Books
Mike Mignola draws covers for brother’s ‘Pinocchio’ books
Ever heard of digital publisher Dog Boy Productions? Neither had I until I saw these earlier: Mike Mignola’s cover designs for a new edition of Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio, and Scott Mignola’s Pinocchio’s Forgotten Land.
Digging about, it seems that Dog Boy was set up by Scott Mignola as “a small boutique publisher of new, rare, and out-of-print material in digital form.” Sounds promising, and having one of the greatest illustrators of a generation in the family can’t hurt, either. The pencils for the cover of the Collodi book can also be seen below.
Neil Gaiman introduces his children’s book ‘Fortunately, the Milk’
Beyond a vague description of it as “a very silly children’s book,” we’ve been given scant details about Fortunately, the Milk, the upcoming collaboration between Neil Gaiman and Skottie Young (for the U.S. edition) and Chris Riddell (for the U.K. version). But at long last, the author has broken his silence in a video introduction from SFX.
“It’s the silliest, strangest, most ridiculous book I’ve ever written. And I’m damned proud of it,” Gaiman says. “It’s called Fortunately, the Milk. It’s the story of a father who goes out to bring back milk for his children and, at least according to him, on the way is kidnapped by aliens, kidnapped again by pirates, rescued by a stegosaurus in a hot-air balloon. He has a nearly fatal encounter with a volcano god, there’s a ridiculous amount of time travel. There are ponies. There are vampires, or possibly one-pires, there are interstellar dinosaur police, and there’s a happy ending. And fortunately for everybody, there’s milk. Can a container of milk save the universe?”
Officially announced in July as part of the author’s five-book deal with HarperCollins Children’s Books, Fortunately, the Milk will be released Sept. 17 in the United States, and in October (from Bloomsbury) in the United Kingdom. Watch the video below, and check out Skottie Young’s cover for the U.S. edition.
Poet Raymond McDaniel devotes collection to Legion of Super-Heroes
On the science fiction blog io9, Rachel Ariel Porte provides us with a great introduction to Raymond McDaniel‘s Legion Of Super-Heroes-themed poetry collection Special Powers And Abilities, along with a fascinating interview with the poet.
This was a book whose existence I was entirely in ignorance of until now, but has gone straight to the top of my Amazon wish list. McDaniel’s dropped-at-the-deep end introduction to Legion lore sounds remarkably similar to my own, when I bought LSH #300 on a whim as a youth. The interview reveals McDaniel as a writer with an amazingly thoughtful take on these characters, and a man throwing around as many mad ideas and as much maddening language as Grant Morrison. (“Consider us super-induced, added to that which is, enumerated perhaps to the point of being supererogative if never quite superfluous, each one of us supernumerary, all of us superhetrodyne, mixed, reactive, multiple, magical”).
The guy should be offered the job of writing a Legion comic for DC ASAP!
Harry Potter books to feature new covers by Kazu Kibuishi
That sound you hear is the collective gasp of millions of J.K. Rowling fans as Scholastic unveiled the new cover for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by none other than Kazu Kibuishi, the acclaimed creator of Copper, Daisy Kutter and Amulet.
The cover is the first of seven illustrated by Kibuishi for the U.S. trade paperbacks commemorating the 15th anniversary of the U.S. debut of Rowling’s beloved fantasy series. According to Scholastic, each of the covers will depict a memorable moment from the respective book. The entire collection will be released in September as a boxed set. The American softcover editions have sported Mary GrandPré’s covers since 1998.
Balloonless | Matt Baker: The Art of Glamour
It’s really a shame that Golden Age artist Matt Baker was so relatively mysterious among his peers, as the historical importance of his influential work and his being one of the first and few black men working in comics at the time make him a figure a lot of people should want to know more about.
That there are so many question marks regarding Baker’s personal and professional life beyond his drawing table isn’t exactly a tragic thing, however. As editor Jim Amash notes during an interview included in his Matt Baker: The Art of Glamour, it meant Baker could be appreciated for his work more than any biographical details, as interesting and colorful as some of those may be .
Fred Robinson, Baker’s half-brother, puts it this way in the interview: “The reason that Matt got so much work wasn’t because he was black or white; he got it because he was good. It’s as simple as that. If you’re good, and you have what people want, they’re going to use you. You get hired. Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier mainly because he was good; he could play ball better than anyone else. He just happened to be black.”
Baker died in 1959 at just 38 years old, the victim of a lifelong heart problem, and therefore didn’t live as long as so many of his peers (some of whom, like the 90-year-old Stan Lee, are still working today), and didn’t even last long enough for the rise of a fan culture around comics, and the nostalgia-driven efforts to collect and chronicle the medium’s beginnings.