2011 October
The Middle Ground #74 | None More Extreme
My first thought when learning that there was going to be a revival of Rob Liefeld’s Extreme Comics line at Image was that I was an old, old man. We’d already reached the point where something so recent was old enough to have a nostalgia hook? And then I realized that we’re more than a decade since the last revamp of Prophet and almost as long since the last attempt at a Glory series. Continue Reading »
- October 18, 2011 @ 04:30 PM by Graeme McMillan
Start Reading Now: Sexbuzz
Your sit-up-and-take-notice webcomic of the week is Sexbuzz, a smart, suspenseful, and (yes) sexy science-fiction tale from cartoonist Andrew White. Set in an ever so slightly futuristic city currently undergoing “the worst fucking period of all recorded history,” it focuses on a quartet of twentysomethings whose dependency on an illegal, intense drug-like sex technology called sexbuzz — and on each other — draws them into an underworld of crime and conspiracy. But the plot is just part of the comic’s appeal: The focus on the characters, the lush graytoned art, and a continuous vertical-scroll layout that lends itself both to gripping action sequences and breathtaking abstract passages combine for a comic with multiple, complementary strengths.
White hasn’t made a lot of waves online that I can see, but his art and writing for Sexbuzz are both crazily accomplished — fans of the thoughtful near-future science-fiction comics of Dash Shaw and Paul Pope will find much to admire, both visually and narratively. And White only updates the comic in chapter-length chunks, which means it’s only updated every few months but is much easier to follow from one installment to the next.
I wrote a lot more about Sexbuzz here, but your first stop should absolutely be the comic itself.
- October 18, 2011 @ 03:00 PM by Sean T. Collins
Take a peak at James Kochalka’s ‘Attract Mode’ from the Devastator
from Attract Mode
The fourth issue of the humor anthology The Devastator arrives Nov. 9, and the theme for this issue is video games, It includes contributions from James Kochalka, Danny Hellman, Corey Lewis and many more. Above is a brief taste of Kochalka’s contribution; if you’d like to see the whole thing, you can find a preview of a few pages from the book on their site. And hey, if you pre-order it before Nov. 9, you’ll get a mystery prize!
A trailer for the book is available after the jump.
- October 18, 2011 @ 02:00 PM by JK Parkin
Quote of the day | Bad comics are the disease. Jaime Hernandez is the cure.
…Hernandez’s comics are in many ways an antidote to all the things that drive comics fans nuts despite their seeming appetite for wallowing in such things for weeks, months, years on end. Sexism in comics is always worth fighting because sexism is pernicious and harmful and thus worth calling into question every time it’s encountered, but for many adult fans part of the solution really is to put down the terrible comic that enrages you and buy something like Love & Rockets: New Stories #4 for its fragile, sympathetic portraits of a wide range of human experiences.
—Tom Spurgeon, in yet another excellent piece on Jaime Hernandez’s Maggie & Hopey masterpiece “The Love Bunglers” from Love and Rockets: New Stories #4.
There’s a sense one gets when issues involving lousy or ugly or offensive comics are discussed on the comics Internet that the superhero genre is the extent of the comics experience. This can be both a good thing and a bad thing. It’s good in the sense that for most of the North American comics market, superheroes are if not the only game in town then at least the Super Bowl compared to the Pee-Wee League games being played by other kinds of comics, so the numbers necessitate a serious engagement with the genre’s problems and the problems of its publishers. And if you treat superhero comics as paramount, then your critiques of its practices gain in urgency, an urgency that’s probably required if those critiques are to be heard and responded to.
- October 18, 2011 @ 01:00 PM by Sean T. Collins
Food or Comics? | Rub-A-Dub-Dub, Batman in a tub
Batman #2
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.
Michael May
If I had $15, I’d mostly grab the second issues of some DC stuff I enjoyed last month: Batman ($2.99), Birds of Prey ($2.99), and especially Wonder Woman ($2.99). No Justice League for me though. Unlike Action Comics, I didn’t enjoy the first issue enough that I can rationalize paying $4 for it. Instead, I’ll grab Avengers 1959 #2 ($2.99) and Red 5′s Bonnie Lass #2 ($2.95), both of which had strong first issues.
If I had $30, I’d have to put back Bonnie Lass and wait for the collection in order to afford Jonathan Case’s atomic-sea-monster-love-story Dear Creature ($15.99).
- October 18, 2011 @ 12:00 PM by JK Parkin
Occupy Graphic Novels
V for Vendetta
One of the more interesting (at least to me) aspect of Occupy Wall Street is that it has its own library, tended to by professional librarians and providing a variety of literature, from serious works of social and economic theory to picture books to keep the kiddies happy. Check the blog for news of authors who have been stopping by and donating their books; the New Yorker even wrote a nice little piece. Libraries are springing up in the other Occupy sites as well, including Boston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Providence.
This sparked a lively discussion on a librarians’ graphic novel discussion group where I lurk. Gan Golan, creator of The Adventures of Unemployed Man, started the discussion:
I visited the libraries at both the Occupy Baltimore (which was tiny) and Occupy Wall St. at Zucotti park in NYC (which was huge) and the good librarians at both places lamented the lack of a strong graphic novels section that showcased comic that were relevant or socially engaged. (The libraries there are very popular, btw).
- October 18, 2011 @ 10:59 AM by Brigid Alverson
The numbers are bad, Wonder Woman! The numbers are bad!
From Wonder Woman #2, by Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang
It’s perhaps a little fitting that Wonder Woman’s first post-relaunch visit to Themyscira, a magical, hidden island that can teleport to any location or time, should have echoes of Lost. In the preview of this week’s Wonder Woman #2, from the Maxim magazine website of all places, we get our first exposure to the (re-) rebranded Paradise Island, complete with unnerving, and downright threatening, whispers, and Others Amazons emerging from the shadows of the jungle.
Also worth noting: Queen Hippolyta is blonde again, for the firs time since, when, the 1987 relaunch? Wonder Woman #2, by Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang, goes on sale Wednesday.
- October 18, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
What’s the mystery DC Comics video game coming next year?
In a Los Angeles Times profile pegged to today’s launch of Batman: Arkham City, Warner Bros. Interactive President Martin Tremblay drops an enticing crumb: In addition to a new Lord of the Rings video game and a sequel to LEGO Batman, next year the studio will release an adaptation of a DC Comics superhero he wouldn’t name.
That Warner Bros. is looking to develop more DC properties for its rapidly expanding games division is no secret — a new studio in Montreal is being set up specifically for that task. But what could this mysterious title be?
Kotaku notes that while a Superman game may be the obvious guess, given the release of Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel in June 2013, it hardly requires a veil of secrecy. After all, movie tie-ins are par for the course.
- October 18, 2011 @ 08:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
NYCC hangover | A round-up of additional news from the show
Age of Apocalypse
News and reports from the New York Comic Con rolled out even after the lights were turned off on Sunday; here are a few of them, as well as some tidbits we missed the first time around:
• Marvel announced an ongoing Age of Apocalypse series by David Lapham and Roberto De La Torre, spinning out of the current “Dark Angel Saga” storyline in Uncanny X-Force. [CBR]
• Designer Chip Kidd is writing a Batman book called Batman: Death by Design with art by Dave Taylor. It’s due out next summer. [ComicsAlliance]
• USA Today spotlighted Captain Brooklyn, due next May from Jimmy Palmiotti, Frank Tieri and Amanda Conner. The three-issue miniseries will be published by Image Comics. [USA Today]
• Following the convention, Marvel has released pages from the Prep & Landing story that will appear in a few of their upcoming November comics. [CBR]
- October 18, 2011 @ 07:00 AM by JK Parkin
Talking Comics with Tim | Andrew Foley
Done to Death
Anyone who has had the displeasure of editing or reading poorly executed copycat literature is likely entertained by the core premise of writer Andrew Foley & artist Fiona Staples’ Done to Death trade collection: an editor who sets out to kill the writers of bad literature. This trade collection, which was released by IDW on September 21, had quite a six-year journey to get on the shelves, as Foley explained to me in this email interview. My thanks to Foley for his time. Once you’ve read this interview, be sure to read the late September interview that Foley did with CBR’s Shaun Manning.
Tim O’Shea: How long have you been developing Done to Death and how did it come to be at IDW?
Andrew Foley: It’s taken a little over six years to finally get this collection on the shelves. The original five issues took a little more than a year from to get from the initial pitch to publication. After parting ways with Markosia Fiona and I spent quite a while looking for the right publisher for the collection. In the early portion of my career, I had publishers I was working with: abruptly go out of business; unilaterally break contracts they’d agreed to; elect not to publish several graphic novels (at least one fully illustrated) I wrote for them while being constantly reassured they would see the light of day; stiff dozens of creators when the publisher decided the moment for their wildly ambitious anthology series had passed; and just generally try to advance themselves on the backs of passionate (if naïve) creators.
There are some great indy publishers out there. Red 5 springs to mind. But there are also a distressingly high number of predatory companies around whose sole purpose is to acquire or control as much intellectual property for as little as possible in the hopes that one will become 30 Days of Night or Cowboys & Aliens and get optioned for millions of dollars. It’s a bit like playing the lottery, only each ticket represents hundreds of hours of labour on the creators’ parts.
- October 17, 2011 @ 03:00 PM by Tim O'Shea
NYCC | Is the Human Torch joining the Secret Avengers?
Secret Avengers
Marvel.com has posted an interview with Rick Remender about his upcoming run with Gabriel Hardman on Secret Avengers, and a piece of promotional artwork reveals a potentially different roster for the team — one that includes the Human Torch and Venom.
Over the weekend, Marvel announced the new creative team and shared a promotional piece by drawn by Art Adams (the book’s cover artist, according to the Marvel feature). It showed new team member Captain Britain, the team’s new leader, Hawkeye, as well as Hank Pym and other current members of the team. Hank Pym doesn’t appear on the promo art from Marvel’s site, but Venom and the Human Torch do. Or a Human Torch, anyway; whether it’s a resurrected Johnny Storm, the WWII-era Torch he took his name from or, heck, even Toro is anybody’s guess at this point. But Marvel has teased the return of the Johnny Storm Human Torch already, so he seems like the likely suspect.
In the interview, Remender doesn’t talk much about the roster beyond Captain Britain and Hawkeye, but he does reveal that along with introducing a new Masters of Evil, he’s also revamping another classic Avengers villain as the team faces the Adaptoids — “sentient, hyper-evolved descendants of the original Super Adaptoid.”
- October 17, 2011 @ 02:02 PM by JK Parkin
Klein and McManus create board-game inspired art print, Go Freelance!
Go Freelance!
Letterer and designer Todd Klein announced another print in his “alphabet” series, where he teams with various comic creators to create some nice looking art. This time around, he’s teamed up with artist Shawn McManus to create a print that doubles as what will likely be the hottest new game in comicdom when the holiday season arrives, Go Freelance! — “a board game that outlines the lives of two budding comics artists.”
“Here you’ll meet Artie and Scribbler as they make their way from childhood to retirement through the challenges, pitfalls, rewards and catastrophes of a creative livelihood,” Klein wrote on his blog.
The print costs $20 and can be purchased on Klein’s website.
- October 17, 2011 @ 01:26 PM by JK Parkin
Comic Couture | Cloonan, Nicolle, Vasquez, Goldberg design robot T-shirts
"Making Friends is Easy"
The T-shirt site Threadless has released a third round of “Comics on Tees” on their website, featuring the work of Becky Cloonan, Ethan Nicolle, J.R. Goldberg and Jhonen Vasquez, who wrote the four “issues” this time around.
This is the third “volume” of comic shirts from Threadless. The first volume featured artwork by Jill Thompson, Cliff Chiang, Tony Moore and Art Baltazar, while volume two featured Eduardo Risso, Lee Bermejo, Matheus Lopes and Dave Johnson, with a story by Brian Azzarello.
You can buy all four of the volume three shirts as a set for $79 or individually for $20 each. You can find artwork for all four shirts after the jump.
- October 17, 2011 @ 12:00 PM by JK Parkin
NYCC | Convention draws a record 105,000 attendees
New York Comic Con
New York Comic Con set an attendance record, with an estimated 105,000 people pouring into the Jacob Javits Center between Thursday and Sunday, the first time the event has been held over four days. That figure is up from the 96,000 who attended the 2010 convention.
Every year the show has grown so dramatically that it feels like we are starting over with our plan and building a brand new show,” show manager Lance Fensterman wrote this morning on the ReedPOP blog. “In spite of that fact, every year we try to make it better and improve upon the things that did not go well the year before. We got some things right and we know we missed the mark on some things as well. What’s important though is that we always are listening.”
He acknowledged that in a year of several NYCC firsts — first Thursday preview, first business summit, first three-day sellout — there were complaints about lines for the presentations for The Avengers and The Walking Dead, as well as the Saturday and Sunday queue hall. (From what I’ve seen online, he can probably add the Javits Center’s spotty Wi-Fi to the list.)
New York Comic Con 2012 will be held Oct. 11-14.
- October 17, 2011 @ 11:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
Wonder Woman gets a fill-in artist in January (Plus, DC covers!)
Wonder Woman #5, by Cliff Chiang
DC Comics has begun parceling out its January solicitations ahead of the full release this afternoon, revealing Tony Akins as the first fill-in artist for Wonder Woman. As noted last week, Cliff Chiang will still provide the cover for Issue 5, which finds Diana back home in London dealing with “two of the most powerful deities of the pantheon.”
Chiang and Wonder Woman writer Brian Azzarello had one of the most acclaimed debuts in DC’s New 52.
Beyond that, the creative teams in the Justice League, Superman and Batman groups, the only solicitations released so far, appear stable in the fifth month of DC’s relaunch. The covers range from dazzling — Wonder Woman by Chiang, Batwoman by J.H. Williams III and Batgirl by Adam Hughes are particularly noteworthy – to confounding. Starfire appears to be bleeding from her hair on Red Hood and the Outlaws (damned cheap Tamaranian dye jobs), while the covers of Detective Comics and Superman employ some oddly executed split images.
And then there’s the enormous demonic creature gnawing on Nightwing …
Check out some of the highlights, and lowlights, below, and visit Comic Book Resources at 2 p.m. PT to see DC’s full solicitations for January.
- October 17, 2011 @ 10:00 AM by Kevin Melrose