Sin City
Ashcan All-Stars cover Sin City on new sketchblog
Miho by Tyler Crook
Shawn Crystal sends word that a stellar group of artists have formed a new sketchblog, Ashcan All-Stars. The line-up includes Crystal, Christopher Mitten, Erik Jones, James Stokoe, Khary Randolph, Moritat, Nathan Fox, Robbi Rodriguez, Ryan Stegman, Sheldon Vella and Tyler Crook. This week the crew kicks off their blog with a bunch of Sin City sketches, while future themes will include Blacksad, Zelda and Skydoll.
I should also point out that Sin City features strippers, so several of the pieces are not safe for work.
Comics college: Frank Miller
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns
Comics College is a monthly feature where we provide an introductory guide to some of the comics medium’s most important auteurs and offer our best educated suggestions on how to become familiar with their body of work.
Strap yourself in for a long read, because this month we’re looking at the rather lengthy and considerable career of one of the most influential comics creators of the past 40 years, Mr. Frank Miller.
Comic Strips to Comic Flicks: Frank Miller movies they haven’t made (yet)
In recent years, we’ve seen a boatload of comic books and graphic novels make their way to the silver screen, from Big Two stalwarts like Spider-Man and Batman to independent titles like Scott Pilgrim and 30 Days Of Night. Amongst the various adaptations, though, some creators have emerged as magnets for Hollywood types — and one of those is Frank Miller.
You could see glimpses of Frank Miller on the screen going as far back as Tim Burton’s Batman and even in the more recent Daredevil, but he didn’t become a name to movie-going audiences until the smash hits 300 and Sin City, both based on his original work. But there’s more to Miller’s oeuvre than just those two seminal works, so we thought we’d point out some overlooked items in his catalog and posit what a film adaptation would look like.
Give Me Liberty – “From the creator of 300 & Sin City and the co-creator of Watchmen.” That’s how any promotion for this would start out, and the movie itself would show a burnt-out husk of a world with humanity pulling itself out from the wreckage. Fronted by the a freedom fighter named Martha Washington, it would cover her humble beginnings to her time in the second Civil War to her death as glimpsed in the recent coda story Miller & artist Dave Gibbons released. I’d love to see Children of Men‘s Alfonso Cuaron on this, and this could be a starring vehicle for Rosario Dawson.
Dark Horse to debut ’1 for $1′ reprints in August
1 for $1: Sin City: The Hard Goodbye
On the heels of similar initiatives from DC Comics, Marvel and Image, Dark Horse has announced its “1 for $1″ program offering reprints of 12 of its most popular comics for $1 each.
The campaign debuts in August with six comics: Aliens vs. Predator, Sin City: The Hard Goodbye, Hellboy: Seed of Destruction, Usagi Yojimbo, Conan and The Goon.
Twenty-eight page comics from creators like Frank Miller, Mike Mignola, Stan Sakai, Kurt Busiek, Cary Nord and Eric Powell — for $1 apiece? That’s tough to beat.
You can see the solicitations for the six titles below:
Straight for the art | New covers for De:Tales, Sin City collections
Dark Horse sent over three new covers that you’ll find when their next round of solicitations go live … first up is the cover for a new edition of Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon’s De:Tales, which collects several of their short stories. The softcover is out of print, so Dark Horse is releasing it as a hardcover in October. If you like their Daytrippers series from Vertigo, you’ll most likely like this:
De:Tales
Miller time: A roundup of Frank Miller items
The Hard Goodbye
Although his Twitter and blog haven’t been updated since March, that doesn’t mean Frank Miller has been idle or forgotten. Witness, a few Miller-related items from the past few days …
- ComicsAlliance reports that Miller was at the MoCCA Festival this past weekend, where he confirmed that he is no longer working on Holy Terror, Batman! So I guess we won’t get to a Batman/Al-Qaeda showdown, at least not one drawn by Miller.
- David Brothers, Chad Nevett, Tim Callahan and Tim O’Neil have teamed up for a series of blog posts called “Booze, Broads, & Bullets,” where they are collectively writing about Miller’s body of work. Nevett, for instance, is hitting the Sin City books, while Brothers has hit stuff like Ronin and Man Without Fear. Check out the entire index over at the 4thletter!
- And speaking of Sin City, Miller tweeted in January about new covers he was doing for the Sin City line of books, and now they’ve popped up officially in the latest Dark Horse solicits.
Straight for the art | Frank Miller’s new Sin City covers
Miho by Frank Miller
He’s only been on Twitter for five days, but already Frank Miller is making the most of his newfound outlet: This afternoon he posted a pair of new cover illustrations for what I assume are new versions of the Sin City trade paperbacks. That’s Miho above, for Family Values; click here to see Dwight from The Big Fat Kill.
Meanwhile, this is a bit on the cryptic side, but there appears to be more art to come: “ps. DINOSAUR is coming next week,” read Miller’s final pre-weekend tweet. That’s a callback to the “really cool dinosaur” he announced having drawn in his Twitter debut. Dare I hope for a full-length Cretaceous-Era Frank Miller thriller?
‘That’s right, thumbsucker. I see you.’
"Schulz City: That Yellow-Shirted Such-and-Such"
Timothy Lim and Jean Luc Pham imagine Charles Schulz’s Peanuts filtered through the mind of Frank Miller in Schulz City: That Yellow-Shirted Such-and-Such. (Part 1, Part 2)
(via Super Punch)