Over at ICv2, American Born Chinese’s Gene Yang and First Second’s Mark Siegel talk about the success of ABC, and what’s next for Yang. Here’s a clue - it’s a collaboration with Derek Kirk Kim, and it sounds awesome. Mark?:
Derek Kirk Kim is [drawing] it in three really different styles. It’s not so much like a showcase, but it is this kind of virtuoso tour-de-force graphic project. Gene has these three stories that have in common this paradigm shift–turn everything on its head in three different ways; it’s a very exciting project to me. In some ways it builds on what American Born Chinese does in terms of the plot surprises, but it’s also very much in its own right a very surprising set of stories, and then there’s more beyond that on the horizon.
On her blog, illustrator and art director Laurenn McCubbin announces that Showtime has optioned Rent Girl, the 2004 graphic/illustrated novel she created with writer Michelle Tea.
Tony Jonas (Queer as Folk) will be the executive producer. The show will be written by Shawn Schepps (Weeds). McCubbin writes that she and Tea will be producers.
Time slipped away from me this week. I’ll chalk it up to being in mourning over the death of Bart Allen. Maimed, stripped of his personality, absorbed into the Speed Force, aged, depowered and then killed — all within four years. The poor kid can’t catch a break.
Anyway, where was I? Oh, right: It’s time for Chris Maunter and me to sift through the titles shipping this week to a comics store near you.
It’s a fairly quiet week, release-wise, so we’ll just dive into our picks.
As always, let us know your choices in the comments below.
All this week, New York magazine’s Vulture blog is running excerpts from Good As Lily, Derek Kirk Kim and Jesse Hamm’s graphic novel for DC’s Minx line.
India’s Rediff has a substantial profile of Virgin Comics that lays out the publisher’s three comics lines, spotlights its recruitment of celebrity talent, and makes clear that it’s not doing superhero stories.
“The American comic market is dominated by superheroes — companies like Marvel and DC rule the roost and people don’t want third generation knockoffs,” says recently hired editor Ron Marz. “The American comic book market is so restricted: when people hear about ‘comics’ they immediately think of superheroes, rather than seeing them as merely one way to tell a story.”
Related: While searching for a piece of art, I discovered that Virgin Comics launched a blog earlier this month.
Fox Bunny Funny
Written and Illustrated by Andy Hartzell
Top Shelf
$10.00
We all rebel in our own ways.
When I was a teenager, my rebellion wasn’t over anything monumental. My folks were pretty conservative, so we battled over hair length, ear piercing, and curfew. Standard stuff, but it felt important at the time. It felt like there was this person whom I really wanted to be, but wasn’t being allowed to become.
Fox Bunny Funny is about that feeling. In a wordless story, Andy Hartzell depicts a culture of anthropomorphic, “funny animal” foxes that’s largely like any middle-American community. A young boy rides his bike into town to pick up a couple of things for his mom, gets into some mischief with his buddies, plays video games with his little brother, has some dinner, and goes upstairs to his room. But along the way, we learn something disturbing about fox culture: they love dismembering the rabbits.
On its website, Dark Horse has a 26-page preview of “Viva Las Buffy,” one of the stories in the upcoming massive Buffy the Vampire Slayer Omnibus, Vol. 1. The 320-page tome is set for a July 18 release.
At CHUD.com, Devin Faraci talks at length with writer Ed Brubaker about Criminal, Captain America, and dodging crossovers and tie-ins with the “big event” titles:
With this Captain America story, for example, where you want to explore certain themes and concepts, how much leeway do you have to do that in today’s publishing environment? You’re exploring a world without a Cap but then there’s World War Hulk and then there’s whatever comes after that, and you have to have your tie-in issue.
I don’t have any of that stuff coming up, thankfully. I’m fortunate that I’m not some guy fresh off the boat; I was hired by Marvel because they knew what I had done before and I had a pretty good reputation coming in and they saw they could put me on bigger books and make a bigger name for me. They succeeded at that, and the reason they succeeded is that I’ve been doing this a while and know what to do. I talked to my editors a lot about what I’m going to do, but they don’t force me — and I don’t think they force a lot of people — to be a part of those crossovers if I don’t want to be. With Civil War there was no way around having a couple of issues of Cap take place during Civil War, but for the first four months of Civil War — or what was supposed to be the first four months of Civil War! — I had a story where Cap was in London. They don’t force as much on me, but I think part of that is because I expressed early on that I wasn’t interested in doing that and breaking up the stories I was telling with my books. I have a pretty good map of where I’m heading with all my books, and it makes no sense to suddenly have an issue of Daredevil all about Civil War when I have Daredevil running around Europe. …
There’s much more at the link, of course, including some talk about the state of the market and of the “superhero empires.”
Fantasy Book Critic talks to comics writer, author (and Blog@ guest blogger) Mike Carey about his debut novel, The Devil You Know, comic books, and the differences in working in the two mediums: “ne of the biggest differences is in terms of the way the work impacts on your life on a day-to-day basis. It comes down to pacing again – or maybe I mean scheduling. In comics you work to very short deadlines. You plot months in advance, so you know where you’re going, but you’re writing the story in short segments that have to be completed within a finite and tightly defined time frame. So you write the script, you send it in, you get the edit notes and do a rewrite, and then off it goes to the artist. If you’re in the middle of the next issue or a few issues down the line and you suddenly think ‘Oh wait, I should have introduced this character earlier’ or ‘I should have prepared the ground for this!’ it’s too late and you can’t change your mind. The freedom to change your mind is very limited.”
The Star of Malaysia chats with Malaysian artist Milx about working on IDW Publishing’s Transformers comics line: “You’ll be surprised, but there are lots of comic artists out there who want to be part of the Transformers (franchise). Everyone wants to draw them.”
And The Onion’s A.V. Club has a solid Q&A with the John Kricfalusi, creator of The Ren & Stimpy Show, who discusses a lot of things, including the biggest misconception about animation: “To tell you the truth, I don’t really know what the average person thinks about animation. I think the average person thinks that it’s made by cartoonists—and it used to be. When people think of The Simpsons, they think of Matt Groening. They don’t think of whoever the 200 writers are. In the old days, that was really true. You thought of Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, Walt Disney. But at one time, there were no writers. It was all written by artists. There are artists who are writers, but there was no such thing as cartoons that were written by somebody who couldn’t draw.”
This Saturday and Sunday sees the sixth annual of Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art Festival in New York City, with the ballrooms of the Puck Building packed with cartoonists and publishers, and the MoCCA gallery bustling with panels and programming.
At The Beat, Heidi MacDonald has been doing a good job all week of gathering press releases on who’s appearing when and where, what books are debuting, and where everyone’s going afterward. And at The Comics Reporter, Tom Spurgeon assembles a list of 10 things he’d do at the festival.
The full schedule of programming can be found here.
This isn’t even my metaphor, it’s Isaac Asimov’s – he swiped it from Lewis Carroll and put it into a time travel story of the same name.
In Through the Looking Glass, Alice meets up with the Red Queen and they go for a very brisk run – at the end of which they find that they haven’t moved an inch. They’re still standing under a tree, right where they started. Alice is a bit indignant, because she’s hot and sweaty and tired and she hasn’t got anywhere. The conversation goes like this:-
`Well, in our country,’ said Alice, still panting a little, `you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.’
`A slow sort of country!’ said the Queen. `Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!’
I’ve been running a Red Queen’s race for the past week or so, trying to get a lot of deadlines met and a lot of different things (creative and otherwise) sorted before I go to the States for the Castor signing tour in mid-July (see my own blog at www.mikecarey.net, for details – you can follow the ON TOUR tab or look in UPCOMING). But every time I finish something, something else pops up to take its place. My inbox is a magical horn of plenty that replenishes itself faster than I can empty it, and I’m sitting here gleefully mixing my metaphors like I’m trying to make a bomb or a new religion or something.
Maybe the feeling of uncontrolled acceleration comes from how many books I’ve got out this month – more projects hitting the stands from more different sources and angles than I’ve ever had before, by a factor of several. Last week saw my OGN Re-Gifters arrive in store: the first martial arts rom-com I’ve ever written, and the first book I wrote for DC’s new Minx line – although far from the first thing I’ve written with editor plenipotentiary Shelly Bond, whose brainchild Minx is. It’s a fun book and you should check it out, if only for Sonny Liew and Marc Hempel’s heartbreakingly beautiful art.
This week is Endangered Species, the X-Men one-shot that acts as part of a concerted and carefully planned overture to the Messiah Complex crossover later this year. This one-shot is a book with virtually no action – unless Madrox snapping his fingers and Cyclops shooting clouds counts as action. It’s all character beats, and it’s kind of dark – a sombre chord at the start of an amazing story.
Next week the first Crossing Midnight trade is out, along with X-Men#200. I’ll say more about Crossing Midnight in a post later on today, and a copy of the trade is going to be the prize in this week’s competition. But first, stay tuned for the winner of last week’s caption contest.
I know, I know – it’s just bread and circuses. But reading the entries livened up my weekend a lot, and gave me the excuse I needed to stop running and down tools for an hour or two. Anarchic inspiration, people. Thanks for all your efforts.
And buy my books. Or at least lie about it to make me feel good…
Last week I mentioned the Oni Press preview for Vasilis Lolos‘ upcoming graphic novel, The Last Call. Well, now I’m mentioning it again, because a.) I love Lolos’ work, and I’m really looking forward to this book; b.) it looks like the release date has been bumped to July 18; and c.) Oni has increased the preview to a whopping 38 pages.
Variety reports that DreamWorks and Universal Pictures will team up to turn Platinum Studios’ Cowboys & Aliensinto a live-action film.
The script will be written by Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby (Iron Man, Children of Men). Imagine partners Brian Grazer and Ron Howard will produce the film, along with Platinum’s Scott Mitchell Rosenberg, and Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci (Star Trek XI).
Released by Platinum late last year, Cowboys & Aliens, as the title suggests, blends elements of the Western and science fiction genres. In 19th-century Arizona, a fight between cowboys and Apaches is interrupted by the crash landing of an alien spacecraft. Said aliens plan to conquer the Old West, but the cowboys and Apaches unite to fight off the invaders.
In advance of a local signing, The Washington Post’s Express talks briefly with cartoonist Paul Hornschemeier about his latest graphic novel, The Three Paradoxes, and the evolution of his artistic style.
At Chasing Ray, Colleen Mondor talks with Eddie Campbell about The Black Diamond Detective Agency and graphic novels in general:
“I think that for the ‘graphic novel’ (a term I no longer have any affection for) to advance, it must evolve into something else. The comic book field has arrived at a state in which the readers are mostly adult, and the writers and artists are attempting to graft what they imagine to be adult sensibilities onto an immature medium. That is the prevailing mentality, and within that milieu, works of real value are unlikely to be adequately recognized. But they are also unlikely to be recognized outside of it, where a crippling conservatism prevails among the establishment, as we saw last year when Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese was up for a book prize in the young reader’s category. Young readers, who are much less conservative than adults who would speak on their behalf, must have wondered what that was all about.”
Atlanta’s Creative Loafing chats briefly with Top Shelf Productions Publisher Chris Staros about his company’s 10th anniversary, and how the comics industry has changed in the past decade:
“After all of us spent time legitimizing comics, around 2003-2004 we realized that we’d forgotten about the kids, and that all of our readers were well over 20 years old. Top Shelf put out books like Owly [by Lilburn’s Andy Runton] and Korgi and Spiral Bound and more, and that market has started to explode recently. Libraries have latched onto them as a way to get kids to read. Comics are perfect for young readers today because they’re fast-paced and convey concepts so easily.”
The latest installment of Publishers Weekly’s Comics Week is out. Highlights include: an overview of collections of classic comic strips from Fantagraphics, IDW, Checker and Universal Press Syndicate; a brief interview with one of my new-favorite creators, Vasilis Lolos, about his new graphic novel, The Last Call; a Q&A with Jason Rodriguez, editor of Postcards: True Stories That Never Happened; and the first part of a two-part interview with Go! Comi founders Audrey Taylor and David Wise.
It’s worth noting that the introduction to the Go! Comi piece mentions that Elfquest creator Wendy Pini is producing the company’s first original yaoi project, Masque of the Red Death. In the comments at the Icarus Publishing blog, manga writer Tina Anderson points out that this is old news, as Pini posted about it on the Go! Comi blog back in March.
With New Comics Day fast-approaching, Chris Mautner and I return for another look at the titles scheduled to appear at a retailer near you.
As DC Comics says good-bye to Flash: The Fastest Man Alive — the name and numbering, at least — Image kicks off Madame Mirage and Repo, while Marvel lays the groundwork for its fall X-Men crossover with the Endangered Species one-shot.
Elsewhere, Virgin Comics collects Devi,John Woo’s Seven Brothers and Snakewoman, and Boom! Studios has a big week with collections of Hero Squared and Tag, and the first issue of Warhammer: Forge of War.
But for the release of the week, you’ll have to read on.
As always, let us know your choices in the comments below.
The Clarence Principle
Written by Fehed Said; Illustrated by Shari Chankhamma
SLG Publishing
$12.95
I was once madly in love with this girl. I’m talking about the kind of passionate obsession that keeps you from eating and sleeping because those things just distract you from what you really want to be doing, which is thinking about Her.
Truth be told, that’s happened to me several times in my life, but in this particular case, she just wasn’t having any of it. (Okay that’s happened a couple of times too, but just bear with me.) On this occasion, with this girl, I could tell that she liked me, but she always had one excuse or another why it wasn’t meant to be “right then,” and before long she’d found someone else to be in love with. My heart was broken and it took me a while to move on, but we were able to stay friends. I kept up with her for a while, which is how I eventually learned what a bullet I had dodged. (more…)
