Princeless/Skullkickers sketches

I’ve been meaning to check out Jeremy Whitley and M. Goodwin’s all-ages comic Princeless ever since reading an online review of it last month, and now it looks like my procrastination has paid off–Princeless: Save Yourself, the collection of the first volume, will include a new story featuring a Princeless/Skullkickers crossover by Skullkickers writer Jim Zubkavich and drawn by Goodwin.

You can see Goodwin’s sketches of the characters, from her Deviant Art site, above. The collection arrives in April.

Conan the Barbarian meets his dumber alter ego in April when Dark Horse presents a four-issue Conan/Groo the Wanderer crossover. While Conan is clearly the brainier of the two mighty warriors, Groo creators Sergio Aragonés and Mark Evanier are scripting the comic, so Groo will have the home-team advantage. Thomas Yeates is handling the art and Tom Luth the colors. Yeates has penciled other Conan comics as well as Dark Horse’s adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Outlaw Prince.

While April 1 would be a logical release date for a book like this, the chances are that no one would believe it, so it’s due out on April 18.

I was surprised when Bil told me he read Zippy in his local Arizona paper and liked it. He didn’t even qualify his opinion with the usual, “Of course, I don’t always get it.” Until then, I hadn’t paid much attention to The Family Circus, but I slowly began to see that you could read more into it than what appeared on the surface.

We mentioned the other day that the late Bil Keane once did a Family Circus crossover with Bill Griffith’s Zippy. Griffith has a nice piece at The Comics Journal that explains how the crossover came about and reinforces what everyone says about Keane being a nice guy but also sharper than his genial comic would lead you to believe; he also posts the Zippy strips that feature Jeffy and the Family Circus panel that features Zippy in all their surreal glory.

What are they putting in the water at the Sanrio Corp? The parent company of Hello Kitty is letting its prize property wander off in some mighty odd directions: At Comic-Con International, the company mentioned a Hello Kitty/Street Fighter crossover, and now it’s Hello Kitty meets Tony Tony Chopper in a Sanrio/One Piece mashup. And that’s not all: Look for Luffy D. Monkey and the rest of the Straw Hat Pirates, who will be entering the world of Hello Kitty for some good clean Kitty fun. Apparently this involves cross-species-dressing, and the pirates will have to figure out how to make do without knees or elbows, because it’s Kitty’s world, and they are only living in it. (Actually, I think it would be much more interesting to see One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda turn Hello Kitty into one of his exaggerated, energetic characters, but that’s just a pipe dream.) Watch for a wave of pirate-infested HK merch in fine import shops everywhere this fall.

Congorilla meets his end in Flashpoint: Grodd of War #1

DC Comics has been criticized for the sheer brutality and wholesale slaughter depicted in its blockbuster crossovers and events, where characters are decapitated, disemboweled and devoured with a frequency that approaches parody. But is it possible that Flashpoint, that concludes next week just as “The New 52″ debuts, has a butcher’s bill that makes the body count of Final Crisis seem like, well, kid’s stuff?

Like a U.N. observer, Funnybook Babylon’s Chris Eckert surveyed the sprawling battlefield — no easy task, considering there’s the core title, 16 miniseries and a handful of one-shots — and emerged with a death tally that’s staggering, as entire nations fell in alternate-timeline global wars involving Aquaman’s Atlanteans, Wonder Woman’s Amazons, Gorilla Grodd’s armies, and other factions.

“Given that everything is going to be returned to The New Normal at the end of it, DC has gone hog wild with killing people off in Flashpoint,” Eckert wrote. “It’s not just ‘shocking’ death scenes for beloved intellectual property: the Flashpoint Earth got seriously depopulated.”

Sure, but just how seriously? He conservatively places the death count at about 833 million, or the rough equivalent of the combined populations of the United States, Indonesia, Brazil and Mexico — on our world, in any case. (Eckert actually breaks down the figures by event, some of which require guesswork while others lead him to throw up his hands.) And that’s just on Earth; Nekron and his Black Lantern forces have consumed about one-fifth of the universe, which brings the tally to … let’s see … carry the 2 … hm. Let’s just leave it at “a lot.”

But Flashpoint isn’t just about faceless mass murder. Oh, no! For those who like their feline superheroines with their heads punched off, or their teen superheroes eaten by bioengineered crocodiles, the crossover has plenty of that, too. Okay, maybe not the latter, but Eckert assembles an impressive list — wait, “impressive” isn’t the right word — of deaths ranging from the by-now-mundane beheading to head-squishing to exploding body parts to suicide.

The under-served death-by-digestion demographic isn’t completely forgotten by Flashpoint‘s writers: Eckert notes that Cheetah is killed, and possibly eaten, by Etrigan the Demon. See, Sobek Nation? You were thrown a bone after all.

Cue the Welcome Back, Kotter theme music: At a live press conference from NYC’s Midtown Comics today, Marvel unveiled “Fear Itself,” a line-wide event beginning in March. Featuring a prologue one-shot by Ed Brubaker and Scot Eaton, tie-ins, spin-off stand-alone miniseries, and an April-launching seven-issue core limited series by Matt Fraction and Stuart Immonen, it’s very much in the vein of past mega-events like “Civil War,” a comparison company personnel made repeatedly at the presser. If anything, it sounds even bigger than “Civil War,” as the two core Marvel franchises who’ve traditionally been kept at arms’ length from the big events of late, the Hulk and the X-Men, look to be playing an integral role right along with the Avengers, Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four and so on.

As such, it’s a marked departure from the post-”Dark Reign”/”Siege” direction of the Marvel Universe, which has seen the era of big line-spanning events give way to franchise/family-specific crossovers and mini-events like “Shadowland,” “Second Coming,” “World War Hulks” and “The Gauntlet,” under the loose “Heroic Age” banner.

The past year, during which smaller events were the norm at the company, has seen a marked decline in sales, and editors like Tom Brevoort have noted that fans appear to be confused and overwhelmed by the proliferation of smaller events, even though the thinking behind them (along with avoiding creator and reader burnout on the bigger crossovers) was that they’d be less demanding of consumers’ energy and cash than the mega-events. Now, correlation does not imply causality, and there are any number of explanations for slack sales besides the relative merits of different event-comic business models, from the overall economy to price hikes on individual titles to readers simply being less interested in the stories on hand.

Keep in mind that DC’s sales have suffered, too, the success of “Blackest Night” and “Brightest Day” and even the franchise-specific “Return of Bruce Wayne” (not to mention future plans for “Flashpoint” and “War of the Green Lanterns”) notwithstanding. But by returning to the mega-event model, Marvel appears to be saying that in their eyes, at least, a change was needed, and the way to move forward was to go back to what worked in the past.

As a pundit, I find this stuff pretty fascinating. As a reader and critic, I don’t give a crap — all that really matters to me is that the comic in front of me be entertaining. Personally, I think “Fear Itself” has a lot of potential in that regard. “Straight-up supervillain comes hard at all of the superheroes, even the gamma and mutant ones” is a long-overdue structure for a Marvel mega-event, which from “Avengers Disassembled” onward have all either pitted heroes against heroes (“Disassembled,” “Civil War,” “World War Hulk”) or heroes against villains who appeared to be heroes to someone, at least (“House of M,” “Secret Invasion,” “Dark Reign,” “Siege”). An old-school good-vs.-evil crossover from character-conscious talents like Fraction and Immonen could be just what the doctor ordered this spring and summer. And judging from Marvel’s move away from the business plan they announced with much fanfare when unveiling “Siege” over a year ago, that’s what they’re banking on.

Nemesis, Superior and Kick Ass

Over on his message boards, writer Mark Millar teases a crossover between three of his creator-owned properties — Kick-Ass, Superior and Nemesis — with some art by Leinil Francis Yu.

“Leinil’s just finished some layouts here, but it’s a nice teaser for everyone,” he said about the art. “The picture really says it all: Nemesis, Superior, Hit-Girl and Kick-Ass. The first Millarworld crossover event.”

No other details were given in terms of what this is or where it might appear, but his Clint Magazine might be a likely venue.

Update: It’s three covers.

The Source brought the news last week of yet another crossover, and it’s a doozie: Turns out the Tiny Titans live right near Riverdale, and at last they are going to meet up with their counterparts, Little Archie and his pals. It looks like the result will be extreme cuteness, with Tiny Titans artist Art Baltazar coming up with a fresh yet familiar look for the Riverdale set. (It’s interesting to speculate on what the crossover would have looked like if it went the other way, with Archie artists drawing the Tiny Titans.) It looks like this is going to be a series, with Tiny Titans/Little Archie #1 making the scene in October.

Meanwhile, at First Comics News, would-be Archie writer Jeff Krell, the creator of the long-running gay comic Jayson, explains why, after almost 30 years of his own comic, he still yearns to write about Riverdale. You can tell that both he and interviewer Mark Haney are longtime Archie fans, and there are a lot of intriguing insights and ideas there.

The Archie folks are heading to SDCC this week, of course, and their schedule is here, on their excellent Archie News blog.

Inspired by Fraction’s facetious tweets about the powers of each of the ten rings wielded by Iron Man villain the Mandarin (including making phone calls that never drop and the ability to TiVo three shows at once), Johns got the ball rolling. Below you’ll find their crossover conversation, tweaked slightly for clarity and featuring guest appearances by editor Steve Wacker and Avengers writer Brian Michael Bendis…

artist unknown (let us know in the comments)

Johns: @mattfraction What can the Mandarin’s rings do? Iron Man/Green Lantern xover…!

Fraction: @geoffjohns0 together, all of ‘em can save the direct market…! #LETSDOTHISTHING

Fraction [later]: wait weren’t me and @geoffjohns0 plotting our GreenLantern/IronMan xover in real tweettime? wasn’t mandarin getting a red ring or something?

Johns: Then Hal loses his ring, but finds one of Tony’s suits. And thinks it’s the coolest thing to ever pilot…

Fraction: Tony rebuilds a shattered power battery with repulsor tech and discovers he can make this weird ring do what he thinks…

Stephen Wacker: @GeoffJohns0 @mattfraction SinestrO.D.O.K.

Johns: And the SinestrO.D.O.K. Corps

Fraction: how big of a red ring would a red ring have to be to fit around fin fang foom’s neck like a collar? #blooddragon!!!AAIIEEEEEEEE

Johns: Fin Fang Foom you have great rage in your heart! Welcome to the Red Lantern Corps!

Fraction: “Pepper Potts, this is Carol Ferris. Carol, meet…”

Johns: “Hal? I was,um, just having a drink with…” “Tony. Tony Stark. I hear this ring belongs to you…but I can’t get it off.”

Johns: In the suit, Hal plays chicken with the Quinjet. The Avengers want to know who stole Tony’s armor.

Brian Michael Bendis: @GeoffJohns0 @mattfraction hey!! No quinjet or avengers unless i get some tie in/ spin off action!!

Johns: @BRIANMBENDIS @mattfraction Avengers/Green Lantern/Iron Man We last left Hal Jordan in Iron Man’s armor battling the Avengers…

Red Lantern Fin Fang Foom and the SinestrO.D.O.K. Corps alone make a real-world version of this imaginary crossover worth the price of admission, don’t you think?

Joining in the “long tradition of comic book crossover events,” according to the press release, Zuda’s The Black Cherry Bombshells and SuperTron strips are crossing over.

“We’ve been dropping hints in both strips for a while. Last year The Bombshells appeared in SuperTron’s dream and recently connections between the King and MOM Bot were discovered,” said Johnny Zito, co-creator of The Black Cherry Bombshells.

SuperTron creator Sheldon Vella will illustrate five episodes of Black Cherry Bombshells beginning April 5. Sheldon’s stint as guest artist will connect the Armageddon events between both series and will catapult both comics into their final chapters.

“We’re really excited to finally team up with Shelly. For the longest time we’ve thought of the Bombshells as the prequel to SuperTron,” said Tony Trov, co-creator of The Black Cherry Bombshells.

This isn’t the firts time Vella has drawn the Bombshells; you can see a promo piece he did for them last year in this post. And check out another piece of art after the jump …

*****

The (Old) New Avengers

Let’s say you’re the writer for Marvel’s new Pugnacious Paste-Pot Pete ongoing. You’d like to do the obvious thing and bring in Unus the Untouchable for a six-issue grudge match. But the X-office has just solidified plans for its “Unus-ted We Stand” crossover, in which Double-U plays a leading role. Who decides who gets to play with the Untouchable?

Two of Marvel’s top editors weighed in on this very question (albeit using far less absurd hypothetical examples) on Monday. First, in his weekly Cup o’ Joe column here at CBR, Editor in Chief Joe Quesada fielded a question from reader Andyb regarding the reported inability of Avengers writers Dan Slott and Kurt Busiek to use the X-Men characters Nightcrawler and the Beast in their respective runs. Though he averred that more often than not the answer to whether a character could cross from his or her usual franchise to another title is “yes,” Quesada explained that the decision typically rests with the writers and editors of that character’s usual “family,” who receive priority in terms of their customary characters’ handling:

For example, back when Brand New Day started, Steve Wacker and the Spider-Man creators, of which Dan was one, asked that there be a moratorium on classic Spidey villains in other Marvel books. The reason for this was because they were appearing in so many titles, that they were losing their impact and the Spider titles were suffering because of that. I agreed with this logic as the plan was to let some time pass and then allow the Spider group to revamp and reintroduce the villain heavy-hitters.

That same day, Executive Editor Tom Brevoort discussed the issue in greater detail. Writing for his Blah Blah Blog on Marvel.com, Brevoort explained that he’d had to help referee a character dispute between several creators earlier in the day—the kind of conflict, he said, that can result precisely because Marvel is usually so accommodating in terms of letting its different franchises use one another’s characters. Because the writers’ first loyalty is generally to the story they’d like to tell, Brevoort says Marvel editorial, whose first loyalty is generally to the long-term health of each franchise, has a mechanism in place to help settle such disputes:

So we’ve got some guidelines about how this all works out. Principle among them is that each character has a home title or a home office, through which their appearances should all be coordinated, so as to minimize conflicts. At a level above that are the Executive Editors, Axel Alonso and myself, keeping a broader eye on the various goings-on in our divisions. And above that is Joe Q as EIC and Dan Buckley as Publisher.

Even still, Brevoort says that characters from one “home” sometimes use another as a sort of timeshare, thus shifting the distribution of responsibility for that character over time. Wolverine’s regular appearances in New Avengers, for example, give Brevoort’s Avengers office more parity with the X-office in terms of determining Logan’s status than it used to have.

Given this decade’s emergence of the Avengers as Marvel’s new flagship franchise—a success based in part on how the team now draws on traditionally non-Avengers-based characters like Spider-Man and Wolverine—and the years-long dominance of massive line-wide event comics as the storytelling mode of choice, the question of who has the final say over such crossover appearances is as pertinent as ever, and seeing how the sausages get made in that regard is pretty fascinating.

Uncanny X-Men #141

Earlier this month ABC News ran a special report called Earth 2100, which imagined a possible “worst case scenario” if the “perfect storm” of population growth, resource depletion and climate change converge, causing catastrophic effects to the planet. The report featured graphic novel-style sequences by Josh Neufeld, Sari Wilson, Joe Infurnari, George O’Connor, Tim Hamilton and Leland Purvis.

It wasn’t the first time that comic book creators have taken a look at a possible future where everything has gone to hell, both scaring and depressing you with its bleak look at what might be in store for us. So in honor of the show, here are six of my favorite apocalyptic doomsday scenarios, as presented by comics past and present …

1. Death by robots — Geekanerd recently did a post on possible robot apocalypse scenarios and how to avoid them, using Battlestar Galactica, Terminator and The Matrix as examples. Another story that falls into that category is the classic Uncanny X-Men story “Days of Future Past.” First introduced in issues #141 and 142, the storyline focused on a possible future where mutants have been hunted almost to extinction by the Sentinels, with the survivors being kept in internment camps. Giant robots = bad, bad things.

I remember reading these issues as a kid and being genuinely freaked out about the fate of the X-Men. It was bad enough finding out that Cyclops, Nightcrawler and many of the others were already dead, but to see Storm, Colossus and Wolverine meet their fates … I took it as canon, actually, that one day the X-Men comic would end with a similar scene, once it caught up to the future those issues portrayed. Of course, I thought Jean Grey was really dead, too, so …

Walking Dead

2. Death by zombies — Imagine waking up in the hospital after being a coma for a few months to find that not only have you been abandoned by pretty much everybody, but also that your world has been overrun by zombies. We’ve seen how similar scenarios play out on the silver screen, but Robert Kirkman’s taken us beyond that in The Walking Dead, past the feeling of pure fear and false hope, and straight into the realm of pure survival. It’s one thing to watch a group hole up in the mall for a couple of hours and fight off the undead; it’s another to watch them slowly disintegrate as human beings over the course of several years.

Although we still don’t know what caused the zombie apocalypse, Kirkman has introduced a new character, Eugene Porter, the mullet-headed doctor who could bring salvation. Knowing how the group’s luck runs, though, odds are that Porter gets eaten right before we find out how to end the nightmare …

Scout

3. Death by mystical forces — Back in the late 1980s, Eclipse published the adventures of Emanuel Santana in an America that had seen better days. Once a world superpower, sanctions against the country because of past ecological excesses had left it as a third-world country. Global warming had left most of the United States a desert, the government was run by corporations and the economy was pretty much non-existent.

Tim Truman’s Scout featured a pretty grim look at the future of the country, but it turns out it wasn’t completely our own fault. Four monsters from Apache legend had taken human form and basically ran the country into the ground, and it was up to Santana to fix things by, naturally, killing the monsters. And the human forms they took were powerful folks within the government, so of course this put our hero at odds not only with his former comrades in the armed forces, but also with himself … was the country taken over by these monsters, or was he just crazy? Either way, Truman did a great job mixing the geo-political with the mystical to create a compelling story.

If you’re curious to check out Scout, some of Tim Truman’s finest work, Dynamite recently collected them into two volumes.

Therefore Repent!

5. Death by scripture? — A couple of years back, Jim Munroe and Salgood Sam did a graphic novel called Therefore Repent!, a post-Rapture graphic novel about what happens to those left behind after all the Christians in the world take the express train to Heaven. Through the eyes of Mummy and Raven, the two main characters, we’re introduced to a world where magic is making a comeback, dogs talk, Splitters hope for a second rapture and angels wield machine guns as they start to take out the sinners.

Of course, the real story here is that Mummy and Raven are breaking up — which, let’s face it, can be a sort of doomsday of its own. You can check out the book for free on Jim Munroe’s site.

Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth

6. Death by mutated animals with opposable thumbs — Earth A.D., or “After Disaster,” is a future Earth inhabited by intelligent, mutated animals and what’s left of the Statue of Liberty — and a lone human. Nope, it isn’t Planet of the Apes, even if it does share some similarities. It’s, of course, Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth, which was created by Jack Kirby in the 1970s.

So what happened to Kamandi’s world? Well, that was never quite explained. Something involving radiation, which resulted in some animals gaining human-like intelligence and movement. Whatever the disaster was really doesn’t matter … what does matter is that the book, no matter how weird it got, really worked.

Our friends at Comic Should Be Good had “>a great post about Kamandi last year. Alex Cox described it as “something of a masterpiece, and quite possibly the best comic of the Seventies. Against all odds, KAMANDI worked in a way that few comics do. It holds up, conceptually, even today. Despite major flaws, it remains infectious and joyous and a total kick in the ass.”

Age of Apocalypse

4. Death by Apocalypse — So what happens when you travel back in time, intent on killing a powerful evil mutant, but end up killing your own father instead? Well, if you’re Legion, and your dad is Professor X, you create an alternate history where Apocalypse rules North America and freedom fighters led by Magneto make trouble for him while trying to restore the old timeline. Throw in some genocide, the threat of nuclear war and a new version of the Four Horsemen, and you’ve got yourself an armageddon.

Luckily this one didn’t last very long … one crossover event and a few surviving strays later, and this world no longer existed except in the pages of Exiles.

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So what are some of your favorite end-of-the-world stories?

Iron Lantern

A couple of weeks ago I linked to two posts by Todd Klein where the award-winning letterer took a look back at the logos for the Amalgam line of comics. So it only seems right to link to his follow-up posts, which examine the logos for the second round of the DC/Marvel mash-up books; here’s the first one, which talks about Bat-Thing and (heh) Generation Hex, and here’s the second one, with info on Spider-Boy Team-Up and Iron Lantern.

Black Lanterns

In preparation for the big “Blackest Night” event that’s spinning out of Green Lantern, DC’s Source blog has been posting information on all the Corps. of the rainbow, ending with the above image of the Black Lanterns.

Whose hands do you see?