Warner Bros. Animation
Joshua Middleton shares art from Green Lantern animated series
While comics fans may miss seeing new work from Joshua Middleton on comics shelves (the covers to Sword & Sorcery and Before Watchmen were nice!), there’s some consolation in knowing that although the artist isn’t actively illustrating comics he is keeping within the superhero landscape. Middleton recently posted some landscape designs he created for Warner Bros. Animation’s Green Lantern: The Animated Series, which he worked on for some time. What he’s revealed so far is his renditions of Oa, interplanetary headquarters of the Green Lantern Corps. In his brief post, Middleton explains some of the obstacles from an art direction standpoint to the Green Lantern concept and how he overcame them for his work on the series.
“One major problem from an art direction perspective, with Green Lantern: The Animated Series and anything Green Lantern in general, is the overabundance of green,” Middleton writes. “It can be difficult to come up with nice color palettes when everybody and everything in the scene is glowing green. Matters were not made better with the introduction of Red Lanterns, as we now had the world’s weirdest Christmas to deal with.”
Cartoon Network releases all three ‘Bat Man of Shanghai’ shorts online
Last month we posted shaky footage from a short from Cartoon Network’s DC Nation programming block called “Bat Man of Shanghai.” Featuring an anime-influenced Catwoman in 1930s China, it made me long for the return of DC’s Elseworlds imprint, in which creators reimagined familiar characters in different time periods and settings.
Now, just as the Elseworlds nostalgia had subsided, Cartoon Network has released a three parts of the series online — each spotlights a different character — showing us Bane’s ode to King Kong, Bruce Wayne’s transformation into Bat Man and a high-speed three-way fight.
Joshua Middleton joins The Last Airbender: Legend of Korra
From Joshua Middleton's poster for "The Last Airbender: Legend of Korra"
Following a stint last year as an art director for Warner Bros. Animation’s upcoming Green Lantern: The Animated Series, artist Joshua Middleton announced this week that he’s joined the staff of Nickelodeon’s The Last Airbender: Legend of Korra. And he does so in fine fashion, with the beautiful illustration he created for the limited-edition poster that debuted at Comic-Con International.
The eagerly awaited sequel to the hit Avatar: The Last Airbender, Legend of Korra picks up 70 years after the original series, following the current incarnation of the Avatar, a hotheaded teenage girl from the Southern Water Tribe. The 26-episode series is set to debut in mid-2012. Check out Middleton’s full poster after the break.
‘It all comes out right in the end’: A review of the All-Star Superman movie
All-Star Superman
Warner Bros’ animated adaptation of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All-Star Superman is so reverent and faithful toward the source material that the film, to a certain extent, feels like a pale copy of its inspiration.
That’s not necessarily a damning criticism. Bruce Timm and company took the right approach in attempting to get as close a conversion from page to screen as possible (to do otherwise would have pleased no one). But the comic itself is so rich in detail and episodic in nature that even a trim, streamlined version like this that still manages to hit a number of the right high points feels a bit flabby in comparison. Saying “the book is better” is a rather easy cheat for a critic — the book is almost always better, but I suspect that fans of the comic won’t be able to watch this without running a compare/contrast checklist in their head and find the film coming up a wee bit short. The good news is that those coming fresh to the material probably won’t notice anything wrong at all.
Conan O’Brien and Bruce Timm debut The Flaming C
On last night’s show, talk show host Conan O’Brien visited his neighbors at Warner Bros. Animation and chatted with Creative Director Peter Girardi about various DC Comics characters, including “cowboy dandy” Bat Lash, Ultra the Multi-Alien and Captain Boomerang. He then worked with legendary animator Bruce Timm to create his own alter ego, The Flaming C. Check it out below:
SDCC ’10 | There’s got to be a morning after
Absolute All-Star Superman
A quick round-up of Comic-Con updates, additional announcements and interesting links:
• Warner Bros. Animation officially announced a DC Universe Original Movie based on All-Star Superman, the award-winning series by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. The direct-to-DVD animated feature, set for release in spring 2011, is written by Dwayne McDuffie, who calls the series “one of the greatest stories in comic book history.”
• ICv2.com has additional details about one of the more interesting announcements from the convention, Fantagraphics’ partnership with Disney to publish the complete Mickey Mouse comic strips by Floyd Gottfredson. The collections will be released beginning in May at a rate of two volumes a year. They will retail for $29.99.
• Tom Spurgeon rounds up the selections from the Thursday panel “The Best and Worst of Manga 2010.”
• Speaking of Spurgeon, his “Notes from the Convention Floor” posts are, as usual, well worth reading: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4.
• I enjoyed Todd VanDerWerff’s coverage of Comic-Con for The A.V. Club, including his visit to Artists’ Alley, and this broader post in which he questions whether the convention is “worth serious news coverage.”
• In the midst of Comic-Con, the Los Angeles Times rolled out a look at digital comics and their potential impact on the industry. “Comic book stores have a very close relationship with their customers,” says author and critic Douglas Wolk. “But the old-school collectors are aging, and it may be that the print comic goes away eventually. There is an entire generation of readers who is not interested in physical copies.”
• Grant Morrison chats briefly with IGN.com about his newly announced series Batman Inc.
• Is it just me, or are the round-ups of convention “winners and losers” pretty much meaningless? I’m sure Snakes on a Plane was declared a “winner” of whichever Comic-Con it was promoted — 2006, maybe? — and we all know how that played out.
SDCC ’10 | Peter David writing episodes of Young Justice cartoon
Young Justice
Peter David has announced he’s writing several episodes of Young Justice, the much-anticipated Cartoon Network series based on the DC Comics title he worked on for nearly five years.
“I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to reconnect with the characters,” he wrote this morning on his blog, “even if there are some differences between the guys I wrote and the new incarnation. I would love to tell you all about my first episode, but I’m afraid that it’s … oh, what’s the word … Secret.
Fans of the DC Comics series, published from 1998 to 2003, will undoubtedly recognize the not-so-subtle allusion to Secret (aka Greta Hayes), the incorporeal “mist girl” introduced in the 1998 “fifth-week” one-shot Young Justice: The Secret. She, Wonder Girl and Arrowette joined the original Young Justice line-up of Robin, Superboy and Impulse.
We know from the sneak peek that the animated series will focus on a six-person team of Robin, Superboy, Kid Flash, Miss Martian, Artemis and Aqualad. However, in the words of producer Greg Weisman, that is “really just the tip of the iceberg.” The cartoon will feature a 16-member Justice League that mentors the teens plus, judging from the character sheets, appearances by characters like Speedy/Red Arrow and Mary Marvel.