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What Are You Reading?

Showcase: DC Comics Presents

It's old home week at What Are You Reading today, as our special guest is none other than Graeme McMillan, who,  before he became a writer and editor for the sci-fi blog io9, used to pal around with us back when we were at that other blog that shall not be named for fear of ... something, I dunno.

Anyway, to see what Graeme and everyone else is reading this week just click on the link below ...

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Comics, Covered | The best covers of the week

Spider-Man 1602 #2

I've written a good deal at Robot 6 and elsewhere about comic-book cover art and design, but, unfortunately (for me at least), not so much in recent months. I hope "Comics, Covered" will remedy that, as each Saturday I select the six best covers -- the most striking, the most successfully executed, the most intriguing -- to grace the shelves that week.

This week's list is filled with three comics from Marvel, one from Image, one from DC's Wildstorm imprint and one that's technically not a comic at all.

To find out what made the cut, read on.

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Comics A.M. | The comics Internet in two minutes

I believe we've reached the pre-Thanksgiving industry slowdown.

Green Arrow: Year One

Internet | A website called the Home of the Green Arrow, which supports the far-right British National Party in its "fight to secure a future for the indigenous peoples of these islands in the North Atlantic which have been our homeland for millennia," has co-opted Jock's art from the DC Comics miniseries Green Arrow: Year One for its banner. "This is leaving a horrible taste in my mouth," the artist wrote this morning on Twitter. He has contacted DC's legal department. [Jock's Twitter feed]

Art | Frank Frazetta's original cover painting for the 1967 Lancer paperback edition of Conan the Conqueror sold at auction last week for a reported $1 million. That's nearly four times the previous record price for the artist's work -- $251,000 -- paid in 2008 for the cover to Edgar Rice Burroughs' Escape on Venus. [Spectrum Fantastic Art, via Sci Fi Wire]

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Comics A.M. | The comics Internet in two minutes

Blue Bloods: Masquerade

Publishing | Italian movie producer Domenico Procacci has purchased Bologna-based graphic novel publisher Coconino Press, adding it to his Fandango filmmaking and book-publishing company. In addition to its own titles, Coconino publishes the Italian editions of works by such artists as Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, and Garon Tsuchiya and Nobuaki Minegishi. [Variety]

Publishing | Young-adult novelist Melissa de la Cruz has signed new contracts with Hyperion, the Disney Book Group imprint that publishes her bestselling Blue Bloods series. The deal calls for three companion books to the teen-vampire drama, including Blue Bloods: The Graphic Novel. [Variety]

The Last Unicorn

Publishing | IDW Publishing will adapt Peter Beagle's bestselling 1968 fantasy novel The Last Unicorn as a six-issue miniseries. The comic, by writer Peter B. Gillis, artist Renae De Liz and colorist Ray Dillon, will debut in April. [ICv2.com]

Publishing | Simon Jones offers commentary about declining manga sales in Japan: "Some blame was again placed at the industry’s increasing focus on niche genres (just as comics is a spandex ghetto, manga is facing a crisis of the moe slum), but I think this is being overstated as a cause, when it’s really a symptom that is self-feeding.  Manga sales have gone down … it could be lower birth rates, or competition from other media, or internet piracy (come on guys, we don’t need to couch this in flowery language), or any combination of those.  But it all comes down to fewer companies being able to produce mainstream products, because a growing segment of mainstream audiences are no longer willing to pay for them despite increasing demand." [Icarus Publishing]

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What Are You Reading?

From Hell

Hey there, hi there, ho there, it's time once again for What Are You Reading. Our guest this week is blogger and Top Shelf pr guru Leigh Walton. Want to know what Leigh is reading this week? Of course you do! Click on the link to find out, then let us know what you're reading in the comments section.

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Everyone's A Critic: A round-up of comic book reviews and thinkpieces

Footnotes in Gaza

• Tom Spurgeon once again beats everyone to the punch with a review of Joe Sacco's new book, Footnotes in Gaza: The first good news to report ... is that the cartoonist is in top form throughout." He also has good things to say about Prison Pit.

• Christopher Allen offers 60 ways of looking at Watchmen.

• Critics critique critics -- Robert Boyd reviews Bart Beaty's Unpopular Culture: "This is a thought-provoking book, and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in comics-as-art."

• David Welsh gets schooled in college manga.

• Rob Clough calls MK Reed's new book, Cross Country "the most complex, ambitious and visually interesting of her comics."

• Perhaps if I link to Sean Collins' review of Refresh, Refresh, he'll forgive me for accidentally (I swear) stealing the title of his review feature.

• Nina Stone enjoyed the first issue of Cinderella: From Fabletown With Love: "All the pieces of the story just started to fit together perfectly."

• Grant Goggans declares The Art of Osamu Tezuka "very highly recommended."

• Finally, Kristy Valenti looks at a 1999 graphic novel drawn by Mia Wolff and written by acclaimed sci-fi author Samuel Delany.

J.M. DeMatteis on the end of Abadazad, new novel series

Abadazad

It's been five years since Disney bought up the assets of CrossGen, the defunct comics publisher behind such titles as Ruse, Sojourn and Abadazad. It was that last property, by J.M. DeMatteis and Mike Ploog, that Disney seemed the most interested in, and a series of children's books published by Disney's Hyperion soon followed. So whatever happened to Abadazad?

DeMatteis recently posted two different posts on his blog that answer that question; first, he details the book's rise from an idea to being a big reason why Disney wanted the CrossGen properties, and in a second post he explain that that personnel changes at Hyperion and disappointing sales led to the end of the road for Abadazad. But the cancellation was the springboard for another idea:

That concept smacked me across the face, grabbed me by the throat and dragged me out of my bed and into my office, where I found myself typing furiously, outlining the tale of a twelve year old girl—Mehera Crosby—whose life is upended when her favorite book series is canceled; upended even more when she discovers that the characters she so loves are alive, trapped in a strange and deadly limbo—and it’s up to her to rescue them. I called the story Mundus Imaginalis and writing that outline totally dissolved my foul mood.

The title was shortened to Imaginalis, and the first one in the planned series is due next June; go check out both his posts for a lot more detail; it's interesting reading. So will young Mehera end up saving Kate and Matt Jameson? I guess we'll find out then.

Ellis releases Shivering Sands as a print-on-demand book

Shivering Sands

Writer Warren Ellis has released a new book called Shivering Sands -- "a book containing a selection of essays, articles, columns, rambles and jabberings that were written in various places on the internet over the last seven years or so" -- as a print-on-demand book through Lulu.com.

"I’ve been talking about POD for months, and I thought it was time to try it out," he wrote on his blog. "This work has not been collected in one place before, and I think pretty much none of it has ever been on paper." You can check out a preview over on the Lulu.com site.

Comics A.M. | The comics Internet in two minutes

The Book of Genesis Illustrated

Sales charts | R. Crumb's The Book of Genesis Illustrated climbs seven spots to No. 2 in its second month on BookScan's list of top-selling adult graphic novels in bookstores. It's bested, as most are, by the latest volume of Masashi Kishimoto's Naruto. But it's another story on USA Today's bestseller chart, where Crumb's book drops 49 places in its second week to No. 129. [ICv2.com, USA Today]

Passings | Tom Spurgeon, NPR's Mark Memmott and Ina Jaffe, and Michael Cieply of The New York Times have obituaries for Comic-Con co-founder Shel Dorf, who passed away on Nov. 3 at the age of 76.

Libraries | The Yoshihiro Yonezawa Memorial Library of Manga and Subculture opened over the weekend at Meiji University's Surugadai campus in Tokyo. Users can become one-day members of the library, where they can have access to about half of the 140,000 manga for about $1.10 per copy. The books can't be removed from the library. [The Japan Times]

Internet | Tom Spurgeon points out that the review blog Guttergeek will move to the expanded TCJ.com, joining a stable of hosted blogs that will include The Hooded Utilitarian. [Guttergeek]

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Douglas Rushkoff writes X, a graphic novel for new video-game franchise

From "X"

Author, media theorist and sometimes-comics writer Douglas Rushkoff (Testament, Life, Inc.) has penned a graphic novel to promote an as-yet-unnamed video-game franchise from Smoking Gun Interactive.

Illustrated by Cheoljoo Lee and Younger Yang, the comic -- it's simply called X -- is being previewed on this marketing site in installments that roll out over the next four weeks. The full graphic novel will be released next year. More stories are set to follow.

As you might expect from the mysterious title, the story of X involves secrets -- specifically, "the secret history of mankind."

So says the press release: "As a small, scattered group of people stumble onto the truth, they find that they are too late: every great power on earth has already aligned itself against humanity. The war is all but over. Their struggle to discover the truth will lead them into a massive conspiracy that predates humanity itself -- from the world's most ancient sites to the global centers of power."

Comics A.M. | The comics Internet in two minutes

Shel Dorf with Warren Beatty in 1990

Passings | Sheldon "Shel" Dorf, who in 1970 co-founded the event that grew into Comic-Con International, passed away Nov. 3 in San Diego's Sharp Memorial Hospital from diabetes-related complications. He was 76.

A collector of comics and Dick Tracy memorabilia, Dorf had run Triple Fan Fest in his native Detroit. After he moved to San Diego in early 1970, he met Ken Krueger of Alert Books in Ocean Beach and the two, together with a group of teen-aged fans, organized first Golden State Comic Con, held Aug. 1-3, 1970, at the U.S. Grant Hotel. Dorf served as president, or chairman, of the convention until the mid-1980s, stepping away just as the annual event was becoming a national stage for pop culture.

Dorf reportedly struggled with diabetes for years, gradually losing mobility and vision. He entered Sharp Memorial Hospital in 2008 and never left. His brother Michael was with him when he died.

Mark Evanier, of course, has a nice tribute to Dorf peppered with memories dating back to before that first convention. There's also an extensive Shel Dorf Tribute website, and a memorial banner topping the Comic-Con International homepage. The photo above, of Dorf with Warren Beatty on the set of the 1990 Dick Tracy movie, is borrowed from Alan Light's Flickr stream. [The San Diego Union-Tribune]

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What Are You Reading?

Blood's A Rover

Welcome to What Are You Reading. I hope everyone had a nice Halloween and spent at least part of it reading comics.

Our guest this week is Chip Mosher, Marketing Director at Boom! Studios, publisher of such fine books as Irredeemable and The Muppet Show. As the image above hints, Chip's been reading some rather interesting (and gritty) material, so click on the link below to discover what he and the rest of Robot 6 have been reading recently. Oh, and don't forget to let us know what you have been reading in the comments section.

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Comics A.M. | The comics Internet in two minutes

The Pirate Bay

Legal | A new study claim the shutdown two months ago of file-trading site The Pirate Bay by Swedish authorities "significantly, if temporarily, disrupted" the illegal trafficking of digital files worldwide. The emphasis is on temporarily. The white paper, released by anti-piracy company DtecNet, found the closing forced traffic to flood other BitTorrent trackers, "causing temporary secondary outages" for several days.

The study finds that BitTorrent traffic is soon expected to return to levels seen before the shutdown, with relatively new website OpenBitTorrent emerging as the successor to The Pirate Bay. [The Live Feed]

Sales charts | R. Crumb's much-publicized adaptation of The Book of Genesis debuts at No. 8 on USA Today's bestseller list. Meanwhile, the 46th volume of Masashi Kishimoto's popular shonen series Naruto inches up three spaces to No. 136. [USA Today]

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Straight for the art | Rob Steen's monster sketches

Whispering Grass by Rob Steen

Artist Rob Steen, who draws the Flanimals series of books written by Ricky Gervais, as well as various comics like Elephantman and Afterlife, has a sketch blog where he posts all sorts of creepy and kooky creatures. Go check it out.

Via

When I wake up in the morning and the 'larm lets out a warning ...

From "Saved by the Spell," by Lucy Knisley

The always-entertaining Lucy Knisley imagines what J.K. Rowling might've come up with had she been inspired to create Harry Potter some two decades earlier. The result? A Saved by the Bell-style TV series called Hogwarts High, starring John Cusack, Mark Paul Gosselaar and Brooke Shields, and featuring David Bowie as He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.