2011 December
Comics A.M. | Charges dropped against Susie Cagle in Occupy arrest
Susie Cagle
Legal | Cartoonist Susie Cagle, who was arrested last month while covering Occupy Oakland, says she has been cleared of all charges by the Oakland Police Department. The Society of Professional Journalists sent a letter to the Oakland police condemning the arrest, which ultimately assisted in getting the charges dropped. The letter called out the department’s crowd management policy, which says, “Even after a dispersal order has been given, clearly identified media shall be permitted to carry out their professional duties in any area where arrests are being made, unless their presence would unduly interfere with the enforcement action.” [Fishbowl LA]
Conventions | San Diego City Council approved a plan to have San Diego hotels pay for a $520 million convention center expansion. The plan moves to a second hearing in January and requires a vote of two-thirds of the hotels that cast ballots for approval. [NBC San Diego]
- December 9, 2011 @ 06:55 AM by JK Parkin
Grumpy Old Fan | Successor stories
Justice League America #61
Don’t ask me how I remember this, but it was just about twenty years ago that the first previews of Dan Jurgens’ Justice League began appearing. After five years, the “bwah-ha-ha” era was winding down, and Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis were leaving Justice League America. Giffen was also stepping away from plots and breakdowns for Justice League Europe, with JLE’s scripter Gerard Jones taking over as the book’s only writer; and Brian Augustyn replaced Andy Helfer as both books’ editor.
With a number of the New 52 titles changing creative teams before they’re even a year old, it’s too early to start talking about any long-lived, let alone definitive, runs on a particular book. Still, DC clearly hopes these books will be around for a while, even without the folks who launched ‘em. It got me thinking about past changes of the guard, and how they have followed some well-established interpretations.
* * *
- December 8, 2011 @ 05:00 PM by Tom Bondurant
Stephenson teases Image’s 2012 comics
Eric Stephenson reveals the covers of five upcoming Image projects at his blog, along with a dig at the Big Two for publishing retreads. Not all the titles are there, but the creators he lists as having upcoming Image books include Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, Robert Kirkman, Nick Spencer, Shawn Martinbrough, Brian K. Vaughan, Fiona Staples, Jonathan Hickman, and Nick Pitarra—quite an eclectic group. Over at the Image blog, Stephenson teases a bunch of different series and puts in a plug for the Image Expo as well. You know what would be fun? Going back to that post this time next year and matching the comics to the blind items. In the meantime, though, we’ll just have to guess.
- December 8, 2011 @ 04:00 PM by Brigid Alverson
Hobo Lobo of Hamelin side-scrolls into awesomeness
Hobo Lobo
You might remember wayyy back in the day when video games like Moon Patrol used a technique called parallax scrolling, where the background would move at a different rate than the foreground and gave the illusion of depth to a two-dimensional game. Stevan Živadinović uses that effect to his advantage in the Hobo Lobo of Hamelin. And while you don’t get to shoot simultaneously in two directions or shoot moon rocks*, you do get to read a beautiful-looking webcomic that takes full advantage of your bottom scroll bar. Go check it out.
*My apologies for the gratuitous Moon Patrol references.
- December 8, 2011 @ 03:00 PM by JK Parkin
Previews: What looks good for February
Judge Bao and the Jade Phoenix
It’s time once again for our monthly trip through Previews looking for cool, new comics. As usual, we’re focusing on graphic novels, collected volumes and first issues so that I don’t have to come up with a new way to say, “ Wonder Woman is still awesome!” every month. And I’ll continue letting Tom and Carla do the heavy lifting in regards to DC and Marvel’s solicitations.
Also, please feel free to play along in the comments. Tell me what I missed that you’re looking forward to or – if you’re a comics creator – mention your own stuff.
Archaia
Judge Bao and the Jade Phoenix - A detective story set in ancient China. Plus: cool name.
Avatar
Dicks #1 – Garth Ennis and John McCrea’s humor makes my top hat explode and my monocle fly off my face, but I remember this being pretty popular back in the day and I imagine that it’s new presentation in color and leading into a new storyline could make it popular again.
Bongo
Ralph Wiggum Comics #1 – This, on the other hand, is exactly my kind of funny. Kind of like 30 Days of Night, I’m astonished no one’s thought of it before. Too bad it’s just a one-shot, but hearing that Sergio Aragones is one of the contributors makes me want to poke myself with my Viking helmet to see if I’m dreaming.
- December 8, 2011 @ 02:02 PM by Michael May
Wolfman and Mandrake summon DC’s Night Force
Night Force #1, by Leonardo Manco
Veteran writer Marv Wolfman will return to Wintersgate Manor in March when he teams with artist Tom Mandrake on a seven-issue Night Force miniseries for DC Comics.
Created by Wolfman and the late Gene Colan, Night Force debuted in 1982 as a loose-knit group assembled by the sorcerer Baron Winters to battle supernatural threats. Members included the psychic Vanessa Van Helsing, granddaughter of Dracula’s nemesis, her reporter husband Jack Gold, parapsychology professor Donovan Caine, and ancient warrior Zadok Grimm. Night Force ran for 14 issues from 1982 to 1983, and was briefly resurrected in 1996.
“Because of the ability to write truly intense horror stories that allowed me to go anywhere I wanted, Night Force has always been my favorite creation,” Wolfman told DC’s Source blog. “This new Night Force story takes place over hundreds of years, but happens in the space of minutes. It is about a frightened young woman, the product of many generations of secret manipulations, a cop who is about to retire from the force and a cold case investigated by his dead FBI father many years before, a mysterious cult that is affecting the future but began on the night George Washington died, and a secret that will change the course of mankind forever.”
Night Force #1 debuts March 1.
- December 8, 2011 @ 01:00 PM by Kevin Melrose
The coloring on IDW’s Raphael made me sai* wistfully for the original comics
As much as I love comics, as much as I love the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, as much as I love writing and as much as I love drawing, I do not envy the folks at IDW, who secured the license to produce new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics from the new owner of the ninja turtle characters, Viacom. Sure, from a business perspective, it sounds like a great opportunity for a comics publisher, particularly a smaller one without, say Time Warner or Disney breathing down their necks to turn huge profits constantly.
But from a creative standpoint? What do you do with the characters in 2011, after their mega-successful first life as black-and-white comics stars from the mid-eighties, their even more successful second life as late-eighties cartoon, toy, movie and marketing juggernauts, and the many, many less successful attempts to rejigger them in various media, with varying levels of success, over the course of the last ten to fifteen years? After all, even if approached as a nostalgia-driven project, there are two very different most-prevalent takes on the characters to try and tap into.
I think IDW probably has the right idea.
They somehow managed to lure back one of the two creators, Kevin Eastman, after he had been largely absent from the comics for years (His fellow co-creator, Peter Laird, had been heavily involved in the last Mirage series, just previous to the Viacom sale). Eastman is co-writing the new series with Tom Waltz, and co-penciling with artist Dan Duncan, essentially providing layouts for Duncan to finish.
They also chose to start fresh with the narrative instead of picking up where one of the past volumes of the comics left off, or simply rebooting and telling the same old story all over again. There are, so far, some pretty key differences, including a new villain and the fact that the four title characters didn’t all grow up together.
I don’t know how well IDW is serving the many potential TMNT audiences, but I was pretty excited to see a “micro-series” starring Raphael on the stands this week.
- December 8, 2011 @ 12:00 PM by J. Caleb Mozzocco
Hickman continues his creator-owned work with Manhattan Projects ongoing series
Jonathan Hickman made his name with creator-owned comics like Nightly News and Pax Romana, and was quickly snapped up by Marvel as part of their next generation of writers. Although now entrenched at the House of Ideas writing four ongoing series (plus next summer’s Avengers Vs. X-Men), he didn’t forget how much fun he had off on his own. Earlier this year he and artist Nick Pitarra did the four-issue Red Wing series at Image, and now the duo are coming back for a new ongoing series titled Manhattan Projects.
“I think anyone that’s followed my work knows about my affinity for near-future/alt-history, and The Manhattan Projects pretty much represents the crown jewel of all the stories I’ve ever cooked-up in that vein,” Hickman says in a press release from Image. It posits that the secret project that invented the atomic bomb during World War 2 was one of many projects too dangerous to be revealed; projects that were more threatening than the atomic bomb itself.
- December 8, 2011 @ 11:00 AM by Chris Arrant
Straight for the art | Paolo Rivera shares his cover for Daredevil #10
Daredevil #10
Paolo Rivera, part of the creative team who have made Daredevil one of this year’s stellar comics, shares the somewhat-creepy cover to Daredevil #10. It looks like Daredevil crosses sticks with the Mole Man and his moloids (as he did on the cover to issue #9), who in recent months have popped up all over the Marvel Universe. These moloids don’t look near as friendly as the ones who adopted the Hulk, however.
- December 8, 2011 @ 10:00 AM by JK Parkin
If DC’s looking for an Amethyst artist, Renae De Liz is ready and able
Amethyst by Renae De Liz
With Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld apparently making her way to the television screen via Cartoon Network’s upcoming DC Nation cartoon block, it seems like the perfect time for a revival of the comic book. And if DC Comics needs a creator for it, they need look no further than Renae De Liz.
De Liz, artist of IDW’s Servants of the Bones and one of the folks behind the Womanthology project, has been sharing Amethyst artwork for awhile now on her blog. Robot 6 contributor Chris Arrant posted some of it on Project: Rooftop, which led to a discussion in CBR’s forums about it.
And it sounds like De Liz not only has the artistic talents to bring everyone’s favorite Gem-themed princess back to comics, but she also has a story. “Yes! PLEASE let me revamp Amethyst! 
I have a great story in mind!” she tweeted earlier today. You can see some of her sequential pages over on her blog.
- December 8, 2011 @ 10:00 AM by JK Parkin
Talking Comics with Tim | Seth Kushner & Chris Miskiewicz
Trip City
As long as I have been covering the comics industry, it seems like I have always found reasons to support the work of Dean Haspiel and/or his many talented associates. So when Trip City, a Brooklyn-filtered literary arts salon, launched at the start of last month it struck me as a good time to reach out to the founders for an email chat. While Trip City has four key members (Haspiel, Seth Kushner, Chris Miskiewicz and Jeffrey Burandt) the bulk of the discussion involved Kushner and Miskiewicz, with a brief check-in by Haspiel (discussing the start of a new Billy Dogma story, The Last Romantic Antihero [TLRA]). Haspiel also gave me a head’s up on a December 8 TLRA live reading at BookCourt at 7 PM (163 Court St Brooklyn, New York 11201/718-875-3677).
Tim O’Shea: When did TRIP CITY first get conceived–and how did the two of you come to be involved? How early in the planning was it determined that a podcast would be important to the venture?
Chris Miskiewicz: Dean was leaving Deep6 and starting a new studio. Seth Kushner and I were the first people he asked along. Although my film schedule is always in flux and I wasn’t sure how often I’d actually be there, the idea of sitting around others and not being by myself writing appealed to me. So we formed HANG DAI Studios.
If you put three creative people in a room together stuff happens. What happened was TRIP CITY. We spoke about the concept for about five months. Who would be a part of it, what we’d do, how we’d do it. We didn’t want to revamp ACT-I-VATE but we did want comics, along with prose, fiction, a web-series, and a podcast. What we did was create a multimedia site that catered to our individual interests blending them together into a whole.
- December 8, 2011 @ 10:00 AM by Tim O'Shea
‘That’s high class comic pirate rock n’ roll’
Following a request from a scanlator for unlettered pages from Skullkickers to make the comic’s translation into Russian easier, creator Jim Zubkavich has stumbled across re-lettered versions of two covers from the popular Image series.
“This one blows my mind,” he wrote this morning on Twitter, indicating the cover of Issue 8. “They even translated the signs around their neck.” He later added, “That’s high class comic pirate rock n’ roll.”
- December 8, 2011 @ 08:45 AM by Kevin Melrose
Comics A.M. | More on digital pricing; comics’ Colbert bump
Dark Horse Digital
Digital | Retailer Brian Hibbs responds to recent comments around the price of digital comics, commenting on how “channel migration” could effect comic retailers: “The concern of the comics retailer isn’t that there IS digital — fuck, I’m totally all for a mechanism to drive a potentially wide segment of customers to the medium of comics itself. How can that NOT help me? But, rather, that enough customers will ‘change channels’ (of purchase), so as to make segments of work unprofitible to carry. I’ve been pretty straight with you — most periodicals are but marginally profitible; most books are largely unprofitible. That we have stellar, break out, oh-my-god-it’s-like-printing-money successes like WALKING DEAD or BONE or SANDMAN doesn’t mean that this is the way all books can follow. Quite the opposite in fact! So what this means is that even losing a TINY portion of the readership through Channel Migration could potentially have dire effects. Seriously, if I lost just 10% of my customers, I’m done. And what we also know is that when physical stores close, most of that readership for comics UTTERLY VANISHES. The gist of this is that losing 10% of sales to migration could mean that the other 80% of that stores’ sales are COMPLETELY LOST.” [The Savage Critics]
- December 8, 2011 @ 06:55 AM by JK Parkin
Your Wednesday Sequence 35 | John Romita
The Amazing Spiderman #88 (1970), page 6. John Romita.
John Romita came to his decades-long tenure on Marvel superhero comics from a career as a solid-to-outstanding illustrator of romance stories, and when he arrived he was asked to pencil his first costumed-action book over rough layouts by Marvel’s main stylistic voice at the time, Jack Kirby. He learned his lessons from the King well. Decades after Kirby had ceased to be the company’s prime mover, young artists recruited by Marvel were still sent to learn their fundamentals from Romita.
- December 7, 2011 @ 03:25 PM by Matt Seneca
The best of the best of the year lists
Hark! A Vagrant
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:
• Time has released their list of the top 10 fiction books of 2011, which includes two graphic novels — The Death Ray by Daniel Clowes at No. 10 and Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton at No. 7.
• Prolific manga commentator Deb Aoki lists her nominations for the 15 best manga of 2011, divided up by category (shoujo, shonen, etc.). Despite talk of a “manga bust” in recent years, 2011 was a pretty good year for new series, and there are some books here that are definitely worth a look.
• Garrett Martin, Hillary Brown and Sean Edgar at Paste Magazine share their picks for the 20 Best Comic Books of 2011, which they’ve broken into two different lists — new comics and reissues. Their lists include Animal Man, Big Questions, the We3 Deluxe Edition and Celluloid, among many others.
• Drawn’s John Martz shares his favorite books of the year, which include Pope Hats, Paying for It, Mister Wonderful and The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists.
• The Comic Vault present a lengthy discussion among their bullpen of their favorites of the year, breaking it down in various creator and comic book categories.
• Multiversity Comics named Image Comics publisher the year, and has released lists of the best new titles and most overlooked titles of 2012.
• Comics Should Be Good!’s Kelly Thompson shares her third annual “female positive comics holiday gift list,” which includes Shadoweyes in Love, Echo, Batman: The Black Mirror and Strange Tales II, among many others.
- December 7, 2011 @ 02:00 PM by Brigid Alverson and JK Parkin