from Matthew Petz

It’s Christmas Eve, and we’re winding down here at Robot 6 to go spend time with family and friends. Before heading off to celebrate, though, you’ll find a collection of holiday-themed links after the jump, along with this year’s collection of holiday cards we received.

On behalf of all of Robot 6, have a great holiday and stay safe. We’ll see you next week.

(Above: a Christmas showdown by Matthew Petz)

*****

Stories | Cullen Bunn offers a four-part Sixth Gun Christmas tale on his website.

Stories | J.M. DeMatteis shares a Christmas tale, “The Truth about Santa Claus.”

Webcomics | Mike Maihack presents one final Batgirl/Supergirl comic, this one with a holiday theme.

Webcomics | Jon Adams has a Santa comic only he could offer.

Webcomics | Mike Hawthorne’s Raising Crazy has several holiday-themed comics up right now.

Classics remixed | Medium Large offers some alternate takes on A Christmas Carol.

Classics remixed | John Martz and Graham Roumieu update various Christmas specials for the modern era.

Nightmare style | Dan Hipp pits Tintin against Jack Skellington.

Faux comics | Chris Sims and Kerry Callen give us a glimpse at a comic that never was–The Santa Squad.

Holiday art | Anthony Vukojevich redraws the Glory and Friends Christmas Special cover from back in the day.

Holiday art | Brendan Tobin corners Christmas Spider-Man.

Good cause | Ross Campbell shares a Shadoweyes drawing he did for a multi-artist snowball fight for Comic Creators For Freedom.

Podcasts | Timothy Callahan and Chad Nevett’s Splash Page returns for a special holiday episode.

Music | Fred has the yearly Venture Bros. holiday single available for download.

Holiday cards:

from DC Comics

from James Turner

from Dark Horse Comics

from Tyler James

from Archaia (outside)

from Archaia (inside)

from Ilias Kyriaszis

from Dean Haspiel

from Devastator

from Arcana

from Kevin Colden

from Broken Frontier

from Neil Kleid

You can find more cards out on the web, from Atomic Robo, the Perhapanauts team, Jeff Lemire and a whole bunch of Marvel-themed cards from Agent M.

Here’s a video holiday greeting from Akira the Don:

Have a great holiday!

Titled Mr Hipp Strikes!, this limited edition art book comes signed and numbered to the lucky 400 people who get the edition. It features Hipp’s favorite color illustrations from his blog, as well as a sneak peek at his next graphic novel, Stray Days.

Hipp came into comics on the strength of his art in the Image series The Amazing Joy Buzzards, and followed that up with a two volume series called Gyakushu! through TOKYOPOP’s beleaguered original manga effort. He had a short stint on DC/Wildstorm’s Gen13 series, but has spent the past few years off the direct market’s radar but in the larger public’s with several volumes of Ben10 graphic novels written by Peter David.

Hipp is taking pre-orders for Mr. Hipp Strikes! on his blog, and I’ve just submitted a requisitions request to the bookkeeping department at Robot 6 to get one for our library.

The indispensable Dan Hipp has created a series of fake Tintin covers mashing the classic character together with movies like Alien, Star Wars, and Tron. And this isn’t even the coolest thing on his blog.

Dan Hipp’s Gyakushu was originally published by Tokyopop and then moved online for a while (it seems to be gone now) after Tokyopop discontinued their global manga line. Now it is taking on a third life: Tokyopop is publishing volume 3 as a print-on-demand book, and Hulu just posted a motion comic of the first volume. You might as well settle in; it’s 41 minutes long.

Meanwhile, Hipp is posting some awesome fanart at his blog, and it’s all for sale.

Tooth Troll!

Dan Hipp celebrated his birthday last week by sharing a short comic starring Piggy Brown, the Piglet Detective, as he makes the world safe for teeth from Tooth Trolls. Read and enjoy … and happy belated birthday, Dan!

Illustration by Dan Hipp

This certainly isn’t the first time Dan Hipp has graced the pages of Robot 6 with his one-off illustrations, but now his rousing and relentless blog features a drawing of the so-called Harmonica from a Clint Eastwood Sergio Leone classic. Hipp has a habit of posting new artwork almost daily, spanning superheroes, Hayao Miyazaki and now Western movies. Earlier this year, Kevin Melrose spied some pages from an unpublished spaghetti Western that Hipp is also working on.

The postings will continue until Hipp is hip-deep in tall dollars. Be warned.

by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba

Down to the wire here, so let’s do a round-robin of a few more cool items you can get at the San Diego Comic-Con this year …

• Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba are bringing a new limited signed giclée print, which you can see to the right.

• Buenaventura Press is having a going-out-of-business sale at booth #1734. Alvin Buenaventura will be there, selling the last copies he has of Kramers Ergot 7, Boy’s Club by Matt Furie, The Gigantic Robot by Tom Gauld, original art and more.

• Gene Luen Yang has a new T-shirt he’ll be selling at the show.

• Terry Moore is bringing The Complete Paradise TOO — “a 360 page softcover book filled with hundreds and hundreds of my comic strips and cartoons, from high school to SIP to all the Kixie strips and Plato and Lizzie the axe-murderer… all for just $30.”

• Scott Morse will have a TON of items for sale at the show; you can find them here and here.

• Both Josh Howard and Humberto Ramos will have sketchbooks at the show. Sean Galloway, meanwhile, has a Spider-Man print.

• Kevin Church will have collections of his webcomics Lydia and She Died in Terrebonne. Ben Costa will have a collection of his webcomic Pang.

• Animation studio Titmouse Inc. has an anthology.

• And finally, Dan Hipp has a new poster at the Hermes Press booth that teases an upcoming project called Stray Days.

"Gyakushu!" Vol. 3, by Dan Hipp

Following the announcement on Friday that Tokyopop has teamed with digital-distribution website Zinio to offer some of the publisher’s titles online, cartoonist Dan Hipp has revealed the new cover for the third volume of Gyakushu!

Debuting in February 2007, the violent revenge tale was canceled after just two volumes, a victim of Tokyopop’s 2008 OEL manga implosion. Now the first two previously published volumes are available for download from Zinio, with the third volume set to debut on the website later this week.

See the full cover after the break.

"Gyakushu!" Vol. 3, by Dan Hipp

Streelight Manifesto

I could probably do a “Straight for the art” post every day for Dan Hipp — esp. lately, as he’s been posting a lot of cool stuff on his blog — but I try not to go too overboard with any one artist and just post when they have something really special. Like this piece, a poster for the band Streetlight Manifesto, for their upcoming tour.

And if you click on over to his blog, you can see a bonus image of Rogue, one of several X-Men he’s been posting lately. But like I said, all things in moderation …

Hellboy

Over on his blog, Amazing Joy Buzzards artist Dan Hipp has been tearing it up recently with various sketches — from Hellboy (above) to Sin City, Batman Beyond and Conan. Go check’em out.

Devil Tarot by Dan Hipp

Congrats to one of our favorite blogs, Super Punch, on their third anniversary. To celebrate, Super Punch blogger John Struan has enlisted several of his favorite artists to create an official Super Punch tarot deck.

“So, about this project. I wanted to do something special for the third anniversary of Super Punch, and three weeks or so ago, the idea popped into my head of inviting my favorite artists to create tarot cards. Other than reading Promethea, I knew very little about tarot cards, so I got up to speed courtesy of Wikipedia. I then went about contacting artists and matching them to cards,” Struan writes.

As you can see above, Gyakushu! creator Dan Hipp provided the Devil. See more of the cards here and here.

Just what it says, folks: as we mentioned last week, Volumes One and Two of the Amazing Joy Buzzards artist’s epic fantasy of vengeance Gyakushu! are now available to read in their entirety at Hipp’s new dedicated site, The Thief Is Dead. There’s also an extensive preview of Volume Three, coming soon from Tokyopop. Click away and start scrolling — just be warned that there will be blood…

The Thief is Dead!

Dan Hipp of Amazing Joy Buzzards fame announced that GYAKUSHU!, his OEL manga series that got caught up in the Tokyopop implosion a couple of years ago, is returning on the web. While the first two volumes saw print, the third was canceled by Tokyopop along with a lot of their other original English language projects in 2008.

Hipp is launching a site at http://www.thethiefisdead.blogspot.com/, where he plans to post the first two volumes and the first third of the third one starting Jan. 11. Right now the site is invitation only, but there is a way to get early access, as noted here.

He also shared a bit more on the project in the last days of 2009, talking about why he chose to post it on the web.

“Now, to anyone that has suggested I should look into an IMAGE deal, similar to what the amazing Brandon Graham did with KING CITY, well… Thank you so much for the thought and concern, but quite frankly, I did. There didn’t seem to be much interest, or maybe the lines of communication were crossed, regardless, after looking around and asking a few questions to people in the know, I realized that I loved the idea of putting a blog together on my own, with no interference, allowing for anyone that reads it to leave comments on any given chapter of the series and to ask questions if they felt the need,” he said on his blog. “Hopefully, anyone taking the time to read several hundreds of pages online that liked them, might feel the need to purchase a hard copy (Volumes 1 and 2 still available, more on Volume 3 later (he teased)). GYAKUSHU! was NOT designed to be read as single issues of a monthly comic, and in hind sight, I do not think that going to IMAGE (or anyone else (and I did)) would have been the right choice for the book. The story was designed as a series of graphic novels, and the only alternative I see to that, in print, is the ultimate/absolute/what$@#!in’ever 600 page version. The blog may be up for a long time, or not long at all, only time will tell. Volume 3 will NOT immediately be posted in it’s entirety, but rather just the first third.”

And if, like me, you’ve been eagerly awaiting the next Amazing Joy Buzzards book, Monster Love, he also gave an update. “For anyone wondering about AJB: MONSTER LOVE, I’m back on the job and am hoping that 2010 is the year of the Monster(Love). I’m no longer making promises, as I have no more foot to put in my mouth. To everyone that’s been waiting, I thank you for your continued patience,” he said.

And finally, in more good Dan Hipp news, he also posted several strips on his blog last week: take a look at this Amazing Joy Buzzards strip, this Bonehead strip and this Supernatural (as in the TV show) story, featuring the Ghostfacers!

Ten Against the World by Scott Morse

As Chris goes through the 2009 catalogs of various publishers like Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly, I thought I’d share a few update on future projects that creators have mentioned on their blogs. First, over on his blog Red Window, Scott Morse says he’s working on a follow-up to The Ancient Book of Myth and War called The Ancient Book of Sex and Science. He’s also got another Magic Pickle book coming out in 2009, as well as what sounds like a gigantic bunch of awesomeness, a ’50s monster book called Ten Against the World:

*TEN AGAINST THE WORLD is in the works, I’m pleased to officially announce. It’s a 160 (or so) page Kirby/Toth-inspired monster comic set in the 1950′s, lots of comic book fun I’m certain Wertham would love. There’s a teaser above. It’s being produced entirely in Photoshop on my Cintique, no pencils, just straight digital black, white, and blue, as an experiment in economics and speed. I’m about 40 pages in at this point. Keep your eyes and ears open for this one, as it may actually hit initially in online installments.

Next, Alex Robinson’s Too Cool To Be Forgotten has been popping up on year-end best of lists here and there (Tim O’Shea had it on his), and over on his LiveJournal he talks about the project he’s just starting starring Santa Claus:

I seem to have finished my script for A Kidnapped Santa Claus. I say “seem” because I will undoubtedly fine tune it as I go.
This is the first time in my entire life I’ve scripted out an entire story from beginning to end, and I gotta say, I don’t know how you people do it. It was an ordeal! Trying to create scenes, just picturing them in my head, only with a keyboard and no visual component was a real challenge. Ideally, we’ll see this paying off with the drawing phase of the book going a lot faster (I hope so since my deadline is closer than I would like!) and hopefully it will all have been worth it.

Amazing Joy Buzzards

Artist Dan Hipp notes that the next Amazing Joy Buzzards book he’s doing with Mark Andrew Smith was due in 2008, but as you might have noticed hasn’t come out yet:

Originally solicited for last month, the deadline came and went, with the book unfinished. It was well on it’s way to completion, but life decided it was time to get in the way, and production on the book has slowed. All I can say is that it’s awesome, it will still be finished, but I can’t tell you when. Truly, I am sorry, as that book has a slice of me sewn into the binding, and it saddens me that I can’t get it to you sooner.

He also says he’s working on the third volume of Gyakushu!, the first two volumes of which were published by Tokyopop before their implosion. He says it’ll likely appear online first, but print copies will appear … in Italy.

Lastly, it isn’t exactly an unannounced project, but Neil Gaiman shares some really nice Andy Kubert artwork from their Batman two-parter over on his blog. Be sure to read all the way to the bottom …