Here’s good news for fans of the television show Smallville who were left without their fix in May when the series went off the air for good: DC announced today that Smallville is coming back as a comic, which will be released first in digital and then in print form. The series will be written by Bryan Q. Miller, who was a scriptwriter for the show, and will pick up where the television story left off. Pere Perez, who worked with Miller on Batgirl: The Flood, will handle the art, and the digital cover above is by Cat Staggs.

DC has an interesting strategy for this comic: It will launch as a digital comic on April 13, with a new digital chapter coming out each week. (No word on pricing or length.) About a month later, it will come out as a print comic, collecting the chapters and adding an episode guide; the first print comic is due out on May 16, and Gary Frank (Superman Secret Origin) will be doing the covers for the print issues.

The weekly chapters are an interesting twist. Not only do they mimic the timing of the original show, they make the comic more of an immediate experience, something people come back to frequently and discuss in real time, as opposed to a monthly event. IDW is doing something similar with its Transformers series Autocracy, publishing an eight-page digital chapter every two weeks, priced at 99 cents. And of course there’s Shonen Jump Alpha, the digital reincarnation of Viz’s Shonen Jump, which publishes a chapter a week of six different manga within two weeks of their Japanese release, with a teen-friendly price of 99 cents per issue (less if you get the yearly subscription).

I spoke to Viz senior vice president Alvin Lu about the weekly chapters at NYCC last year, and he made an interesting point: “Manga is a live medium in Japan,” he told me. “It comes out in popular form every week and is enjoyed at the same time by millions of readers. Creators feed off that energy, and that is the secret of manga’s success.”

Aside from that energy, the weekly chapters are generally priced lower than a comic, and it’s a basic psychological fact that most people will be more comfortable spending 99 cents four weeks in a row than spending $3.99 all at once, no matter how much they get for the money.

Art by Alexis Frederick-Frost

Libraries | The Center for Cartoon Studies has found a new home for the Schulz Library, whose previous location was damaged in a flood in August: the old post office in downtown White River Junction, Vermont. The school was able to purchase the building with the help of Bayle Drubel, a real estate developer and founding CCS board member who bought the post office in 2004. Renovations are set to begin this winter to create room for instruction space, faculty offices and the Schulz Library cartoon collection. [The Center for Cartoon Studies, via The Daily Cartoonist]

Creators | The Atlantic profiles Zippy the Pinhead creator Bill Griffith. [The Atlantic]

Creators | Artist Fabio Moon talks about teaming with Zack Whedon on the new Serenity comic that makes up one-half of one of their Free Comic Book Day offerings. [ComicsAlliance]

Creators | Paige Braddock discusses working with Charles Schulz, and her lesbian webcomic Jane’s World: “Ten years ago, I didn’t think it was important to let gender and sexual orientation show, but now I wish I’d been braver. I think it’s important for people to see lesbians of all kinds represented in every medium. So, my answer now is different than it would’ve been 10 years ago. It’s important to embody who you are, whether you’re writing gay stories or not. But the best thing that can happen to me is if a kid in Idaho says, ‘I read your comic online and I feel less alone.’ That’s better than any paycheck. I got an email once from a mother whose daughter had come out and she was really upset. But then she started reading Jane’s World and said she was much less worried about her. That’s the kind of thing I love.” [AfterEllen]

Habibi

Creators | A Milwaukee magazine interviews local-boy-made-good Craig Thompson (who moved away years ago, but, whatever) about his graphic novel, Habibi: “I see it as a fairy tale that’s drawn from all different time periods and places. People want to say the book takes place in the Middle East, because of the desert, but it is as much rooted in America as Persia as Vietnam or anywhere.” [OnMilwaukee.com]

Creators | Tom Spurgeon continues his holiday interview series with a conversation with Pope Hats creator Ethan Rilly. [The Comics Reporter]

Process | Usagi Yojimbo creator Stan Sakai shows off two stages of one of his pages for the Mouse Guard Legends anthology, inks and the colored page. [Stan Sakai]

Review | Greg McElhatton reviews Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s Criminal: The Last of the Innocent. [Read About Comics]

Review | Philip Shropshire takes a hard look at the latest Graphic Classics anthology, African American Classics, and notes a glaring omission as well as some high and low points of the selection. [Comics Forge]

Comics | Chris Marshall pokes around on the internet and finds 14 collected editions to look forward to in the coming year. [DGTL Comics]

Opportunity | IDW is looking for a marketing/PR person. [The Beat]

One of the reasons that the digital comics distributor comiXology has done so well is that it syncs well across a number of platforms, including iOS, Android and the web. Their web store is convenient for those who prefer browsing and buying on their computer, but the Flash-based interface is a bit buggy—it never scrolled properly in my Safari browser, for instance—so I was happy to hear that they have relaunched the web store using HTML5 for the browsing and buying interface.

They also redesigned it, which is a relief; if I have one complaint about comiXology, it’s their tendency to throw a bewildering array of comics onto the screen all at once. The original webstore put a ton of comics on the front page (a page that didn’t scroll properly, remember), while this new one mirrors the design of their iPad app, with a smaller selection and tabs to allow the reader to go deeper. Navigation is pretty straightforward—the site is a little slow, but it is still in beta. The comics reader is still in Flash for now.

ComiXology CEO David Steinberger has more details at the comiXology blog, and I spoke to him about the new storefront yesterday. While the iOS app remains the most popular channel, he said, “More and more people actually use our website, once they discover it, to shop and buy, and I hope with the HTML5 release, more will do that.” One of the new features of the web store is that users can gift a cart, rather than just a single comic. “Right now we are going to finish releasing all of Bone, so you will be able to add the whole Bone series to your card and gift it to somebody,” Steinberger said. “We have Sandman at a very competitive price to the paperback. Comics people create more comics people by getting in tune with their friends and gifting them comics.”

Also, if you pay full price at comiXology, you’re not paying attention; they run different sales all week long, and at the moment they have three different holiday sales going on: A Batman 201 sale, a Marvel Major Players sale, and a Holiday Sale featuring indy publishers Oni Press, BOOM! Studios, Image, Dynamite, and IDW. Lots of good stuff here: The Sixth Gun, Robert Kirkman’s Super Dinosaur, Doctor Who, Mark Waid’s Irredeemable, and one of my favorite comics of the year, Spontaneous (the first issue is free, so you can now pick up the whole five-issue arc for four bucks).

Life with Archie #16

Comics | CNN covers the upcoming wedding of Archie Comics’ Kevin Keller, who will get married to another man in Life with Archie #16. Keller was injured while serving in the military in Iraq and Clay Walker, his groom-to-be, was his physical therapist. “Riverdale is this picturesque vision of American life, and when you see yourself reflected in that, you have a role in even the most idealized version of the reality you live in,” said Matt Kane, associate director of entertainment media for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. “That’s the difference between feeling like a rejected outsider and feeling like you’re a part of something.” [CNN]

Comics | Jim Caple worries that viewers of the Tintin movie won’t appreciate it the way he does, comparing old-school Tintin fans to old-school Boston Red Sox or Seattle Mariners fans: “That’s what I worry about. I worry there will be all these Tintin wannabes who only know the character from the movie, who don’t appreciate Herge’s genius, who don’t know what it was like to wait a month for the next 10-page installment or when you had to special order the few books made available in America. Fans who didn’t earn this movie.” [ESPN]

Creators | Kurt Busiek discusses his work on Dracula: The Company of Monsters, which returned from cancellation as a webcomic, as well as digital comics in general: “I’ve been interested in the possibilities of online distribution for a long time, and even pitched an idea for an online strip a decade or more ago, but my collaborators and I couldn’t afford to do it on our own back then, and we didn’t find any takers who wanted to back it. And there are stories I’d love to do online, and ways I’d like to try taking advantage of the online interface, instead of print, that I’m eager to try — but between deadlines on existing projects and my health issues, I haven’t been able to launch an online series yet.” [Biff Bam Pop!]

"Saga," from Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples

Creators | Fiona Staples talks with her local newspaper about her upcoming project with Brian K. Vaughan, the eagerly anticipated Image Comics series Saga. [Calgary Herald]

Creators | Sweets creator Kody Chamberlain gets the spotlight ahead of a book signing with Chew artist Rob Guillory. [The Times]

Creators | Here’s a heartwarming story for the holidays: A historian found some old comics about Saginaw, Michigan, in the local library and tracked down the artist, Vincent Faletti, whose work was published in The New Yorker and other magazines. It turns out that Faletti is alive and still cracking jokes at 95. [MLive.com]

Comics | The first issue of IDW’s Magic: The Gathering comic, originally scheduled to be released next week, has been pushed back to Feb. 1 due to “unforeseen printing challenges.” [ICv2]

Crime | Victoria, British Columbia, police have recovered a cache of stolen goods worth more than $10,000 — $8,500 of which was a comic book collection taken from an apartment storage locker. Police are returning the collection to its owner. [Victoria Times Colonist]

Fandom | Ology spotlights the marriage proposal of David Salomon, who proposed with a homemade take on an issue of Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane. “What is it about the gamers, the comic book Ologists, the sci-fi fans and the zombie slayers that makes them the kings and queens of romance?” [Ology]

But from a creative standpoint? What do you do with the characters in 2011, after their mega-successful first life as black-and-white comics stars from the mid-eighties, their even more successful second life as late-eighties cartoon, toy, movie and marketing juggernauts, and the many, many less successful attempts to rejigger them in various media, with varying levels of success, over the course of the last ten to fifteen years? After all, even if approached as a nostalgia-driven project, there are two very different most-prevalent takes on the characters to try and tap into.

I think IDW probably has the right idea.

They somehow managed to lure  back one of the two creators, Kevin Eastman, after he had been largely absent from the comics for years (His fellow co-creator, Peter Laird, had been heavily involved in the last Mirage series, just previous to the Viacom sale). Eastman is co-writing the new series with Tom Waltz, and co-penciling with artist Dan Duncan, essentially providing layouts for Duncan to finish.

They also chose to start fresh with the narrative instead of picking up where one of the past volumes of the comics left off, or simply rebooting and telling the same old story all over again. There are, so far, some pretty key differences, including a new villain and the fact that the four title characters didn’t all grow up together.

I don’t know how well IDW is serving the many potential TMNT audiences, but I was pretty excited to see a “micro-series” starring Raphael on the stands this week.

During Eastman and Laird’s original, 1984-1993 volume of the series, they published four such micro-series featuring solo stories of the each character, beginning in 1985 with Raphael. Half of them were fairly standalone stories. 1985’s Michaelanglo was a Christmas special, and 1986’s Donatello was an unofficial team-up with Jack Kirby. The others were pretty integral to that volume’s story. In 1986’s Leonardo, for example, Shredder and The Foot Clan return from the first issue to hound the title character back to his home and drive the characters out of New York City to the farm much of the rest of the series would be based at.

And in Raphael, Eastman and Laird introduced Casey Jones, presented as a worse version of the angry, violent Raphael. In his original appearance, Casey Jones was basically a maniac vigilante, beating up muggers with sporting equipment.

Appreciating the nod to the first volume of turtle comics (a nod that includes, among the way-too-many variant covers, transposing Eastman images of the covers for the original special onto the new one), I thought this would be a pretty good time to check in on IDW’s progress with TMNT.

The differences between 1985′s Raphael and 2011′s are dramatic.

Firstly, this is a different creative team than the monthly, with Brian Lynch writing and Franco Urru drawing. Urru’s design for the the Turtles, well, Turtle, seems very much in keeping with Duncan’s, but unlike the Mirage version, it’s by different guys than the series it spins out of.

It’s also in color, which was, of course, to be expected, although ninja turtles in color still strike me as somehow off, like a colorized black-and-white movie. There was a grittiness to the black ink on white paper, and immediacy and urgency that felt in keeping with the 1980s NYC urban setting. The color art, by Fabio Mantovani, is also pretty forceful, in the showy, over-powering style that has become the standard at Marvel and way too many of the non-Big Two companies in the past five years.

There’s a neat stippling effect on Raphael, that gives his skin a reptilian look, but the coloring is extremely effects-heavy, to the point that every square inch has several such effects, so that it all blends together, and nothing pops out. Raphael’s skin has the same look and texture as the rooftops he stands on, for example. Shadow effects on top of the colors make the darkness seem weak compared to the more dramatic, stark black of regular old ink or Crayola-colored solid black.  And luminescent lighting effects are applied to stars, windows, the reflection of light from Raphael’s shell or a new character’s white fur.

The story, like that of the original Raphael, definitely stands alone, with a beginning, middle and end, but it also quite noticeably picks up on a bigger story already in the telling, and ends with a very dramatic, full-page splash cliffhanger with a very 1960’s Marvel technique hinting at the return of the characters’ most well-known villain. It introduces a new character in Alopex, an arctic snow fox mutant, just as the previous Raphael introduced a new character, although in this case its made quite clear she’s meant to stick around.

After the story, in which Raphael and his friend Casey Jones are interrupted from crime patrol/talking about their feelings by the introduction of a new mutant pursued by familiar foes, there are three pages of sketches of the new character by Eastman. The first of these is a full-page one, in which we see the character in Eastman’s familiar, rough style (Is she a fox, or a werewolf, or a rat, like Master Splinter, whom she resembles?). She’s leaping in mid-air, a cityscape of rooftops and chimneys and heavy clouds in the background.

It’s in color, but only just, mostly blue on top of the black ink, with some green, brown and red in Alopex’s clothing to distinguish it from her fur. It’s certainly more finished than the other two pages of more preliminary sketches, but it still looks like the dashed off work of a great artist. It looks drawn, by human hand, and it looks urgent and unmediated.

I wish the rest of comic looked like that. Not necessarily drawn by Eastman, but more like this drawing of his: Drawn by hand, from memory instead of reference, less fussed-over, less-realistic.

Perhaps even more than the characters, I think that’s what I liked most about the original comics, and what I like more about them now when I look back at them, as the production values of mainstream, serial comic book-comics get higher and higher, and the pursuit of realism is coloring and setting becomes more and more prevalent.

I still think IDW’s going about their management of the franchise in the right way, and there’s certainly a lot more right about Raphael than there is wrong, but, as always, I found myself wanting it to be more right.

Or maybe just more like the way I personally want it to look, and to hell with industry trends or what seems to sell these days.

Yeah, that sounds about right. After all, I am a fan.

*And if you think that sai-based headline pun was bad, you shoulda seen the other nine on the list I decided against using.

“We had a record amount of entries from publishers this year with more than forty-five different titles” said FCBD spokesperson Leslie Jackson. “Retailers on the committee had a tough time deciding on which titles to choose for Gold sponsorship, but we’re sure fans will be pleased with the line-up for next year.”

While the choices may have been difficult, it’s hard to imagine that someone couldn’t come up with something more enticing than what Image has to offer: “An anthology featuring all-new stories with a mix of Image’s old and new best loved characters!” Could you possibly get any vaguer than that? They don’t even have a cover design. If my comic got bumped for that, I’d be steaming. On the other hand, Archaia’s 48-page hardcover, featuring new material (not reprints or bits of something to come) looks mighty sweet, all the more so because they name names: A Mouse Guard story from David Petersen, a Jim Henson’s Labyrinth story by Ted Naifeh and Cory Godbey, a side story from Royden Lepp’s new graphic novel Rust, a Cursed Pirate Girl story from Jeremy Bastian, a Cow Boy story by Chris Eliopoulos and Nate Crosby, and a Dapper Men tale from Jim McCann and Janet Lee. There’s this year’s wow factor.

The line-up actually seemed pretty obvious to me, so I went back and looked at the Gold Sponsors for the past five years. Sure enough, six of the publishers are there every year: Archie, Dark Horse, DC, IDW, Image, Marvel. Since five of these are also Diamond’s premier publishers, and Archie is a newsstand juggernaut, there’s no surprise there. BOOM! Studios has been a Gold Sponsor for the past four years and Archaia for the past three. The other slots vary: Ape Entertainment was a Gold Sponsor in 2011 and 2010 but is missing this year, and Bongo and Oni are back after a two-year absence. Others who have popped up once or twice in the past five years: NBM/Papercutz (2011), Drawn & Quarterly (2010), Viz (2008 and 2009), Dynamite (2008), Virgin (2008), Gemstone (2007), and Tokyopop (2007).

There’s more to come: The Silver Sponsors will be announced next week.

Done to Death

Anyone who has had the displeasure of editing or reading poorly executed copycat literature is likely entertained by the core premise of writer Andrew Foley & artist Fiona Staples’ Done to Death trade collection: an editor who sets out to kill the writers of bad literature. This trade collection, which was released by IDW on September 21, had quite a six-year journey to get on the shelves, as Foley explained to me in this email interview. My thanks to Foley for his time. Once you’ve read this interview, be sure to read the late September interview that Foley did with CBR’s Shaun Manning.

Tim O’Shea: How long have you been developing Done to Death and how did it come to be at IDW?

Andrew Foley: It’s taken a little over six years to finally get this collection on the shelves. The original five issues took a little more than a year from to get from the initial pitch to publication. After parting ways with Markosia Fiona and I spent quite a while looking for the right publisher for the collection. In the early portion of my career, I had publishers I was working with: abruptly go out of business; unilaterally break contracts they’d agreed to; elect not to publish several graphic novels (at least one fully illustrated) I wrote for them while being constantly reassured they would see the light of day; stiff dozens of creators when the publisher decided the moment for their wildly ambitious anthology series had passed; and just generally try to advance themselves on the backs of passionate (if naïve) creators.

There are some great indy publishers out there. Red 5 springs to mind. But there are also a distressingly high number of predatory companies around whose sole purpose is to acquire or control as much intellectual property for as little as possible in the hopes that one will become 30 Days of Night or Cowboys & Aliens and get optioned for millions of dollars. It’s a bit like playing the lottery, only each ticket represents hundreds of hours of labour on the creators’ parts.

Anyway, at a certain point I’d had enough of that sort of thing, and was ready to sit on the book until a company Fiona and I were 100% comfortable with agreed to publish it. I was confident they would, eventually, just because it was clear Fiona was destined for great things. Sooner or later someone would see the wisdom of getting her first major comics work back in print.

IDW gave us the thumbs-up around the middle of 2010. Then we started going through the previous version, looking for things that could use a little tweaking. I haven’t made a big deal about this being a “remastered” version of the story because the changes are the sorts of things that probably aren’t going to make much of an impression on people casually reading the thing. But we were working on pretty tight deadlines the first time around, and we did what we had to to hit them, and there were a few little things I always wished could’ve been done a little differently. Now they have been, and I couldn’t be happier.

O’Shea: What is it that made Fiona Staples a perfect match for the project?

Foley: She’s a fantastic artist, and she was willing to spend several months working with a pretty much unknown writer for not a lot of money because she liked the story. She’s just a great collaborator and a legitimately nice person. As any writer with minimal financial resources can tell you, finding an artist with all those qualities is like winning the lottery and getting hit by lightning five minutes later, only the lightning is magical and instead of frying you it makes you look like a stunningly attractive person.

O’Shea: Do you ever edit people’s work and do you think after reading this story they’ll be scared of you being an editor?

Foley: Well I hope they will…

I have done some editing, and what I learned from the experience is that I’m a decent editor and that I should avoid doing it again for my own emotional wellbeing. Successful editors compartmentalize things in a way I can’t, I think. They have to be able to put 100% effort into making a story the best it can be inside externally imposed limitations (deadlines, flaky creators, upper management, etc.), they have to do that with multiple projects at the same time, and they have to keep an emotional distance from it all to make sure they’re seeing things clearly and also so they don’t end up being gunned down in a McDonalds after having gone on a bloody murder spree. And then creators get pretty much all the credit and editors all the blame. It’s grueling work, and I’ve nothing but respect for the editors I’ve worked with. If I was in their shoes, I’d spend the bulk of my waking hours sitting on a toilet sobbing pitifully.

I can only imagine it’d be slightly less grueling work if the creators of a project were a little afraid of their editor. Anything that streamlines the process and makes for the best work (which I naturally define as work done the way I want it) has got to be a plus, right?

O’Shea: How much input did you have on the look of Andy, or did you defer to Staples completely on that aspect?

Foley: Aw, man, I can barely remember what happened last week, never mind six years ago. I think I wanted him to be overweight…? In any event, I don’t believe there was much additional input of Andy’s design on me after Fiona’s initial character sketches.

O’Shea: In this digital age, how much of a priority was it for you to see this in print?

Foley: I’m not actually convinced we’re in the digital age yet, at least not for creators. There are some making a living doing digital comics and a few making a very, very good living doing it. As far as I can tell, most of those use the comic strip model, presenting new material daily or close to it and using a standalone set-up/punchline structure. While more extended narratives have been monetized to some extent, I can’t think of many commercial success stories in that vein. Freankangels, maybe.

Speaking from my own experience, I’ve had two of my previous works, Parting Ways and The Holiday Men in The Massacre Memorial Day Sale Massacre, up on Graphicly.com for a few months now, and they haven’t received a whole lot of interest. In fairness, I haven’t spent a whole lot of energy promoting them, either. I’m an old dude who still tends to regard computers as glorified glowing typewriters more than anything else. I understand people are making real, tangible connections both personal and professional via social media–I’m not one of them. I’ve tried, but I just don’t have the online social or technical skills necessary to effectively pull eyeballs to my material.

Given all that, it was very important to me that we end up with a printed version of the complete story between two covers. That doesn’t mean I’m trying to diminish digital or deny its growing impact on comics. I’ve little doubt that in five, ten, or twenty years from now, digital will be the primary delivery system for comics and printed books will be quaint relics of a bygone age, for environmental reasons if nothing else. I’m of a generation that grew up with print and isn’t willing to let it go. But my generation’s getting older and kids these days are far more accustomed to reading stuff on a screen than I will ever be.

O’Shea: OK, clearly I think it’s safe to say you don’t think much of the Twilight trend (correct me if I am wrong). What kind of vampire stories do you enjoy?

Foley: Honestly, with the exception of Twilight I can enjoy almost any vampire story if I come at it with the right mindset. The film Near Dark’s probably my favourite. I liked the Buffy and Angel TV series. Nosferatu. The Blade movies (I even managed to enjoy Trinity, largely because I went in with extremely low expectations.)

O’Shea: If it sells well enough, do you hope to write a sequel to this?

Foley: Oh yes, several, in fact. I wrote a blog post about it on my tumblr account.

O’Shea: What did it take to get to Steve Niles to write the foreword?

Foley: Fiona drew a wonderful series Steve wrote called The Mystery Society, so she was the one who asked if he’d be willing to do it. Done to Death’s editor Justin Eisinger knows Steve well enough to be comfortable, uh, nudging him a few times about getting it done in time for print. Steve’s so passionate and prolific, he writes more in a day than I do some months, but he’s got so much on his plate at any given time that I imagine it’s easy for things to fall through the cracks when deadlines for paying work loom. I was thrilled when I finally got to read the foreword; it’s hard to describe how it feels to have a horror creator of his caliber praise something I’m involved with. Someday he will ask me to kill a man, and I totally will.

O’Shea: Not everybody lives with a book designer, how much fun is it to be able to collaborate with Tiina Andreakos of Edmonton’s Diva Designs on the cover design?

Foley: “Fun” isn’t necessarily the word I’d use to describe it. I love Tiina and I love her work (I loved her work first, actually, we met when I tried to get her to draw something I wrote). But being around her while she’s working is kind of terrifying, and never more so than when she’s working on something with me. When she gets really engrossed in designing something, her expression changes, she puts on what she calls her game face. Unfortunately, her game face makes her look as though she’s about to murder the next person she sees. She isn’t doing it on purpose, but usually we’re so comfortable and content in each others’ company…it’s incredibly unnerving for me to be around her in that situation. I kind of wish she weren’t so damn good at her job, so I’d have a legitimate excuse to go to someone who isn’t in a position to divorce me. But she is so good. I still feel Done to Death’s original covers (repurposed as chapter title pages in the collection) were really interesting and unique and Tiina’s design work was a big part of that. I’ve been shouting about how Fiona should be a superstar artist for years, but I also believe Tiina’s work on D2D deserved more recognition than it got.

O’Shea: Any questions you’d like to ask Robot 6 readers?

Foley: Why yes, yes I do. Hello, Robot 6 readers, how’re you doing today? Gotta say you’re looking mighty fine there, mighty fine…Let me ask you a question: Do you think vampires should glitter? No? You positively loathe Twilight and the glut of poorly written derivative vampire novels that flooded the bookstores after it became a success? Great, that’s great. So listen, maybe you’ve heard I’ve about this book I’ve got out from IDW Publishing right now, Done to Death? Art by Shuster Award-winning Fiona Staples, foreword by 30 Days of Night creator Steve Niles? Yeah? OK, great. Now what will it take to get you to buy a copy, or several copies (as you are obviously incredibly popular and have dozens of friends who share your impeccable taste when it comes to all things bloodsucking)? Because whatever it is, there’s a good chance I’ll do it. So just let me know, will you? I’d be forever grateful if you did.

Also, does anyone have something to eat? I’m starving here.

There’s a brave new world of digital comics out there, but some publishers, it appears, aren’t taking it very seriously.

One of the advantages of ebook formats like Kindle and iBooks is that you can offer the reader a free sample of the book so they can see if they will like it. The problem is that these “free samples” often consist entirely of what editors call “front matter”—title page, half-title, copyright page, and blank pages in between them. No comics.

This probably comes from automatically grabbing the first few pages of the file for the preview without checking what they are. At the downthetubes Mobile Comics blog, John Maybury offers some suggestions for publishers to get their comic into the preview and their front matter out of the way. More publishers should heed his advice, because these content-free previews are distressingly common. When I was writing about IDW’s graphic novels on iBooks the other day, I got curious and checked out some of the other offerings; of the ones I looked at, only the IDW books and Bluewater’s Violet Rose had actual previews. That’s a shame, because the preview can be a powerful selling tool—but only if it has actual content. Setting up a preview and putting nothing but almost-blank pages into it wastes everyone’s time, especially the reader’s.

Click for an example of a preview done right.

IDW Publishing launched 19 graphic novels in the iBook Store this week, hoping to bring new readers to the medium by placing their graphic novels in the same space as related prose books. Jeff Webber, director of ePublishing for IDW, told Macworld that the comics apps were successful in bringing the comics to established comics readers, but that people who don’t regularly read comics are less likely to encounter them; putting the books in the iBooks Store will ensure that Anne Rice, readers, for instance, will find IDW’s graphic adaptations of her work in the same search as her prose novels. Incidentally, the launch included Code Word: Geronimo, IDW’s graphic novel about the capture and killing of Osama Bin Laden, which was released simultaneously in digital and print.

I fired off an e-mail to Webber with some questions, and here’s what he had to say:

Robot 6: IDW has been pretty aggressive in the digital field—you were among the first to market comics as single apps, back in the day. Why did you wait so long to go the iBooks route—and why does it make sense to do so now?

Jeff Webber: The epub format is entirely different from app development. It’s much more rigid and allows for little specialized navigation. IDW has released epub-formatted books before, we have over 200 single-issue books in the Amazon Kindle store. Those are panel-by-panel books, because the same file has to work on a Kindle or inside Kindle apps on other devices. It works fine but isn’t as perfect as using an app. The reason for the big push now is that Apple recently introduced new epub formatting tricks specific to iBooks. That has led to the great looking full-page approach we’ve developed.

Robot 6: From the reader’s point of view, how does the iBooks version of your graphic novels differ from the single-book apps you sell in the iTunes store or the comics you sell through your iOS app?

Jeff: IDW’s books are all full double-page spreads in the iBook format. Then readers can tap and zoom in for crisp, full page reading, and simply flip to the next page. It’s very intuitive. We also include all the extra material in the trades and graphic novels.

Robot 6: Do the iOS platforms sync with one another? If I bought Parker: The Hunter through the iTunes store, could I add it to my iBooks bookshelf?

Jeff: Yes, all books purchased in iBooks line up on the shelves within that app.

Robot 6: The predominant model with apps like the IDW app is single-issue comics, and I see that you have put single-issue comics on the Kindle as well. Why go for longer books in the iBooks store?

Jeff: Presently IDW is focused on distributing longer-form graphic novels and collections. We may experiment with single issues eventually. The existing Kindle books are singles, we will go for longer-form going forward. This is a great format for bringing in new readers—complete stories similar to graphic novels and trades in mass-market book retailers. Casual readers may not desire to learn how to navigate and purchase using a comic storefront app, they just want to cut straight to the story.

Robot 6: What sort of technical challenges did this present?

Jeff: Lorelei Bunjes, our director of digital services, led up an in-house effort on this. There are unique challenges to epub development, especially in overcoming the technical hurdles to make the format look great. We also had great interest and feedback from the Apple iBook team.

Robot 6: With iBooks, are you specifically reaching out to general readers who aren’t averse to graphic novels, as opposed to people who define themselves as comics readers? And does that mean you will focus on graphic novel adaptations (i.e. Anne Rice, James Patterson, The Wizard of Oz)?

Jeff: That’s a perfect description of our efforts here. Big name creators or award winning titles can still be hard to find inside comic storefront apps. Now someone can search for Joe Hill, Max Brooks or Orson Scott Card and find their graphic novels right next to their prose work.

Robot 6: What about licensed properties that aren’t necessarily literary, such as Star Trek and Transformers?

Jeff: We’ll offer the entire range of our brands in iBooks. The variety also includes Eric Shanower’s Oz series and Bloom County Library.

Robot 6: Why did you decide to do a same-day print and digital release of Code Word: Geronimo? Any idea what the response has been so far?

Jeff: Code Word: Geronimo is very much a mass-audience title that’s getting lots of publicity this week, so we wanted it out in print and digital—including Kindle and apps—on the same day as print. Since these all just went live Tuesday, it’s too early for us to have real sales data.

Robot 6: I notice your books are no longer in Digital’s eManga store. What happened
with that channel?

Jeff: I believe Digital Manga is re-working some of their categories, so that’s a temporary issue.

Robot 6: How big a slice of your revenues does digital represent at the moment, and
what is the trend?

Jeff: We’re well ahead of 100% growth over last year and digital is approximately 3-5% of our total. And all of that is measured against an overall growing business.

Robot 6: How does digital fit into your marketing strategy—does it complement or
supplant print channels?

Jeff: It’s very complimentary. IDW’s line has lots of mass-market appeal. For IDW, digital is a great way to expose our brands to new audiences. IDW’s print and digital sales are growing at a very rapid rate. So obviously digital has not taken away from our print sales.

Robot 6: Since IDW is in a number of channels—iTunes store, iOS app, Kindle, Nook, and now iBooks, you have some grounds for comparison. It seems like you are catering to a specific set of preferences: Longer stories rather than single issues, download rather than streaming. Does this reflect what readers are buying, or the way you would prefer to market your books?

Jeff: Single, downloadable, digital issues are our best sellers at this time. The iBook audience is typically used to reading longer form material such as novels, and expects a complete story.

Tim O’Shea: Laura, how did you come to be involved with Womanthology?

Laura Morley: I’m an aspiring comics writer, and saw the original tweet Renae De Liz sent out in May, seeking women to contribute comics to an anthology for charity. I hadn’t actually crossed paths with Renae back then, and saw the message via someone else’s retweet – I wish I could remember whose, so I could thank them! It’s been an amazing experience for me. Then, since I’m one of those perverse people who gets a kick out of wrangling spreadsheets, I sent an email offering to help out with admin for the project – from that I wound up coordinating the admin effort, which has meant acting as a first point of contact for our contributors and our Kickstarter backers. You can also hear me sounding British on the Womanthology Kickstarter video.

O’Shea: Can you explain how it came to be that there is a hardback anthology and a sketchbook associated with Womanthology?

Morley: Publishing a hardcover volume was the plan from the beginning. The book is going to be pretty hefty – it’s over 300 pages long, on a 9×12 inch format, and we wanted to make something truly elegant that would serve as a good vehicle for the beautiful work inside. The sketchbook came about, I believe, as an opportunity to showcase some more of the work by our creators. Some contributors preferred to draw pinups than full stories, and some wanted to do both; some writers wanted to share samples from their scripts – we thought this would be a good way to get more of it out to the audience it deserves.

O’Shea: How did IDW come to be involved with Womanthology?

Morley: I believe Renae was in touch with some people there via books of hers they’ve published previously; she approached them once the project got under way. We were always keen to attach a major publisher, both to help us get the book distributed widely and to give readers some quality assurance, and we’re very grateful for IDW’s support for the project. Like the rest of us, they’re not making any money off it.

O’Shea: How are editorial duties being divided up on the project–what’s the timeline for the project?

Morley: We have four editors volunteering their time, each handling about 25 writer/artist teams. All scripts were completed and approved in July and pencils were finished last weekend; we have inking, colouring, and lettering work underway right now. We’ll then spend September collating the other material, including interviews and features, and laying out and setting the book. We’re aiming to wrap production at the start of October, so the book can be published in December. The sketchbook should be ready sooner, during the autumn.

O’Shea: This interview would be incomplete if we did not discuss the recent seeming backlash. Have you been surprised at the derision and increasing skepticism that the project has received in recent weeks? Admittedly most criticism acknowledges the planners’ intentions are well-meaning, while at the same time noting that the numbers seem unrealistic.

Morley: I don’t really think it has been derision and increasing skepticism: I think it’s been critical attention, and no, that’s not really a shock, or a bad thing. Of course, some of it’s been rather … full-bodied critical attention, but you’d have to be pretty new to the cut and thrust of the comics internet to be surprised by that. People are entitled to ask questions, and the vast majority have done so respectfully, and out of concerns that are completely laudable (and that, as someone starting out in making comics, I obviously share). I hope we’ve been able to give answers that reflect what we’ve said all along that we’re trying to do– and that underline the point that every single person on the project chose to join it as a volunteer, because we saw in it some reward other than pay. I would like to think that the early success we’ve had – and that’s gone so far beyond what we expected – makes that decision look more like a good one than a bad one.

O’Shea: When you see an analysis from a publisher like Dan Nadel have you considered contacting him to see what advice he might be able to offer? How about talking with Laurenn McCubbin?

Morley: Well, I think people are perfectly entitled to comment on the project without having us turn around and essentially demand “If you’re so smart, why don’t YOU tell us how to run it?” We’ll gladly answer questions, and we’re always happy to get offers of help, but cross-examining each of our critics on how they’d do things instead is probably not the best use of anyone’s time right now.

O’Shea: Editing an anthology is no easy task, has the challenge exceeded your initial expectations or was everyone prepared for the level of challenges inherent with a logistical challenge like this project?

Morley: The editorial and logistical challenges, we were pretty well prepared for: most of our editors also do this professionally, and knew what they were in for. That’s not to say it hasn’t been a huge pile of work – as you can imagine, we’re all pulling very long days to fit this around our paying jobs, and since we’re spread over several timezones it’s fair to say that Womanthology’s been a 24/7 juggernaut for the last few months. We’ve been lucky, though, to have such a dedicated group of contributors, who’ve made those tasks infinitely easier than they might have been. (For example, every single team hit their script and pencilling deadlines.)

Of course, the Kickstarter did far exceed our expectations, and came with more work than I think we’d ever dreamed we would hit. One of my best friends inconveniently got married on the second day of the Kickstarter campaign, and at three a.m. on the night of the wedding you could find me hunched over my netbook, clinging to a single bar of wireless signal on the Welsh coast where the wedding was being held, fielding emails from the over 500 backers we got that weekend. Which… no, that’s not how we’d have planned it!

O’Shea: What is organizers’ response to some folks’ concerns that trying to start an imprint makes the project transition more into a business as opposed to just a charity anthology?

Morley: So as we’ve said, whatever we do with the project, it’ll remain non-profit. Right from day one of the Kickstarter (and as described in the Kickstarter FAQs all along), we’d outlined broad plans for what we’d like to do with extra money if we happened to raise it, and that always included trying to launch more projects along similar lines if the money was available. Anything we are able to get off the ground will work along similar lines to what we’ve done on Womanthology.

O’Shea: Have you all been discouraged by the increased critical eye on the project, or did you expect it on some level, given the successful degree to which the Kickstarter effort raised funds beyond initial expectations?

Morley: No, it’s not discouraging at all: as you suggest, when the project took off so far beyond our expectations, it was inevitable that not all of the attention we got would be from people wanting to shower us with kittens and rainbows. That’s normal, and predictable, and has helped us all I think to get a little bit wiser about what working in comics is like.

O’Shea: As noted in this Portland Press Herald piece, while Renae de Liz is based in Portland, you are based in London. How instrumental has social media been in bringing folks together on this project?

Morley: Actually, I’m 50 miles north of London, in even-more-remote Cambridge! But yes, social media’s been instrumental in this. The whole project got started with a single tweet, which is how most of our creators found us. The efforts of the women running our Twitter, Tumblr, DeviantArt, and Facebook accounts were vital to the success of the Kickstarter campaign, and Twitter in particular has been a major vector for people to find out about the project. It would’ve been totally impossible for this to happen so quickly, and on such a global scale, without these tools.

Related: Comic Book Resources talks with Renae De Liz about the rapid rise of Womanthology

Miles Morales

Comics | David Brothers argues that the problem with Miles Morales is that he is being defined as “the black Spider-Man” rather than simply “Spider-Man”: “Miles Morales is notable for being the first black Spider-Man, particularly in Marvel’s Ultimate Universe, but it isn’t his blackness that makes him special. It’s the fact that he’s not Peter Parker. The fact that he’s half-black, half-Puerto Rican, (and how cool would it be if his dad was a dark skinned Puerto Rican and his mom was light skinned black?!), that it looks like he’s taking part in a lottery to get into a good school in the preview images, and that he’s thirteen years old is just sauce. It’s not the meal. It’s part of the meal, sure, but you do yourself and the character (or rather, the concept, what the character represents, or something, because we do not respect characters ’round these parts) a disservice by boiling him down to “black Spider-Man.” He’s so much more than that, judging by the press run Marvel just went on, that breaking him down to being the black Spider-Man is… it’s garbage, it’s lazy, it’s stupid.” [4thletter!]

Comics | Marvel has released an “audio edition” of Daredevil #1, “so that the visually-impaired could enjoy the dawn of a new era for DD, his friends and his enemies.” It features the voice talents of Dardevil writer Mark Waid and Marvel editors Tom Brennan, Ellie Pyle and Jordan D. White. [Marvel.com]

Creators | Tom Neely, creator of The Wolf, discusses page structure and the hard work of revision in the latest installment of his interview with Brian Heater. [The Daily Cross Hatch]

Diamond Comic Distributors

Retailing | Rich Johnston reports that water damage to many DC Comics titles at Diamond’s warehouse in Cheshire, England has led to “major allocations on a number of comic books shipping this week” around the country. [Bleeding Cool]

Comic strips | A reader writes in to complain about excessive swearing in Stephan Pastis’ strip Pearls Before Swine, although its all of the $%&#@ variety). Seriously. Laugh Tracks has an interesting followup. [The Baltimore Sun]

Review | Serdar Yegulalp reviews Jiro Taniguchi’s one-shot zombie apocalypse manga Velveteen & Mandala. [Genji Press]

Review | John Hilgart takes a long look at IDW’s deluxe edition of Elaine Lee and Michael Kaluta’s sci-fi saga Starstruck. [The Comics Journal]

Review | Richard Bruton writes about Sean Azzopardi and Douglas Noble’s creepy suburban-horror comic Built of Blood and Bricks; even if you don’t have time to read it, click through to see the art. [The Forbidden Planet blog]

Conventions | Christopher Butcher asks his Twitter followers what advice they have for making conventions more financially rewarding for creators, and they answer with lots of suggestions. [Twitter]

• Announcements at the Marvel panel included Jeff Parker and Patrick Zircher’s Hulk of Arabia arc, a new Deadpool arc, an Avengers Academy recruitment drive and Villains for Hire, a new spin on the Heroes for Hire concept. Also in the works: A series of Avengers Origins one-shots.

• T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents is coming back in November; the new comics will be written by Nick Spencer and drawn by Wes Craig.

• At the Marvel Digital panel, Marvel senior vice president of publishing David Gabriel announced that Marvel will begin simultaneous print and digital release of its Spider-Man and X-Men comics, starting next week with Amazing Spider-Man #666 and Spider Island line.

• DC released art for several of their New 52 comics. They also revealed Lois Lane’s new boyfriend.

• At the Vertigo panel, Executive Editor Karen Berger announced a new graphic novel called Marzi that would ba marketed to both young and old readers. She also said that Vertigo will launch a new Halloween anthology in October and a totally new series later this year.

• Writer Tim Seely (Hack/Slash) and artist Victor Drujiniu will collaborate on a four-issue The Occultist miniseries for Dark Horse.

• Following up on yesterday’s announcement of a Wally Wood collection, IDW announced John Romita, Sr.’s Amazing Spider-Man: Artist’s Edition. Also, IDW also announced that it is teaming up with DC to create the crossover Star Trek/Legion of Superheroes. Chris Roberson will write the comic, which will be published by IDW.

• In one of Riverdale’s unlikelier pairings, the Archie gang will meet KISS. Archie Comics and IDW share the KISS license now; IDW’s KISS series will launch next year.

• Drawn & Quarterly announced Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City, the latest in cartoonist Guy Delisle’s graphic memoirs-slash-travelogues.

• Van Jensen and Dusty Higgins announced a third volume of Pinocchio: Vampire Slayer.

• Anime Diet liveblogged the Stan Lee/Yoshiki and “Manga: Lost in Translation” panels.

• The Japanese publisher Square Enix is offering a free first volume of any of its 15 online manga, including Fullmetal Alchemist and Black Butler, for con-goers and Facebook fans, through August 10.

• Director Robert Rodriguez said he is still working with Frank Miller on the script for a Sin City 2 movie, but he plans to make it this year.

• Hugh Jackman confirmed that he will fight the Silver Samurai in Fox’s The Wolverine.

Orchid

Comic-Con International in San Diego hasn’t officially started yet—tonight was Preview Night—but the news has been rolling in. So let’s take a look at today’s announcements

• Dark Horse announced three new projects earlier this evening. They will publish a comics adaptation of The Strain, the sci-fi/vampire trilogy by filmmaker Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan. The comic will be written by David Lapham with art by Mike Huddleston.

• They also announced a series written by Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello with art by Scott Hepburn. Orchid is about a 16-year-old prostitute in a dystopian future “becoming the Spartacus of whores.” Each issue will come with a music track by Morello.

• And finally on the Dark Horse front, they will publish comics set in the young vampire world of P.C. Cast’s House of Night novel series. It will be co-written by Kent Dallan with art by Joëlle Jones. You can see a trailer promoting all three new books on YouTube.

• IDW announced the Wally Wood Artist’s Edition, the third in a series that also includes Dave Stevens’ Complete Rocketeer and Walter Simonson’s The Mighty Thor Artist’s Edition.

• Archaia announced Cow Boy, an all-ages graphic novel created by Nate Cosby and Chris Eliopoulos and featuring an impressive array of guest writers.

• 12-Gauge Comics will release a southern-friend anthology called Country Ass-Whuppin’ later this year to raise money for the Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund in Alabama. Participants include Kody Chamberlain, Jason Aaron and more.

• DC Comics is doing a comic adaptation of the Uncharted video game series.

The Avengers poster

• The digital comics app Panelfly is relaunching as both a comics reader and a transmedia storytelling platform that will incorporate videos, blogs, and even Twitter.

• Marvel launched the official website for Joss Whedon’s The Avengers movie, although there isn’t much on it yet.

• Sony released the official trailer for the upcoming Amazing Spider-Man film.

• 1970s comic Captain Canuck has apparently been optioned for film.

• Walden Media has optioned the SLG title Rex Libris, created by James Turner.

• Activision revealed release dates for X-Men Destiny — Sept. 27 — and Spider-Man: Edge of Time — Oct. 4.

Digital Manga has been aggressive about expanding its business in several different directions, but I didn’t see this one coming: This week, their eManga website is carrying a number of IDW titles, including Doctor Who, Locke & Key, and Silent Hill. Oh, and Astro Boy, of course—the movie adaptation, not Osamu Tezuka’s original.

IDW and Digital Manga couldn’t be more different, except for one thing: They were both early adopters of digital media. Both put their wares on the iPhone back in the days when every issue of a comic was a single app, and both have experimented with different formats and platforms. IDW isn’t the first outside publisher that Digital has invited over to the eManga site: They also host manga from two potential rivals, Yaoi Press and BLU.

eManga is a Flash-based site, so it won’t work on the iPad, although it should be OK with Android devices. I use it to read manga on my computer, and it works quite well, although the default image size is a bit too small for me (there’s a zoom button). It’s streaming, so you have to have an internet connection to read your comics; there is no way to download from the site.

The eManga site works on a point system: You purchase points with a credit card for about a penny a point, with a volume discount, and redeem them for books, so I can’t give exact prices here, but a rough comparison is possible. If you’re paying a penny a point, the Doctor Who graphic novels are $9.99, half the original retail price. Locke & Key: Welcome to Lovecraft is a downright bargain at $4.99, although you’d do better buying those Astro Boy comics in dead-tree format via Amazon. One nice thing about the eManga site is that it offers samples of each comic, so you can try before you buy.

These prices are comparable to prices on the iPad via Comics+ or the IDW app. Locke & Key: Welcome to Lovecraft is sold on the app as a six-issue miniseries at 99 cents per issue; Doctor Who: Agent Provocateur is six issues at $1.99 each. In both cases, eManga is a bit cheaper. IDW experimented with putting some of its graphic novels on the iPad as single apps, and those prices are the same as eManga—$7.99 for Tribes: The Dog Years and $9.99 for the Star Trek movie adaptation. Most of the books on the eManga site aren’t available as graphic novel apps, though.

Every comics system has its pluses and minuses. If you choose eManga, you can only read your comics on the internet—you can’t download them to read on the subway—but you don’t have to spend $600 on an iPad. With Comics+, you can download them but you pay a bit more. Print is completely portable, but it’s also the most expensive option.

Ever since his U.S. debut as an animated cartoon in the 1960s, Speed Racer has been zooming in and out of our consciousness. Like so many cool things, the cartoon started out in Japan as a manga, Mach GoGoGo, and was transformed into the anime that transfixed a generation of American kids. NOW Comics and Wildstorm both published American versions of the Speed Racer story, and the original manga was released in various formats. In 2008, Digital Manga released a deluxe boxed set of the entire original manga and IDW re-released the NOW and Wildstorm comics along with a new mini-series; all this was timed to coincide with the release of the Speed Racer movie.

After that, things got quiet, but last week a teaser image appeared indicating that Speed Racer is coming round the track once more. The image doesn’t give us too much to go on—no publisher or release date is listed—except for the creative team, but that is worthy of note. Topping the list is Tommy Yune, whose blend of manga and American styles were a big hit with Wildstorm’s version of Speed Racer. Also on board is veteran DC and Marvel writer Len Wein, co-creator of Swamp Thing and Wolverine. Robby Musso does work for IDW, the most recent publisher of Speed Racer comics, which makes me suspect they are behind this one as well. Lee Kohse and James Rochelle round out the creative team. With a pit crew like this, Speed Racer is off to a roaring start.

Victor Santos is showing off his Godzilla samples that got him the gig following Phil Hester on IDW’s Kingdom of Monsters series. Santos takes over in issue #5.

That’s only part of the drawing above; click through to see the whole thing, with and without inks.

Just like Graphicly, which announced its own set of Nook Color apps earlier this week, iVerse is releasing each graphic novel as a single app. Nook Color apps don’t seem to allow for in-app buying (I can’t check this as I don’t have an actual Nook), but this also fits the basic idea of the Nook, which is designed to be an e-reader first and foremost. Single-book apps, rather than generic comics apps, make more sense in the Nook ecosystem, as does the notion of buying a complete graphic novel rather than a series of single-issue comics.

What’s next? With two of the three major digital comics publishers making Nook Color apps, can comiXology be far behind? We checked in with comiXology CEO David Steinberger, who gave us something that sounded like a definite “maybe”:

We don’t pre-announce our plans, but we’ve stated that we’ll be on every platform that comics look great on and has a good market size. The nook may fit that requirement.

It’s not clear how the apps differ from the graphic novels already available through the Nook Store, except perhaps to expand the offerings. iOS apps started as single-issue apps as well, so maybe in-app buying is in the future.

Fantagraphics plans to have creators signing at their booth pretty much the whole time, with a roster that includes Kim Dietch, Peter Bagge, Dash Shaw, Michael Kupperman, Gahan Wilson, and others too numerous to mention—check out the full list at their blog. Their people are also going to be involved in a ton of panels, and with a four-table block (J1, J2, K1, K2), they should be hard to miss.

Abrams will have their usual crowd of A-list creators at their booth: Jerry Robinson, Michael Uslan, Chip Kidd, Al Jaffee, and Craig Yoe. Jaffee will receive the 2011 Klein Award for volunteer of the year, and Uslan and Robinson will be on the panel Batman, the Joker and Beyond on Sunday.

Top Shelf will be debuting two new books, Liar’s Kiss by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, and Night Animals, by Brecht Evens. Both Skillman and Evens will be there to show off their new books. Jess Fink will also be in attendance, although her Chester 5000 isn’t due out until May.

Evens will also be at the Drawn + Quarterly booth (B5, C5, C6) along with Joe Ollmann, Pascal Girard, Adrian Tomine, and Jillian Tamaki; check their blog for signing and panel times. They will be debuting three books at the show: Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, by Shigeru Mizuki; Reunion, by Pascal Girard; and The Klondike, by Zach Worton.

Fanfare UK will have advance copies of Farm 54 fresh from the printer—it’s not due out until May—so stop by booth K13 and take a look. Writer Galit Seliktar will be there on Sunday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. to sign copies.

Creators at the First Second booth will include Nick Bertozzi (Lewis & Clark) and Nick Abadzis (Laika) on Saturday and Ben Hatke (Zita the Spacegirl) and Tracy White (How I Made It To Eighteen) on Sunday.

It doesn’t look like IDW will have a table of their own, but Craig Yoe will be there with his latest anthology, Archie: A Celebration of America’s Favorite Teenagers, published by IDW under their Yoe Books imprint.

Dave Wachter's cover for That Hellbound Train #1

Chris Ryall has a preview up at his blog of That Hellbound Train, a three-part miniseries based on Robert Bloch’s Hugo-winning short story “That Hell Bound Train.” (Bloch is best known as the author of Psycho, the novel on which the Alfred Hitchcock movie was based.) The story is a classic deal-with-the-devil tale with a nice twist at the end, and it should make a great coimc.

Writers Joe and John Lansdale are doing the adaptation; you may remember that Joe is also the writer for IDW’s latest iteration of 30 Days of Night. David Wachter, who was nominated for an Eisner for his work on The Guns of Shadow Valley, is the artist for the project. On his blog, David shows how he developed the first cover.

Incidentally, Googling “That Hellbound Train” (I was looking for folk sources) turns up some unrelated but very tasty music videos, which doubtless will make a good soundtrack for reading the comic.

This wasn't in the job description! IDW employees flee Godzilla on the Comic-Con variant cover

IDW is launching Godzilla: King of Monsters at the end of March, and it will be their biggest single-issue launch ever, according to editor-in-chief Chris Ryall, because of a promotion that got a lot bigger than they expected: They offered every retailer who ordered 500 or more copies of the comic a custom cover showing Godzilla crushing their comic store. They expected about a dozen retailers to take part, but they ended up with over 70, which makes for a pretty impressive print run.

Ryall credits IDW employee Chris Mowry, who works in the production department, with coming up with the idea, which must have brought a few headaches, as the art team had only two weeks to do all the custom covers. Still, the result is an instant collectible as well as a great talking point. IDW will also have special variant covers for Comic-Con featuring IDW employees fleeing the giant monster. With a well known property and the creative team of Eric Powell, Tracy March, and Phil Hester, the comic already had a lot going for it, but the custom covers put it over the top. For those who are curious, Rich Johnston has posted all the variant covers at Bleeding Cool.