iPad
The Robot 6 Holiday Gift-Giving Guide, Part 3
Flex Mentallo Man of Muscle Mystery Deluxe Edition
Four calling birds, three french hens, two turtle doves … welcome to day three of our holiday gift-giving guide, where we ask comic pros:
1. What comic-related gift or gifts would you recommend giving this year, and why?
2. What gift (comic or otherwise) is at the top of your personal wish list, and why?
A great big thank you to everyone who helped us out this year, including the ones who’ll be showcased tomorrow. Be sure to come back then for our big wrap-up!
Mike Carey
1. The Simpsons/Futurama Crossover Crisis. Leela helps Maggie deal with school bullies. Homer and Bender go drinking. England invades the USA. Come on, you need this.
Flex Mentallo: Man of Muscle Mystery. The most ludicrous and wonderful supporting character from Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol got his own miniseries, and it’s just now being reprinted for the first time. I loved this miniseries when it first came out, and I’m gearing up to love it all over again.
Starstruck. The great Lee/Kaluta sci-fi epic, now between two robust hard covers. I should declare an interest: I wrote the intro. But I did that because it’s awesome beyond the feasible limits of possible awesomeness.
2. A Very Peculiar Practice, season 2. Wow. Just how much of my life right now is ’80s nostalgia? I think I need to get some professional help. Probably from Duran Duran.
Mike Carey has written numerous comics (and a few novels) over his career, including Lucifer, My Faith In Frankie, Ultimate Fantastic Four and Hellblazer. He currently writes X-Men: Legacy and The Unwritten.
The Robot 6 Holiday Gift-Giving Guide, Part 2
Harvey Comics Classics Vol. 1
Yesterday we kicked off our holiday gift-giving guide, where we asked creators like Jim McCann, Matt Kindt and more for gift suggestion and what they’d want to receive this year. Today we’re back with six more creators, and we asked them the same questions:
1. What comic-related gift or gifts would you recommend giving this year, and why?
2. What gift (comic or otherwise) is at the top of your personal wish list, and why?
So without further ado, let the joy continue …
Jeff Parker
1. If you have young children, you can give them hours of quality time with any of Dark Horse’s Harvey Comics collections. My kids have been poring through them repeatedly. I’ll be following up with old back issues of Casper, Dot, Richie Rich and Hot Stuff from the local comics shops; they’re always very cheap.
2. I would not sneeze at getting that Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes volume from Fantagraphics.
Jeff Parker is the writer of Hulk, Thunderbolts and the webcomic Bucko.
Tim Seeley
All-Star Superman
1. I’m a firm believer in buying comics for everyone on your list, even if they aren’t an avid fan. Make ‘em a fan! All-Star Superman for the superhero fan, Dungeons & Dragons from IDW for the gamer, Habibi for the sophisticated reader, and, of course, my Hack/Slash Omnibi for the horror fan. Or, if you’re planning on dropping a bit more, might I suggest an iPad, loaded with comics apps?
2. I want the collected version of the web strip OGLAF, which I thoroughly enjoy. I wouldn’t mind a CS Moore Witchblade statue to inspire me while I write.
Tim Seeley seems to be all over the place lately, whether it’s writing the new Bloodstrike series from Extreme or Witchblade for Top Cow, drawing issues of Marvel’s Generation Hope, or working on his own creations like Hack/Slash and Jack Kraken. There’s a good chance I forgot something, but you can follow him on Twitter to learn more.
The Robot 6 Holiday Gift-Giving Guide, Part 1
‘Tis the season for decking those halls, trimming those trees, lighting the menorah and, of course, figuring out what to buy for your friends and family. To help give you some ideas, we reached out to a few comic creators, asking them:
1. What comic-related gift or gifts would you recommend giving this year, and why?
2. What gift (comic or otherwise) is at the top of your personal wish list, and why?
We’ve gotten back a bunch of suggestions, which we’ll run between now and the end of the week. So let the merriment commence …
Jim McCann
1. Exclusive 2011 Janet Lee Holiday Ornaments
Every year, Janet does about 12 ornaments, three sets of four. This year, she has done Hipster Animals, Scary Toys and Art Nouveau Angels. They are signed and dated, and at the end of the season, that’s it! She stops making them. I’ve been collecting them since 2007, and now our tree is almost completely filled with Janet’s art. You can buy them exclusively through her Etsy shop.
Oh, and if you’re REALLY nice, she MAY have a very limited Dapper Men ornament or two. Just ask!
2. This year, for myself, I’m going with a mix of Blu-Rays (portable Blu-Ray player, please, Santa!) and books. But the thing I’m REALLY excited for is the hardcover edition of the Complete Ripley novels, by Patricia Highsmith. Most people only know of Ms. Highsmith through The Talented Mr. Ripley (and classic film lovers through Strangers On a Train). There were actually five Tom Ripley novels, and the collection looks amazing. Why these books? My spouse recently Tweeted a quote from John Lithgow that struck me as a writer: “Duality, duplicity, truth and deception, good becoming bad and vice-versa are crucial elements of great storytelling.” Highsmith was and remains an unsung hero of mastering that, so I hope I learn something in the process!
Happy Holidays from the Dapper Lariosa-McCann household!
Jim McCann is the writer of Return of the Dapper Men and its upcoming sequel, Marvel Zombies Christmas Carol, Hawkeye:Blindspot and the upcoming Mind The Gap.
British comics bring mischief to the iPad
I grew up reading British comics, but because I lived in the United States most of the time, I couldn’t just trot down to my local newsagent to get the latest Beano or Dandy. My aunts used to send me bundles of them every now and then from Ireland, and the arrival of these big rolls of comics, wrapped in brown paper and tied up with string, was always a special event in our household.
The Beano and The Dandy featured one- or two-page stories, mostly about mischievous kids punking their parents, their teachers, or the local bully, and they had a goofy sensibility that was missing from the smoother, blander American titles we got at home — Archie, Richie Rich, Little Dot.
While they are less exotic than a package from a foreign land, the brand-new Beano and Dandy iPad apps still deliver the goods. Both apps offer the full weekly comic at a reasonable price ($1.99 for most issues, 99 cents for one of the Dandys), plus a handful of back issues for free. The Beano is almost unchanged from the days of my youth, with old favorites like Roger the Dodger and the Bash Street Kids still causing rather mild trouble for all around them, while The Dandy is a bit edgier, with more short strips, fart jokes, and a comic called The Bogies that’s about boogers. (It’s funny and not particularly mucus-oriented but … eew.) However, it also features the very talented Jamie Smart breathing new life into the classic Desperate Dan (about an enormous cowboy who doesn’t know his own strength) and contributing a delightfully goofy newer strip “Pre-Skool Prime Minister.”
Get CIA: Operation Ajax app for free—for now
CIA: Operation Ajax is a standalone graphic novel iPad app about the CIA-led coup d’etat that overthrew the democratically elected prime minister of Iran and pushed the Shah, who had previously been more of a figurehead, into a position of power. The story is fictional, but it’s based on a factual account of the 1953 coup, Steven Kinzer’s book All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, and Kinzer acted as the story editor.
This is the first graphic novel from publisher Cognito Comics, and it has been in the works for a while—the first press release came out over a year ago. The app exploits a lot of the added features that the iPad makes possible: The story is told with limited animation that includes both the flow of the panels and the action within them, and the reader can click away to view historical documentation, including newsreels and CIA files. I read the prologue and part of the first chapter, and so far it seemed like a story that is told mostly in single panels, with a lot of variation and interesting effects—you’re not just zooming from one rectangle to another. It crashed a few times while I was test-driving it this morning, but when I restarted it resumed at the point where the crash occurred. Hopefully that will get fixed in the near future.
The regular price of the app is $7.99, but it is free “for a limited time,” which doesn’t seem to be specified anywhere. I would grab it today, just to be sure.
(Via GeekDad.)
Lovelace & Babbage gets its own app
Oh, the delicious irony of it: Sydney Padua, creator of the delightful quasi-historical webcomic Lovelace & Babbage, has launched an iPad app, thus bringing the parents of the computer to its most recent incarnation. The app is free and includes one complete story, with another available for $2.99.
Like a long-form Kate Beaton comic, Lovelace & Babbage casts Charles Babbage (inventor of the first programmable computer) and Ada Lovelace (the first programmer) as steampunk heroes fighting a variety of evildoers under the aegis of Queen Victoria herself. Padua sets up her stories in an alternate universe but brings in plenty of real historical figures, and both the comic and the app are graced with plenty of footnotes. Padua has a talent for picking out the odd but interesting bits of history, so while the footnotes are scholarly, they are not dry.
Here’s some more good news for Lovelace & Babbage fans: Padua recently announced she is taking time off her day job to focus on her comics, an effort that has already borne fruit in the form of Vampire Poets, a prologue in rhyme accompanied by a few actual contemporary poems about her heroes.
Jason Shiga’s Meanwhile coming to the iPad
Meanwhile
If there was ever a graphic novel that was ready-made for its own iPad app, it would have to be Jason Shiga’s Meanwhile. The interactive “Choose Your Own Adventure”-like graphic novel came with tabs at the side of each page directing readers to choose the next step in the story — if they could avoid wiping out all of mankind in the process, of courses.
In this case it seems like turning the graphic novel into an app could actually make it easier to read, as the device does the work of keeping track of where you are in the story and, in theory, lets you move backward and forward to see the various plot points. So it’s no surprise that Shiga has been working with interactive fiction writer Andrew Plotkin on a version for the various iOS devices.
“I picked up Meanwhile at PAX East in 2010 … I immediately fell in love with it — a thoughtful, beautifully-designed take on the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure genre,” Plotkin said on his blog. “When I got my iPad, I immediately said ‘That. I have to do that. In people’s hands. Interactively. It will happen.’”
The Meanwhile app is due out this fall.
Kurt Cobain graphic novel to rise again on iTunes
A British firm called Musicroom has published a digital graphic novel about Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. The basis for this is the graphic novel Godspeed: The Kurt Cobain Graphic, originally published in 2003. Here’s a bit of background on Godspeed, which apparently caused a bit of controversy but not enough to sustain its own Wikipedia page. (Check out the mixed reviews on that Amazon link.) Interestingly, according to Amazon, a new edition of the print graphic novel just came out in April.
Musicroom seems to specialize in sheet music and music instruction materials, both digital and print, and the graphic novel looks like a bit of a departure for them, but there is something very logical about this. In the ideal case, a graphic novel like this would be packaged with some of Cobain’s music and maybe some video clips as well, making full use of the iPad’s capability. That doesn’t seem to be the case here, alas—from the front page, it just looks like a print graphic novel reformatted for the iPad. And there is something kind of weird about the image of Angel Kurt weeping over a set of menu options. Perhaps they should have thought about redesigning the cover for the app.
(Via the Seattle PI blog, which has a preview of the app.)
IDW brings graphic novels to the iBook store
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.
Apple insists on edits to Underground Classics app
Warning: Pretty much every image in the linked article is flagrantly, joyously NSFW. If your eyeballs disintegrate and hair grows on the palms of your hands when you click the link, well, don’t say we didn’t warn you.
Underground comics are by their nature transgressive, so it comes as no surprise that the Comix Classics: Underground Comics app produced by Toura, an app platform often used by museums, and Comic Art Productions and Exhibits, ran afoul of Apple’s content guidelines. As Kim Munson, who designed the app, explained to Michael Dooley of Imprint Magazine, the app is not a digital comic but “more of an interactive art exhibit.” It’s based on James Danky and Denis Kitchen’s book Underground Classics: The Transformation of Comics into Comix, and it contains all the comics from the book and the exhibit plus some new graphics.
Oddly, when the app was submitted to Apple, the iPad version was accepted as is (with a string of warnings to potential consumers about sex, nudity, etc.) but the iPhone version was rejected for “excessively objectionable or crude content.” Munson removed 16 images, which apparently shifted the ratio enough to make the Apple folks happy. (For those who like to skip straight to the good stuff, the deleted images are at the link.) Munson noted that “The deletions were plainly based purely on the visual representation, not the context of the pieces.”
The Smurfs smurf over to comiXology
ComiXology smurfs another one: They will publish a dedicated Smurfs app for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch that will include seven full Smurfs comics. Like other comiXology apps, the app itself is free, and the comics are available in-app for $3.99 each; the corresponding print volumes retail for $5.99 paperback, $10.99 hardcover, so that’s a pretty smurf deal.
The Smurf comics are published by Papercutz, the all-ages imprint of NBM Publishing, and Papercutz publisher Terry Nantier smurfed the opportunity to point out that the little blue fellows started out as comics before they were animated cartoons. “I grew up with these comics, they truly are classics. It’s a shame that these books, which have been in print forever everywhere else on Earth, have been out-of-print for so long in America, which is why we decided to publish them in print and digitally,” he said.
Although you need an iThing to get the app and buy the comics, they sync with comiXology’s Comics reader, which is available for web browsers and Android devices as well as iOS.
Osamu Tezuka is coming to your iPad
Can’t get enough of Astro Boy and Black Jack? Here’s some good news for fans of Osamu Tezuka, a.k.a. “the father of manga”: Tezuka Productions is putting out an iPad app containing 62 volumes of Tezuka’s work and 39 episodes of “Motion Manga.” The manga are translated (the motion manga are subtitled) and stored in the cloud, and you can access all of it for a subscription fee of $9.99 per month. It’s already in the iTunes store. The service will expand to Android tablets in the fall and winter, and a host of other foreign-language versions are under consideration.
I downloaded the app, which is free, onto my iPad. The selection isn’t bad: In addition to Black Jack and Astro Boy, it offers volumes of Ode to Kirihito, Apollo’s Song, Dororo, Phoenix, Buddha, MW, and Adolf. (One has to wonder how some of this content got through the iTunes store’s screening.) It’s not very responsive, though: I got the opening screen you see above, but the touch controls to download the magazines and configure the app didn’t respond until I held my finger down on them for a while. This happens sometimes with iPad apps—Comics+ used to be very slow and you had to almost hit the screen to make it work, before they upgraded it—but by now I’d like to see that kind of bug worked out. One more beef, as long as I’m complaining: It’s customary to offer some free samples to entice people to buy, but all you get with this app is an invitation to subscribe. I’d rather pay a few dollars more for one of Vertical’s beautifully produced volumes of Black Jack or Dororo and get to keep it forever, but if you want to gorge yourself at an all-you-can-eat Tezuka buffet, this does offer a lot of manga for a decent price.
IDW goes online at eManga.com
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.
SuperGay, ‘the first video game about a gay superhero,’ launches
SuperGay & the Attack of His Ex-Girlfriends
Barcelona-based developer Klicrainbow has launched SuperGay & the Attack of His Ex-Girlfriends, an app for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch billed as “the first video game about a gay superhero.” I didn’t look into the assertion, but I can’t think of any other gay-superhero video games.
The comic book-inspired storyline follows Tom Palmer, an idealistic young scientist who works at Genetic Corp. with his beautiful fiancée Ilsa Himmler and her father Dr. Arnold Himmler to develop a cloning project for humanitarian purposes. But when he discovers that Ilsa and Arnold have been secretly negotiating with foreign leaders to sell their work for military purposes, Tom searches for an escape. When a failed experiment transforms the young scientist into SuperGay, “the greatest superhero of all modern times,” he uses his newfound abilities — including Gay Power and Rainbow Ray — to try to stop his evil ex-girlfriend and her clone army.
In the game, SuperGay races, fights and … dances … his way through 32 levels to stop an imminent nuclear war. Check out the trailer and additional game art after the break.
Disney Publishing Worldwide launches its Disney Comics App
Disney Publishing Worldwide this morning launched its free Disney Comics App for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, with more than 50 titles ranging from the classic adventures of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck to newer properties like Cars 2 and Tron: Legacy. Two new comics will be added each week.
Individual stories are 99 cents, with themed bundles available for $3.99 through In-App Purchase. The app debuts in the United States and will be available in more than 80 countries. It will be available in additional markets later this year.
Disney boasts that the app offers “a new, director-style reading experience,” with readers allowed to choose portrait or landscape mode, automatic or manual smart paneling, and double-page spreads. Readers also may preview titles before purchase, share their stories on Facebook and save content for offline reading. There’s also a feature that automatically updates readers when stories relating to their favorite characters become available. Also: sound effects!
“Comics are a tremendous part of our heritage and we see great potential and interest in bringing our extensive catalog of Disney Comics to mobile devices,” Russell Hampton, president of Disney Publishing Worldwide, said in a statement. “We create over 25,000 original comic pages each year and it’s critical that we deliver this content to our readers around the world. We have over 1 billion Disney comic readers today, and our Disney Comics App will further broaden that audience.”
Read the official announcement after the break.