2011 December
Preview: Jughead Double Digest #176
Of all the Archie lines, the Jughead comics seem to be the most interesting. I know the main Archie comic has Kevin Keller and Kiss and all that, but the Jughead authors seem to mix things up a bit more and come up with more original story lines.
What struck me about this preview, though, was the art in the first story—it’s very much in the Archie tradition (look at Jughead’s sideways smile in the first panel, below) but somehow more dynamic as well. Penciler Ron Frenz seems to be a longtime Archie artist, so I don’t know why I’m noticing this for the first time, but it really pulled me in. That said, the first page is a bit disturbing; I think it’s the look on Archie’s face that does it. He’s simpering. Archie does not simper, dammit!
Anyway, here is a quick look at two stories from Jughead Double Digest #176; if you like ‘em, the comic goes on sale this week.
- December 12, 2011 @ 10:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Help Ace Kilroy fight the vampire Nazis
Here’s a two-fisted webcomic for fans of Clark Gable and old action movies: Ace Kilroy, the story of a Gable-esque tough guy who is sent by his good friend, President Franklin Roosevelt, to investigate a Nazi plot to harness vampires and other supernatural creatures to further their cause. Ace is a smart guy, but in true B-movie fashion, he knows when to let his fists do the talking. And the strip is smart, too—that’s Secretary of State Cordell Hull hovering in the middle panel, behind FDR. I bet he doesn’t show up in too many comics these days.
The webcomic launched on Halloween (of course!), and it updates daily, with a big color comic on Sundays. The archives are a quick read, and there’s also a nicely designed dossier on the characters that shows that creators Rob Kelly and Dan O’Connor have really put some thought into this comic and are in it for the long haul. Kelly and O’Connor are trying to raise enough money via Kickstarter to work exclusively on the comic for a while, as well as to start work on a print edition and do some publicity. The Kickstarter campaign runs through this Wednesday, so if you like what you see, don’t dally! Awards include, in typical 1930s fashion, membership in Ace’s Allies, which I can only hope includes a secret decoder ring.
- December 12, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
‘Forget the movies,’ WB Montreal is focused on DC Comics games
Following the runaway success of Batman: Arkham Asylum and its sequel Arkham City, don’t look for Warner Bros. Interactive to return to movie tie-ins anytime soon.
Instead, the new Warner Bros. Games Montreal has been given a mandate: to just make good video games. Specifically, good games based on DC Comics properties. “It’s really about make the game what it needs to be and forget the movies,” Reid Schneider, the studio’s head of production, told Canadian Business.
“If you look over the past decade of superhero games, there were two. The first one was when Neversoft made Spider-Man — I think it was back on the PS1. People were like, ‘Wow, this is really good,’ and then a couple of things came out that were okay,” he said. “Then Rocksteady came out with Arkham Asylum and that again changed the expectations. If you look at the similarities between the two, they weren’t based on movies per se. They were just taking that really rich fiction from the comic books and exploring the characters. It’s not about hitting the movie date or some arbitrary date — it was giving the game the time it needs to be successful and really just concentrating on the quality of it.”
- December 12, 2011 @ 08:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
Comics A.M. | Comic sales climb 19 percent; IDW promotes Goldstein
Justice League #3
Sales | The comic book market was up more than 19 percent in November when compared with the same period last year, with comics up 23 percent and graphic novels up 12 percent. So far this year the comics and graphics novel market is up 1.87 percent versus the first 11 months of 2010. If December cooperates, this could be the first up year for the market since 2008.
DC Comics was once again the top company in terms of market share. The company took six of the top 10 spots on Diamond’s Top 100 Comics list, with Justice League #3, Batman #3, Action Comics #3, Green Lantern #3 and Marvel’s Point One #1 making up the top five comics of the month. Batman: Noel took the No. 1 spot on the Top 100 Graphic Novels list. [The Comichron]
Publishing | IDW Publishing has promoted Chief Operating Officer Greg Goldstein to president, with a focus on new markets and acquisitions. He joined the company in 2008 from Upper Deck. [ICv2.com]
- December 12, 2011 @ 06:55 AM by Brigid Alverson and JK Parkin
What Are You Reading? with Geoffrey Golden and Amanda Meadows
BLAMMO #6
Season’s Greetings and welcome to another edition of What Are You Reading?, our weekly look at what we’ve been reading lately. Today our special guests are Geoffrey Golden and Amanda Meadows, editors of Devastator: The Quarterly Comedy Magazine for Humans. Their latest issue has a video game theme, with contributions from James Kochalka, Corey Lewis, Danny Hellman and many more. And if you head over to their website between now through Dec. 16, the code ROBOT6 gets you 20 percent off single issues.
To see what Amanda, Geoffrey and the Robot 6 crew have been reading lately, click below.
- December 11, 2011 @ 01:30 PM by JK Parkin
FCBD: BOOM! launches Dune, Bad Medicine surfaces
Diamond has released its Silver Sponsor comics for Free Comic Book Day, meaning that the full array of FCBD comics is now before us. There’s quite a variety: Judge Dredd, Buffy, Gilbert Hernandez’s Marble Season, Smurfs, Donald Duck, Voltron, My Favorite Martian. There’s an anthology of Middle Eastern comics and a (censored) Howard Cruse comic. Over at The Beat, commenter Torsten Adair points out that BOOM! Studios is putting out a Dune comic that hasn’t been announced anywhere else—although the solicit text makes it clear that this is just the first of a series: “a must-have precursor to the epic launch of the adaptation of Dune books from BOOM! starting in July!” And Marble Season was only announced on Thursday. On the other side of the news cycle, the Oni Press selection, Bad Medicine, was first announced in 2008 and is just now coming to the surface—it isn’t even on Oni’s website. The writers are the extremely busy team of Nunzio DeFilippis and Christina Weir, and the art is by Christopher Mitten.
A few other observations: The Gossamyr comic from Th3rd World Studios features art by “talented newcomer Sarah Ellerton.” I don’t know who let that by, but Ellerton is anything but a newcomer; she has been making webcomics (Inverloch, The Phoenix Requiem) for close to a decade now, although it’s clear from the cover that her art has matured quite a bit. Viz is back in the FCBD game but not with their Shonen Jump samplers of years gone by; this year they are all about Voltron Force, and they were pretty excited about these graphic novels at NYCC this year. Yen Press is highlighting their adaptation of Cassandra Clare’s The Infernal Devices, which was announced at NYCC.
- December 11, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Chain Reactions | Defenders #1
The Defenders #1
This week Marvel’s “non-team” returned to the comic book page, as Matt Fraction, Terry and Rachel Dodson, and Sonia Oback brought the Defenders back with a mix of new and old members. Joining mainstays Dr. Strange, Namor and Silver Surfer are the Red She-Hulk, a.k.a. Betty Banner, who was once married to a Defender, and a character Fraction helped revitalize not that long ago in the pages of his own book, Iron Fist. The team is brought together with the help of the Hulk to deal with a leftover plot element from Fear Itself.
So what did folks think of this latest incarnation of the Defenders? Here’s a sampling of opinions on the first issue:
Jim Mroczkowski, iFanboy: “The Defenders #1 is a good read, make no mistake. It is a deceptively meaty tome; it doesn’t drag– or even pause, really– but readers may find themselves repeatedly checking the page count because it seems impossible that the book could be just a standard thirty-two pager. While DC’s new Justice League is three issues in and should just about manage to get everyone from the cover of #1 into the book by this time next year, The Defenders somehow manages to introduce every character, give the reader a vignette revealing something about each of them and where they are in their lives at the moment, introduce the threat in as straightforward a manner as you’ve seen since Marvel Two-in-One was cancelled, and get the entire band together with half a dozen pages to spare. Never mind reading it; I wanted to diagram it and teach it in a writing class.”
- December 10, 2011 @ 12:00 PM by JK Parkin
The best of the best of the year lists
Daredevil #7
As the end of 2011 approaches, websites and publications are unveiling various year-end lists and gift guides — so many that keeping up is a challenge. Here’s just some of what’s been released in the past few days
• Matt Madden and Jessica Abel, editors for the Best American Comics series, have released their annual Notable Comics list. Every year they try to get their hands on every North American comic that’s published every year so they can narrow them down to about 100 or so comics for their guest editor to choose from for each edition. This year’s list includes comics by Matt Kindt, Brandon Graham, Megan Kelso, Kathryn and Stuart Immonen, Michael Deforge, Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson, Mike Dawson, Joshua Cotter and many, many more.
• In a list of their favorite music, movies, books and more of 2011, The Tulane Hullabaloo spotlights Mark Waid, Marcos Martin and Paolo Rivera’s run on Daredevil: “The series contains a sense of pure, manic glee missing from many of today’s dark, gritty and realistic superheroes, with Daredevil grinning as he makes snow angels on the rooftops of his beloved city rather than brooding over his internal demons. It’s a joy to read every month and cannot be recommended more, even to non-comic book enthusiasts.”
• UK comics retailer Forbidden Planet has been posting best of the year lists from various comic folks on their blog, including Sean Azzopardi, Mary Talbot, Edward Ross and Robin Etherington.
• MTV Splash Page counts down the top five comic book movie deaths of 2011.
• Brian Truitt at USA Today offers a list of gift ideas for comic fans.
• Lauren Davis at ComicsAlliance offers a guide to various webcomics collections and merchandise she thinks would make fine gifts — “a fantastic way to convert friends and family to your favorite webcomic.”
- December 10, 2011 @ 10:29 AM by JK Parkin
D+Q to publish Gilbert Hernandez’s Marble Season
Drawn and Quarterly announced yesterday that they will publish Gilbert Hernandez’s semi-autobiographical graphic novel Marble Season in the fall of 2012. The news came from D+Q’s creative director and acquiring editor, Tom Devlin, who described the book this way: “MARBLE SEASON is the autobiographical side of this great cartoonist (albeit semi-fictionalized)–where we get to see how his young comics mind developed.”
Marble Season was one of the many topics that came up in Hernandez’s conversation with our own Chris Mautner at CBR earlier this year. “I’m planning a serious, long graphic novel in the near future of a semi-autobiographical nature,” he told Mautner. “I’m going to do my best in making ‘Marble Season’ my last word on the subject.”
Hernandez continued,
“Marble Season” will feature kids growing up in the 1960s and [illustrate] how pop culture informs their interests, like comic books, movies, TV and sports. The different kids are rarely on the same page with their interests: the jock kids dismiss the comic book kids and vice versa, etc. The ‘60s setting is where it’s semi-autobiographical, I guess.
This is Hernandez’s first book for D+Q, and they will be launching a book tour to promote it next year.
- December 9, 2011 @ 02:00 PM by Brigid Alverson
The Fifth Color | How to give the gift of comics this season
I bet you Ben never knows what to get Franklin every year...
Perhaps your family gathering is going to have way more kids than previous years. Maybe the moment is right for you to hand down some traditional comics reading to a son or daughter. Is your significant other a little more receptive toward your choice of literature these days? You could have even pulled a co-worker at your Secret Santa office party who likes to talk to you about the latest comic book movie. Personally, my brother gave me his comic collection when I was a kid, and I always like to try and give him a couple new ones in return, as a way of saying thank you and reminding him of his roots.
We all have reasons for giving comics and comic-related accessories this holiday season. Comics have been vetted in popular culture, can cover a dozen different interests and physical forms, and always have been a perfectly wonderful gift for any age or interest. In fact, I think we’d all appreciate a little recruitment drive to keep comics at the top of the charts and off cancellation lists!
I’m not saying it’s easy, though. Well, it might be. For some fair readers, you could be looking at a big pile of gifts already wrapped under your Christmas tree, taking a deep breath of satisfaction. Then again, you could be strapped for cash, gift ideas and time to make sure that you don’t show up somewhere empty handed. Or worse, you could be the giftee and all Grandma knows is that you like Batman. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a guide to all the best gifts this year? Well, there is, the fine folks at CBR made up a Holiday Gift Guide, while we here at Robot 6 reached out to comic pros to see what they recommended, and I could recommend no finer list made by dashing and intellectual folks.
Then again, what if this is odd gift shopping? Working retail, I meet the clueless, the frazzled, the fearful and the confused for whom a simple and eloquently put-together list would not be enough. So for you, who will still be shopping on Dec. 24, to anyone who has ever gotten two Batman toothbrushes as a gag gift, to anyone who might be sent out into the cold for the first time to find a comic book, this guide is for you.
This is your Fear Gift-self shopping guide.
- December 9, 2011 @ 01:00 PM by Carla Hoffman
Fly the friendly skies — with manga
National airlines like to add a bit of local color to their flights — I remember when I was a kid, getting Smarties and Beano comics on our Aer Lingus flights to Ireland. Now Japan Airlines is taking that high-tech: Passengers on their 787 Dreamliner flights, which start next year, will be able to read 30 different manga for free on electronic setback readers.
Initially the manga will be in Japanese only, but English translations will be available eventually. But don’t plan on buying a plane ticket from the United States to dodge paying for your manga: The service will initially be available on flights from Tokyo to New Delhi, Moscow and Beijing.
- December 9, 2011 @ 12:00 PM by Brigid Alverson
Celebrities to read Jim Krueger’s Frankincense Monster for charity
Actors Ernie Hudson, Barry Bostwick, Eddy Jemison and others will read from The Frankincense Monster and Other Haunted Christmas Stories, a children’s book by Justice and Earth X writer Jim Krueger, on Sunday as part of benefit for the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles’ Holidays From the Heart program.
Organized by Krueger and producer John Bucher, “Oh Haunted Night” is the first of what they hope will be an annual Hollywood event “that provides the power of story in the midst of a magical season while bringing hope and joy to children who are in need.”
The 8 p.m. performance, held at the Acme Comedy Theater in Los Angeles, will be paired with a silent auction. Tickets can be purchased through the Acme website or at the door.
- December 9, 2011 @ 11:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
Quote of the day | Mark Evanier on Jerry Robinson
Jerry Robinson
“What struck me in all the phone interviews was what a small fraction of Jerry’s life was getting covered. I don’t think most people realize how politically involved he was in issues of Free Speech (especially that of cartoonists) in countries where they don’t cotton to any kind of dissent. I don’t think most folks know how involved he was in the mid-seventies campaign to establish a credit line and pensions for Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster on Superman. Most folks know that Neal Adams spearheaded that campaign and his efforts were vital in making Time-Warner realize that a horrendous situation had to be rectified and put right. Not to take anything away from Neal but it was Jerry Robinson who negotiated with senior Time-Warner execs of behalf of Siegel and Shuster. It was Jerry who closed the deal.”
– Mark Evanier, reflecting on the accomplishments of legendary artist Jerry Robinson,
who passed away Wednesday at age 89
- December 9, 2011 @ 10:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
The only con that matters*: Thoughts on BCGF 2011
Frank Santoro, Dan Nadel, and Dash Shaw with the book of the hour, Kramers Ergot 8
I bought many, many books at the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival this past Saturday; I won’t be showing them to you in this report. This is because I’m actually, actively embarrassed by just how big my haul really was. I spent so much money at this show that I’m ashamed to even obliquely reveal it. Eighteen years from now, when I’m complaining about the cost of sending my daughter to college, the last thing I need is for her to dig through the Robot 6 archives, find my BCGF 2011 haul, and say “Oh really?”
But whatever it means for my finances, the surfeit of compelling new comics at BCGF can only mean great things for the show. As I told nearly everyone I encountered there — and I encountered more friendly critics and creators here than at any other show I can think of, often in marathon back-to-back-to-back meet-and-greet encounters that would slowly choke off an aisle as more and more people stopped to say hello — BCGF is my favorite comics show, hands down. I’d go so far as to say that it’s the best comics show, in fact, in that its relentless, carefully curated focus on the cutting edge gives it a sense of cohesion, purpose, and excitement that’s all but unmatched.
- December 9, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by Sean T. Collins
‘Two things I swore I would never write about’: Abnett to write vampire/zombie comic for Vertigo
The New Deadwardians
Vertigo Comics announced today that writer Dan Abnett and artist I.N.J. Culbard will team up on an eight-issue miniseries titled The New Deadwardians, a comic set in post-Victorian England where the upper class voluntarily becomes vampires in order to escape the lower class, who have all become zombies.
“May I just confess that this is a story that involves both zombies and vampires, two things I swore I would never write about because they had both long since jumped the shark,” Abnett said in his pitch. “Then this idea came to me and wouldn’t leave me alone. Please be tolerant of the zombie-and-vampire-ness of this until you’ve heard me out. It’s essentially a detective story set in an alternate history England, circa 1900.”
Here’s how they described the book on the Vertigo blog:
Set in post-Victorian England, nearly everyone in the upper class has voluntarily become a vampire to escape the lower classes who are all zombies.
Thrust into this mayhem is Chief Inspector George Suttle, a lonely detective who’s got the slowest beat in London: investigating murders in a world where everyone is already dead!
But when the body of a young aristocrat washes up on the banks of the Thames, Suttle’s quest for the truth will take him from the darkest sewers to the gleaming halls of power, and reveal the rotten heart at the center of this strange world.
Abnett, of course, is one half of the DnA writing team with Andy Lanning, who together write Resurrection Man and New Mutants. Culbard has done work for Dark Horse and SelfMadeHero, a British publisher, including the adaptation of Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness that won a British Fantasy Award earlier this year.
The first issue comes out in March.
- December 9, 2011 @ 08:00 AM by JK Parkin