Ryan Dunlavey
Food or Comics? | This week’s comics on a budget
Batman Inc. #7
Welcome to Food or Comics?, where every week we talk about what comics we’d buy at our local comic shop based on certain spending limits — $15 and $30 — as well as what we’d get if we had extra money or a gift card to spend on a “Splurge” item.
Check out Diamond’s release list or ComicList, and tell us what you’re getting in our comments field.
Chris Mautner
If I had $15:
I’d pick up Batman Inc. #7 ($2.99) and that would be it, so afterwards I’d pat myself on the back for not blowing my whole $15.
If I had $30:
I’d go with Farm 54 ($25), a new hardbound collection of stories by the brother and sister team of Galit and Gilad Seliktar, courtesy of Fanfare/Ponent Mon. It’s basically a semi-autobiographical collection of tales capturing a young woman at various critical stages in her youth, adolescence and young adulthood, all done in a tentative, wispy watercolor. Lovely stuff to flip through, at the very least.
- June 28, 2011 @ 05:00 PM by JK Parkin
Dunlavey teams with leukemia survivor to bring Super Shot to life
Super Shot
This is a really wonderful story … comic creator Ryan Dunlavey recently teamed up with 12-year-old Luke Robinson from Dickson, Tennessee to create a new comic called Super Shot that’s being distributed at area hospitals. Robinson, who has survived open-heart surgery and leukemia over the course of his short life, asked the Make-a-Wish Foundation for the opportunity to visit Marvel Comics and create his own comic.
“Luke created and designed the characters and came up with the story ideas – I wrote the script and drew the artwork under the supervision of then-Marvel Comics editor Nate Cosby,” Dunlavey said on his blog. “This past week the book was printed and distributed for free to hospitals in Luke’s hometown area of Tennessee – the story is an origin of Luke’s characters Super Shot and Dr. Shrink, who battle the Virus in a story that demonstrates that kids need not be afraid of doctors or medical care. This was all Luke’s vision and I was just lucky to be asked along for the ride.”
In addition to area hospitals, Robinson plans to debut the book at The Great Escape in Nashville later this month.
- February 25, 2011 @ 02:30 PM by JK Parkin
Copyright Comics: The swindling of Siegel and Shuster
Comic Book Comics, by Ryan Dunlavey and Fred Van Lente, chronicles the history of comics in comic-book form. Their latest story, posted in full at their blog, is a short history of copyright grabs by comics publishers, featuring Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Jack Kirby and Joker creator Jerry Robinson make appearances as well. It’s interesting history and a painless way to learn a bit about copyright law and its pitfalls.
(Via Comics Worth Reading.)
- December 8, 2010 @ 10:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Ryan Dunlavey teams with chef Amanda Cohen on comic cookbook
Art from "The Dirt Candy Cookbook" proposal by Ryan Dunlavey
If the promise of Anthony Bourdain’s Get Jiro! isn’t enough to whet the appetites of foodies and comics fans alike, now Amanda Cohen, chef-owner of Dirt Candy in New York City, has announced she’s collaborating with artist Ryan Dunlavey (Action Philosophers) on a graphic novel cookbook. Dirt Candy is an acclaimed vegetarian, or perhaps simply vegetable, restaurant that opened two years ago.
“I’m not sure if ‘graphic novel’ is the best term here since it’s a cookbook and not a novel,” Cohen writes on her restaurant’s website, “but that’s the best description I can come up with.”
The cookbook will be published in summer 2012 by Clarkson Potter, an imprint of The Crown Publishing Group.
(via The Village Voice, Eater National)
- November 2, 2010 @ 12:00 PM by Kevin Melrose
EXCLUSIVE preview: Fall of the Hulks: M.O.D.O.K. #1
Fall of the Hulks: MO.O.D.O.K.
You might remember that Ryan Dunlavey did a humorous M.O.D.O.K. story last summer for Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited that tied into the events of Dark Reign. Well, he has another M.O.D.O.K. story coming out this week on the site, with this one playing off of the “Fall of the Hulks” storyline. It’ll be up on MDCU on Jan. 6.
Courtesy of Marvel Comics, you can find an exclusive preview of the story after the jump.
Fall of the Hulks: M.O.D.O.K. #1
On-Sale: January 6, 2009
About: M.O.D.O.K. has finally stepped out of the shadows of his hometown bullies and joined the ranks of the Intelligencia alongside fellow “big brain” villains like the Leader, the Mad Thinker, and Red Ghost! But can such a choice assemblage of evil nerds ever truly be free of lame-brain jocks? Find out as the Intelligencia comes face to face with… the Insmelligencia!
Contact:
Jordan White (Editor)
Ryan Dunlavey (Writer, Artist, Inker, Colorist, Letterer)
- January 4, 2010 @ 01:57 PM by JK Parkin
Ryan Dunlavey & ToyFare’s comic-strip mash-ups
Kraven and Hobbes
They’re better known these days for Con Wars and layoffs, but the magazines of Wizard Entertainment have long been capable of producing some pretty funny stuff. Exhibit A: the comic-strip mash-ups artist Ryan Dunlavey has posted on his blog–here and here. Generally written by the ToyFare magazine editorial staff and illustrated by Dunlavey in impeccable approximations of the original styles, the comics take classic strips and mix ‘em up with superheroes, science fiction, and general nerdery, resulting in such mash-up masterpieces as The Thunderkatzenjammer Kids, Spy vs. Spy vs. Alien vs. Predator, Orlando Bloom County, X-Nuts (will Phoenix ever let Good Ol’ Charlie Xavier kick that football?) and much more. Alas, my all-time favorite of the ToyFare/Dunlavey efforts, Ellen Ripley’s Believe It or Not, has yet to be posted, but the rest are still well worth checking out.
- November 2, 2009 @ 03:00 PM by Sean T. Collins
Talking Comics with Tim: Fred Van Lente
Amazing Spider-Man 602
Fred Van Lente is hellbent on getting his name on the cover of every Marvel comic, or so it would seem. I could try to list all the Marvel titles he has written, is writing or will be writing, but we’d never get to the actual interview. Suffice to say that Marvel keeps him busy. And then there’s Action Philosophers (Van Lente’s successful independent collaboration with artist Ryan Dunlavey). Back to Marvel, this week marks the start of his Spider-Man/Chameleon storyline with the release of Amazing Spider-Man 602. Here’s the official word on Van Lente–he “is the New York Times bestselling author of Incredible Hercules (with Greg Pak) and Marvel Zombies 3, as well as the American Library Association award-winning Action Philosophers. His other comics incldue Comic Book Comics, MODOK’s 11, X Men Noir and Amazing Spider-Man.” Van Lente was kind enough to do an email interview with me about his various projects.
Tim O’Shea: Marvel is clearly pleased with X-Men Noir, given that they have announced a follow-up with the same team, Mark Of Cain. Given that a great deal of your writing for Marvel is within the “main” Marvel U, how liberating is at as a writer to get to play around with characters in a Noir universe?
Fred Van Lente: I always like to have big, bloody Grand Guignol endings, with bodies heaped up on stage like at the end of a Shakespeare tragedy. Nothing says “dramatic climax” like “everybody dies.” One of the nice things about working with the X-Men franchise in the Noirverse is that it has so many characters there are always some left over no matter how many you knock off. XMN1 we whacked Jean Grey, Magneto, Mastermind, Blob, Unus, Beast, Banshee, Rogue, Iceman, Gambit and Qucksilver, but we still had Wolverine, Puck, Cyclops, Angel, Professor X, and the Scarlet Witch to kick around.
In Mark of Cain they’ll be joined by a large bulk of the “All-New, All-Different” cast, including Noir analogues of Juggernaut (obviously), Emma Frost, Nightcrawler, Storm, and Colossus, and a few surprise appearances as well.
We’ve already been asked about a third installment, so my co-creator Dennis Calero and I will have to be careful not to kill everybody off. Even the X-Men have their limits in terms of mortality.
- August 10, 2009 @ 02:00 PM by Tim O'Shea