Chris Arrant
Mark Sable & Salgood Sam vamp it up in ‘Dracula: Son of the Dragon’
For a dead guy, Dracula sure gets around a lot.
All jokes aside (for now), a comics gem recently popped up on Kickstarter with the official launch of writer Mark Sable and artist Salgood Sam‘s long-hinted-at graphic novel Dracula: Son of the Dragon. Set in the 15th century, it’s one part historical and one part horror, and while it might be shelved next to Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, this story isn’t a pop culture mash-up. It’s s an origin story that ties together the historical Vlad the Impaler with the fictional Dracula, beginning with Vlad’s childhood and how he was inducted into the dark arts.
In progress for more than a year now, Sable and Sam are using Kickstarter to raise funds to finance the production of Dracula: Son of the Dragon ‘s 60-page first volume, both in a standard edition and a series of limited edition versions. In addition to various editions offered to people who pledge for the fundraising campaign, the duo are offering original artwork, appearances in the book, and even a script review by Sable himself.
Artist organizing ‘Simpsons’ and ‘Akira’ mash-up
While something can be great on its own, the idea of mixing two things can lead to interesting combinations. Peanut butter and jelly, rock and roll, the Beatles and Jay-Z … and soon, The Simpsons and Akira. Cartoonist James Harvey is organizing a full-scale re-creation of Katsuhiro Otomo’s popular manga series with its characters replaced with members of The Simpsons.
“Milhouse is Kaneda. Lisa is Kei. Bart is Tetsuo,” Harvey posted on his blog. “Let’s do it.”
Movie artist tells his own cinematic story in ‘Moth City’
After working for years at WETA Digital on movies like Avatar, District 9 and Tintin, artist Tim Gibson had a story of his own he wanted to tell — and he chose comics to do it.
Working on the project in his spare time (with a little funding assistance from the New Zealand government), last year Gibson debuted the innovative online comic series Moth City. Set in a fictional island off the coast of China that’s reminiscent of a 1950s-era Cuba, Moth City is a murder mystery wrapped in noir by way of South Asian comic stylings. It’s packed with shrewd tycoons, communists and a love story, laid beneath a veneer of soot.
Erik Larsen considers computer lettering for ‘Savage Dragon’
Cover to Savage Dragon #184 with hand-lettering.
When you go to your local store (or digital provider) you’ll find that nearly all of the comics are lettered using a computer. That’s obvious, right? But there are a relative few creators who still prefer, and advocate, hand-lettering to digital methods, and one of those is Image Comics co-founder and Savage Dragon creator Erik Larsen.
With very few exceptions, every issue of his Savage Dragon series for the past 20 years has been hand-lettered by Chris Eliopoulos, Tom Orzechowski or Larsen himself. But recently on Twitter, Larsen began talking about a switch to digital lettering — and for those attuned to the craft, that’s something major. So we asked him for more information.
“In this case it was simply timing,” Larsen told ROBOT 6. “Tom Orzechowski was booked.”
While that might seem trivial, the central point Larsen had is that the time involved — inked pages are shipped to the letterer and then shipped back once lettering is complete — was adding a significant wrinkle to Savage Dragon‘s production schedule. With digital inking, you can send the files to the letterer in a matter of minutes (depending on your scanner and Internet bandwidth), with the production time for a letterer drastically reduced by the use of a computer.
Six by 6 | Six characters M.I.A. in Marvel NOW!
Marvel’s turning over a new leaf, so to speak, as it enters the Marvel NOW! era. But in that amid the flurry of new titles, new line-ups and new creators, we’re finding some notable absences — notable to us at least. While some missed heroes like Luke Cage, Iron Fist and Mockingbird have popped up in cameos here and there, there are still a significant number of popular players waiting to be brought onto the field. In this installment of “Six by 6,” we suss out six such characters and zero in on their last whereabouts, and where some of them might show up next.
Conversing on Comics with Rian Hughes
Comics are more than just drawing pretty pictures and great muscled physiques. They’re about telling a story, through sequences of images but also through the image itself. And British artist Rian Hughes has spent years figuring out how to tell a story, in sequential art as well as in standalone images, package designs and even fonts.
After bursting onto the comics scene as an artist in Escape and 2000AD, Hughes expanded his skills to become a designer and illustrator for comics in England, Europe and the United States. He went on to design a number of logos and mastheads for DC Comics, Marvel and Valiant, and his work on Wildcats 3.0 and Invincible Iron Man proved to be high-water marks for comic book covers. Image and Knockabout Books recently began reprinting some of Hughes’ early comics work, and this summer will see the release of an artbook chronicling his portraits taken from London’s underworld burlesque scene.
For this week’s “Conversing on Comics,” I spoke with Hughes about his forthcoming art book and other upcoming projects, and received a look at his past work, including a never-before-seen set of designs he created for Invincible Iron Man.
Quote of the Day | ‘Let them do what they do best’
“The trick to getting the best work from your talent is to let them do what they do best, give them room to breathe and to make sure you encourage their ideas, not squash them.”
– Jimmy Palmiotti, on his Facebook page, offering advice to publishers in dealing with creators. In addition to writing such titles as All-Star Western, Batwing and The Human Bomb for DC, he also co-founded and edited the Marvel Knights line with Joe Quesada.
Uncovering Marvel’s lost ’80s cartoon pitches
Marvel has long had aspirations for Hollywood. Decades before The Avengers was a mega-blockbuster, years before George Lucas produced the ill-fated Howard the Duck movie, Stan Lee and his superiors knew the heroes at the House of Ideas could sell more than just comic books.
In the early ’80s, Marvel’s developed pitches for animated shows based on a number of its titles, and a number of new creations. And it’s no wonder, given Marvel’s past with the Fantastic Four show and the success DC Comics had with cartoons on the small screen. But the properties they prepped were, well, something else.
Steven Sanders creates world from ground up in ‘Symbiosis’
After wowing us with Five Fists of Science, shocking us with Our Love Is Real and winning over the mainstream with Wolverine & The X-Men and S.W.O.R.D., Kansas City comics creator Steven Sanders is going back to square one with a simple idea: Create a whole new world.
Sanders is doing so with his elaborate mixed-media book Symbiosis, now the subject of a Kickstarter campaign. He describes Symbiosis as “exploring a world where all technology is powered by biological engines that are deeply linked to humans,” told through a series of texts and illustrations.
Frank Cho chomping at the bit to do more creator-owned work
Although he’s now wowing readers with his work on Marvel’s Savage Wolverine, Frank Cho can’t help but hint at a return to creator-owned projects. Between process posts on his blog, Cho has teased not one but three creator-owned books he has in the works. And that’s not counting the ones he’s discussed before.
“2013 is shaping up to be one of my most creative and productive year,” Cho writes. “I have several creator-owned projects in various stages of completion.” This would be a return for Cho, who made his name doing creator-owned work like Liberty Meadows and made some selective returns with Zombie King and 50-Girls-50, looks to be thinking about a return while working on pages for Marvel.
Let’s see if we can count them off for you:
Conversing on Comics with Dan Goldman
Location, location, location. It’s said those are the three important things when it comes to real estate, and cartoonist Dan Goldman knows that more than just about anyone.
Born in Detroit, raised in Miami and coming of age in New York City, Goldman spent the past few years living in São Paulo, Brazil, before returning late last year to New York. A longtime proponent of digital comics, he was among the founders of Act-I-Vate, and launched his current comic series Red Light Properties in 2010 on the website of book publisher Tor. But recently Goldman decided to hitch his boxcar to a different train when he jumped to upstart digital publisher Monkeybrain Comics to continue his 300-plus page run on that title.
Red Light Properties is all about location (location, location), but in a supernatural sense, as it follows a Miami real estate agency whose specialty is to survey, repair and re-sell distressed homes. But these aren’t your normal condos; they’re possessed by the ghosts of dead former tenants. Jude Tobin, the man behind RLP, is a clairvoyant whose powers only come to life when he’s “under the influence,” so to speak, and his associated family and busniess partner have to deal with his problems while also handling their own. It’s as if William S. Burroughs wrote Ghost Whisperer, but you know, with even more hallucenigenics.
I reached out to Goldman to find out more about this new era for Red Light Properties, but also to get his perspective on being an American cartoonist living with Brazil, and the story that took him there and brought him back.
Six by 6 | Six great superhero comics outside of Marvel and DC
There’s more to superheroes than those residing at Marvel and DC Comics. Sure, they might dominate the market, but that doesn’t mean they’re by default the best.
Outside the realms of the Big Two, superheroes are thriving on the more independently minded scene. From a mixture of throwback superheroics to off-beat adventures, and even some superheroes who are willing to go where DC and Marvel wouldn’t let their own properties, there’s a cornucopia out there for readers. And now, we’re spotlighting six standouts in that superhero mix in this week’s “Six by 6.”
Damian Wayne, and Grant Morrison’s tendency to kill his darlings
In the swelling tide preceding Batman Incorporated #8, the promised death of the current Robin and the impending finale of Grant Morrison’s six-year opus, something jumped out at me about the writer’s previous work for hire: He has a propensity to kill the characters he introduces into the universes of Marvel and DC Comics before he leaves.
Think back to his first major mainstream superhero book, JLA. In it, Morrison and Howard Porter revived the team in a back-to-basics approach featuring the seven most popular and iconic members. But during that time Morrison also created (with Mark Millar and N. Steven Harris) the Mesoamerican hero Aztek. Launched in his own series — whose first issue teased his impending death — Aztek later joined Morrison’s JLA and was killed in JLA #41, the writer’s final issue.
DC Comics gets the F out of ‘WTF Certified’
Like the early-morning regrets after an all-night bender, DC Comics reportedly has decided to pull back from plans for its “WTF Certified” cover promotion — at least in terms of the controversial title.
Newsarama reports that Co-Publisher Dan DiDio told attendees at last week’s ComicsPRO annual meeting the “WTF Certified” logo won’t appear on any of the comics released in April, “because we don’t need it.” According to an unnamed retailer, DiDio said there’s already awareness of the event among store owners and readers.
When contacted this morning by ROBOT 6, DC declined comment.
The title refers to the linewide event featuring gatefold covers designed to reveal scenes that “leave reader in a state of shock.” “This was a way to accentuate that threat or shocking moments in our heroes’ lives,” Editor-in-Chief Bob Harras said in a Jan. 14 interview with Comic Book Resources. “What we’re doing with the covers is thematically linked to that. They will be page-fold covers; the covers will tell you a story. There will be an image that will crack the page fold, and as you open up the cover, you’ll say, ‘Oh, wow!’”
Joe Keatinge on Euro comics, collaboration and ending ‘Glory’
Have you ever worked with someone who loves what they do so much that it’s infectious? That’s a solid description of Joe Keatinge, who writes Marvel’s Morbius: The Living Vampire, along with Glory and Hell Yeah at Image. He’s also someone with a restless love for comics in all of its forms.
Keatinge has been involved in the business for going on nine years, breaking in as a colorist before segueing to a staff position at Image. which took him from managing the publisher’s inventory to marketing its books. After overseeing the successful PopGun anthology, he shifted into writing comics himself with the double-barreled successes of Hell Yeah and Glory. It’s his work on the latter series that brought him to the attention of Marvel and DC, who enlisted him for Morbius and issues of DC Universe Presents. Through it all, Keatinge has been an outspoken advocate for the medium.
In our interview, Keatinge talks about his place in the industry as well as his far-ranging interests, delving into his creator-owned work (including collaborations with Frank Cho and James Harvey) and breaking down the perceived walls between different areas of comics.