Scholastic
Robot Reviews: Kids’ comics roundup
Little Mouse Gets Ready
by Jeff Smith
Toon Books, 32 pages, $12.95.
Children’s comics don’t get more basic than this. Little Mouse wants to go play in the barn with his brothers and sisters, but first he has to get dressed. He does so step by step showing readers important things like how to button your shirt (and illustrating a narrative sequence of events). Then there’s a punchline and rimshot, the end.
Smith’s art is lush and spry here. I especially liked Little Mouse’s Warner Brothers-style reaction at the end. There’s no denying it’s a cute book, made by an extremely talented guy. But this is really a book for preschoolers and those just learning to read. If you know someone like that, then Little Mouse will make a great gift. But older Bone fan, even those still in elementary school, aren’t going to get too much out of this, beyond a chuckle or two at the end.
SDCC ’09 | Jeff Smith posts Bone: Tall Tales cover
Bone: Tall Tales
Next to Marvel’s big news today, the best revelation coming out of SDCC for me so far is the announcement that Jeff Smith is going to do more Bone books. And, in case you were wondering what these new series will look like, Smith has the cover art up for Tall Tales and a rough for Quest for the Spark over at his Web site.
SDCC ’09 | Day One
Comic-Con
After a bevy of announcements earlier in the week about movie deals and video-game adaptations, Comic-Con International officially kicked off Thursday with news of the hiring of an industry veteran, and three significant book acquisitions.
IDW Publishing revealed that Bob Schreck, a longtime senior group editor at DC Comics, will join the company as senior editor in October. He’ll focus on developing new projects and new talent.
An editor at Comico and Dark Horse, Schreck co-founded Oni Press with Joe Nozemack in 1996. Three years later he joined DC Comics, where he oversaw the Batman line and, eventually, edited the All-Star titles and developed new projects for Vertigo. He was laid off in January during a wave of major cutbacks by Warner Bros.
Day One’s major publishing news came from Scholastic, Drawn & Quarterly and Dark Horse.
Scholastic announced that Jeff Smith will release new Bone titles with co-writer Tom Sniegoski, beginning in summer 2010 with Bone: Tall Tales. The fall will see the expansion of the Bone world with the first book in the Quest for the Spark trilogy, overseen and illustrated by Smith and written by Sniegoski.
Drawn & Quarterly acquired the rights to Daniel Clowes’ new graphic novel Wilson, the cartoonist’s first book not to be originally serialized in Eightball. The title, described as a “portrait of the modern egoist,” will debut in May 2010.
Dark Horse, meanwhile, rolled out an overview of its convention announcements, which include plans to release all three volumes of the popular European noir series Blacksad.
In other Thursday highlights: