgive me.
The Body of Work by Kevin Huizenga. In addition to promoting the release of Ganges #4, Huizenga had a couple of mini-comics for sale as well. This one features some of the comics he’s been posting online like Postcard from Fielder.
- September 16, 2011 @ 10:00 AM by Chris Mautner
Writer of music comic 27 belts out one-hit wonders for new series
After receiving exponential success with last year’s music series 27, creator/writer Charles Soule is stepped up promotion for the sequel 27: Second Set with a unique way of getting people’s attention: recording music. Although using music to promote comics isn’t new (see editor Nick Lowe’s song promoting Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E.), Soule is taking the idea of the second series — one-hit wonders — and recording covers of several famous done-in-one pop singles. His first one, a cover of A-Ha’s “Take On Me” (Itself inspired by comics) is here:
Soule is good at both vocals and guitar, so the recordings (nine so far) are worth a listen. Check his blog for more.
And oh yeah, 27: Second Set #1 came out this past Wednesday.
- September 16, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by Chris Arrant
Life eternal: Moving tributes pour in for Dylan Williams
As far as I can recall, it’s the only picture I ever took of him. Now, with Dylan taken from us, far before his time, and long before the many, many people who’s lives he’s touched ever thought they’d have to let him go, I’ve found myself thinking about that photo, about that moment, about how Dylan never got a copy of it, about what he might have been thinking when he brought me over to that wall, wanting me to take his picture. The other side of death is the deep scary mystery that we humans, even after all this time, don’t really know how to truly approach or comprehend, but I need to believe that such a vivid and thoughtful person as Dylan can’t just stop existing. I need to believe that this photo is some kind of message from Dylan from the other side of his life and not an irony. This photo needs to be a victory.
—Theo Ellsworth, author of Sleeper Car, on the photograph of the late Sparkplug Comic Books publisher Dylan Williams you see above. I gasped audibly the first time I saw this picture and read Ellsworth’s post about it — how it was taken at the request of Williams, who’d already battled the cancer that would eventually claim him and was well aware of the challenges he might again have to face. And as I’ve made my way through the tributes and anecdotes and encomiums popping up all around the comics internet, I’ve been moved almost as powerfully time and time again.
Through the tributes of his fellow cartoonists and publishers, a picture of Williams emerges. He was a kind person who provided many friends with empathy they felt they could never properly return. He was an ethical person who ran his publishing business in a way that centered on treating, and paying, his artists fairly. He had an eye for talent, able to spot not just good cartoonists but also the good things about not-so-good cartoonists, both of which he nurtured to make them better. He was a comics die-hard who made contributions to the form in nearly every conceivable way—retailer, distributor, cartoonist, publisher, historian, organizer. And he really, really loved Alex Toth.
- September 16, 2011 @ 08:00 AM by Sean T. Collins
Comics A.M. | Reeve Carney extends Spider-Man musical contract
Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark
Broadway | Reeve Carney, who plays Peter Parker and Spider-Man in Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, has extended his contract with the musical through May. Carney’s original contract was set to expire in November. “I can’t imagine a more wonderful, harder-working company than my mates on Broadway, and I look forward to being with them until shooting begins, and again as soon as we’ve wrapped,” he said. [Wall Street Journal]
Creators | The works of cartoonists Frode Överli, Lise Myhre, Christopher Nielsen and Jason are being featured on postage stamps in Norway, in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the first comic book to be published in the country, The Katzenjammer Kids. [cats without dogs]
Creators | Firebreather creator and former Wonder Woman writer Phil Hester is profiled in conjunction with a visit to Limited Edition Comics and Collectibles in Cedar Falls, Iowa. [WCF Courier.com]
- September 16, 2011 @ 06:55 AM by Brigid Alverson and JK Parkin
Grumpy Old Fan | New 52 Week 2: You again?
Frankenstein, Agent Of SHADE #1
This week, I count at least five New-52 books picking up pretty much where they left off. Chief among these are Green Lantern and Red Lanterns; followed by Batwoman, which was supposed to come out months ago. Batman and Robin keeps its previously-announced regular creative team, and Legion Lost spins out of the pre-existing Legion of Super-Heroes. Overall I thought this week was pretty strong, but there were a few clunkers, including at least one book which really disappointed.
Just think — after this week, we’re more than halfway done…!
SPOILERS FOLLOW, but not too many.
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Continue Reading »
- September 15, 2011 @ 03:00 PM by Tom Bondurant
How many Justice Leaguers can fit in the first issue of a Justice League comic?
I found Geoff Johns, Jim Lee and Scott Williams’ Justice League #1, the inaugural effort in DC’s “New 52″ effort, to be thunderously disappointing. Listening to three months of sustained, daily hype has a way of raising expectations, I guess, and as cynical as I remained about so many aspects of DC’s relaunch, and despite the fact that I took each new tidbit of information with a grain of salt, that much exposure to positive PR still managed to raise my expectations rather high. Particularly for this book, since it was the flagship one, and the one being written by the publisher’s chief creative officer and drawn by its co-publisher.
But the quality of the comic book just didn’t really meet those high expectations.
There are a variety of reasons for this, but one of the most obvious, and one I saw cited most often in the slew of reviews and reactions I’ve since seen online, is that it fails to meet even the most basic, vague promise of its own cover: It’s not a Justice League comic, as the logo says, and it doesn’t features the characters pictured on the front. Two of them star in the book, and two more cameo, but it read more like The Brave and The Bold featuring Batman and Green Lantern…albeit a theoretical version of The Brave and The Bold, perhaps written by Brian Michael Bendis for an eventual trade collection of the first six-issue arc, as DC’s various Brave and the Bold books almost always tell a complete story with a beginning, middle and end in each and every single issue.
- September 15, 2011 @ 02:00 PM by J. Caleb Mozzocco
Celebrate Fashion Week the weird way with Lisa Hanawalt
It’s New York Fashion Week, that time of year when labels and designers show off their wares for the upcoming spring season, and Project Runway starts getting really good. What better way to mark the occasion than with Lisa Hanawalt’s painstakingly detailed drawings of animals wearing bizarre hats for the Hairpin? Let’s face it, a poodle wearing a pillbox with a chia pet on top really isn’t any odder than the actual headgear sported by any number of people at the VMAs or William & Kate’s wedding, so Hanawalt really may have a future as a cutting-edge haberdasher ahead of her.
- September 15, 2011 @ 01:30 PM by Sean T. Collins
DC Comics teases Guillem March’s cover for Catwoman #4
Catwoman #4, by Guillem March
Taking over the DC Comics Twitter account today, editor Rachel Gluckstern revealed Guillem March’s cover for Catwoman #4, teasing, “What business could Catwoman possibly have at Stately Wayne Manor?”
The relaunched Catwoman, by March and writer Judd Winick, debuts next week. The fourth issue arrives in December.
- September 15, 2011 @ 01:00 PM by Kevin Melrose
Marjane Satrapi’s The Sigh coming from Archaia in November
The Sigh
I completely missed this in the latest Previews and when Michael noted it last week — Archaia Entertainment will publish an English-language version of Persepolis creator Marjane Satrapi’s The Sigh in November.
The illustrated book has already appeared in France and Spain, and is a fable about the daughter of a merchant. “One day Rose asks for the seed of a blue bean, but her father fails to find one for her. She lets out a sigh in resignation, and her sigh attracts the Sigh, a mysterious being that brings the seed she desired to the merchant. But every debt has to be paid, and every gift has a price, and the Sigh returns a year later to take the merchant’s daughter to a secret and distant palace,” the press release Archaia sent out today reads. The 6” x 8” hardcover will feature 56 pages of text and hand-drawn color illustrations.
“The Sigh is a timeless fairytale that promises to capture the imaginations of readers both young and old,” said Mark Smylie, chief creative officer of Archaia Entertainment. “Marjane is one of those rare writers who has the ability to connect with readers on a global scale and we are proud to bring this story to the U.S.” The release also hints that The Sigh is the first of many new English-language translations coming from Archaia, noting it is “the vanguard of a new wave of foreign titles it will be publishing in the next several months.”
- September 15, 2011 @ 12:00 PM by JK Parkin
Speculators take notice as DC replaces Green Lantern #1 misprint
Amid the announcements of sellouts and second of third printings for the New 52, Heidi MacDonald catches an email from DC Comics notifying retailers of a printing error on some copies of Green Lantern #1. That noise you just heard was the sound of speculators making a frantic dash to their local comics store.
The flaw in question is a little green teardrop above Sinestro’s ear (you can see it in the image on the right). DC asks retailers to report the flawed copies to Diamond Comic Distributors by Monday. Replacement copies will arrive on Oct. 12, the same day as Green Lantern #2.
Naturally, a flawed copy has already made its way onto eBay, where the starting bid is $9.99. However, what DC labels “a printing error,” the seller characterizes as a sly maneuver by the publisher: “I’VE PLACED THE TEARDROP MISPRINT COVER IN ONE PHOTO AND REGULAR COVER ON THE OTHER PHOTO. ITS REALLY OBVIOUS. I’LL LET YOU BE THE JUDGE, CALL IT WHATEVER YOU LIKE. I think it was intentional especially with a launch of this magnitude.”
What DC would get out of it, I don’t know. But far be it for me to question a shrewd owner of an “unread, NM, dripping wet off the presses” copy of the “Teardrop Misprint Variant.”
- September 15, 2011 @ 11:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
Pinocchio, Vampire Slayer channels Shakespeare for new statue
Pinocchio, Vampire Slayer writer Van Jensen sends word that Dusty Higgins’ cover to the second volume of their undead-slaying trilogy is being turned into a limited edition state, which is available for pre-order on the SLG Publishing website. Check out the swell animated gif, which gives you a 360-degree look at it in all its glory.
This just over six-inch figure will be cast in high density polystone and will be nearly made to order in terms of its production run. It was designed by Figurebang Toys. Available exclusively from SLG, they will stop taking orders for this piece on Oct. 31. The statue will cost $189 for pre-orders, and those who place orders won’t be charged until the statue ships.
- September 15, 2011 @ 10:16 AM by JK Parkin