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Chain Reactions | Glory #23
Glory #23
Reviews for the Extreme Studios reboot title Glory have been hitting the internet for awhile–Caleb reviewed it here more than a month ago–and this week finally saw the book hit comic shops. Written by Joe Keatinge with art by Ross Campbell, Glory #23 has little to do with the previous 1990s Glory comic, and yet has everything to do with it, as Keatinge and Campbell’s approach wasn’t to toss everything out and start over, but to pick up with and add on the character’s previous origin and history … and then spin her off in a completely different direction.
On paper, this isn’t a comic that should work–although Keatinge has a lot of comics coming out this year, he’s still relatively new to the game, and Ross Campbell isn’t the first, or fifth, or even 100th artist I’d ever think of drawing a revival of a 1990s bad girl version of Wonder Woman. And yet the beauty is that it does work, as Keatinge and Campbell have created something really awesome here. But don’t take my word for it; check out what others have been saying about the return of Glory:
Edward Kaye, Newsarama: “Much of the issue is spent introducing readers to the character and recapping some of her past adventures. One thing that will be immediately noticeable to longtime Glory fans is that her origin tale has been tweaked a bit, so where in the original story she was born as the result of an alliance between the Amazonians and their demonic rivals, she is now the product of a union between two warring alien races. Other than that, her back-story matches that outlined in the original series, and even acknowledges the events that took place in Alan Moore’s very brief revival of the series.”
The Fifth Color | Justice is like lightning
It was right about the time that Merlin stepped up to speak in the most recent issue of Thunderbolts that I had to check the cover and make sure I had picked up the right book. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Thunderbolts and have really seen them bloom into something rather special in the Marvel Universe, but there was this strange feeling in the back of my mind this issue. Something about how all the Thunderbolts had new Ren Faire costumes to fit into the Camelot scheme that were similar to their usual togs. Something about the casual guest star factor with the court of King Arthur (especially the Black Knight, I miss that guy!). Something about how all the characters worked together or didn’t, depending on the situation and the greater needs at hand.
But really, while listening to Merlin I suddenly realized that I had seen a story like this before. Not the exact same story, but going to Camelot, overcoming adversity, the comparisons between the heroes and the knights of old, even the stylish dress up factor made me want to go find old issues of “The Morgan Conquest,” the post-Heroes Reborn issues of the Avengers from Kurt Busiek and George Perez. It’s not too surprising that the T-Bolts would remind me of a by-gone era of Avengers lore. In fact, taking a closer look, there’s a lot to be said for this rag-tag team of super villains being taught redemption and their exploits in battling evil.
Could it possibly be that the oldest trick in the Thunderbolts book was becoming a reality?
It takes six cartoonists to fill Richard Thompson’s shoes
Richard Thompson is taking a couple of weeks off from his daily strip Cul de Sac to do some physical therapy for Parkinson’s disease, and he has not one but six guest artists filling in while he’s way. Mo Willems (Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!) Stephan Pastis (Pearls Before Swine), Lincoln Peirce (Big Nate), Michael Jantze (The Norm), Corey Pandolph (The Elderberries) and Ken Fisher (Tom the Dancing Bug) will all be taking their turns on the daily and Sunday strips over the next five weeks. What’s that going to be like?
“I let them have free rein to re-create ‘Cul de Sac’ as they saw fit,†Thompson tells ‘Riffs, “hoping only that no one introduced anything too bizarre, like an angry talking Rat, or a Pigeon with some kind of bus-mania.â€
Yeah, right. Good luck with that. Willems, Pastis, Peirce, Jantze, and Fisher were all contributors to the Team Cul de Sac art book, which is being sold to raise funds for the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. The invasion of guest cartoonists begins on Feb. 20.
Gamers switch bodies with their characters in Double Jumpers
Have you ever played video games so much that you think you’re in one? In May, a new comic series from Action Lab called Double Jumpers follow a group of friends who get stuck inside their characters in a video game, and see those characters take over their human bodies.
Coming from writer Dave Dwonch and artist Bill Blankenship, Double Jumpers promises a mature readers-only take on this video game switcheroo. The people at the center of it are a group of programmers marooned in their video game identities while on a trip to a huge convention in Las Vegas. As much fun and intrigue the hijinks inside their video game might be, it’s only doubled when you think about video game personas coming to life inside a convention.
Action Lab also plans to release the comic simultaneously in print and digitally on Graphicly, Kindle, Kobo, Nook, the Apple Bookstore, Google books as well as other outlets.
Here’s a six-page preview of this four-issue limited series set to debut in May.
Something to look forward to: Horror from Bunn and Jones
Jones's= latest sketch from her blog
Joëlle Jones mentioned the other day that she was working on a new horror comic for Oni Press with Cullen Bunn, writer of The Sixth Gun, and that piqued our interest. The folks at Broken Frontier were interested, too, and they got a few more details. “[The project] is currently planned as a limited series,” Bunn said. “It’s definitely one of the darkest things I’ve written so far – a kind of horror mash-up that I’m pretty excited about it.”
While Bunn has been busy with The Sixth Gun, Wolverine and his upcoming stint on Venom: Savage Six, Jones has brought her lively, slightly retro style to a stack of teen and young adult books, including Dark Horse adaptations of PC Cast’s House of Night and Janet and Alex Evanovich’s Troublemaker, and a new adaptation of O.T. Nelson’s The Girl Who Owned a City. These two are a killer combination, and I for one can’t wait to see what they have brewing.
Collect This Now | Blutch’s Mitchum
Mitchum #1
Note: Some images below contain mild nudity that may be NSFW, depending upon where you W.
Blutch, born Christian Hincker, was one of the most influential cartoonists to come out of the French alt-comix scene of the 1990s (although he arguably owes quite a bit to Edmond Baudoin). Blutch’s masterful, expressive line, exemplified in works like Peplum and Le Petit Christian, influenced a number of artists both in Europe and here in America, most notably Craig Thompson. Blutch’s art was such a strong influence on Thompson while he was working on Blankets that L’Association publisher Christophe Menu derided the work as being too derivative and the supreme example of the co-opting the French small press scene in his book-length essay Plates-bandes.
Kickstart My Art | Help collect Robot 13 into a trade paperback
Robot 13
I’ve been a fan of Thomas Hall and Daniel Bradford’s Robot 13 for awhile now; it was probably one of the first comics I bought digitally when I got my iPhone, and, c’mon, the name. The duo is now looking to collect the first three issues of the series into a trade paperback, and they’ve turned to Kickstarter to get help.
“Blacklist Studios was started by Daniel Bradford and Thomas Hall to take their Comic projects to the widest possible audience, while retaining as much creative control as possible,” their Kickstarter page reads. “To that end, they put in their own money to start the company and have handled everything from the writing and art to the printing and distribution of their books themselves. As much of what we make from doing books and shows as possible is put back into making Comics- of the money we raise, about $4000 is to cover printing costs, with the rest split between shipping materials, postage, rewards and storage for the remaining inventory. Right now, Blacklist Studios is a TRUE ‘cottage industry,’ in that all of the excess inventory is stored in our apartments. In order to handle something as large as a run of Trade paperbacks, however, we need to move everything to outside storage.”
A pledge of $13 will get you the trade, and they’ve got several other incentives if you pledge more than that, like T-shirts, buttons, sketches, mini-figures and issues of their other comic, King. “At the top level, one fan will have their likeness used in a future issue of Robot 13 and be eaten by a giant monster,” Hall told me over email.
The Kickstarter campaign runs through March 13. Check out the shirt after the jump.
Start Reading Now (Again) | Ben Towle’s Oyster War
Ben Towle (Midnight Sun, Amelia Earhart: This Broad Ocean) has been posting pages from his current project, the seaside adventure webcomic Oyster War for a while now on Tumblr. The trouble is, Tumblr’s not all that friendly an experience for webcomics readers. Pages are difficult to navigate and since Oyster War is a “graphic novel in progress” (and new pages go up every two weeks) it’s good to be able to flip back a page or two to remind yourself what’s going on.
Fortunately, Towle’s realized this himself and has switched the comic to its own site with traditional navigation buttons. He just started Chapter Five (reading 45 pages will catch you up), so it’s a great time to jump in on a cool, fantastical comic about oyster pirates and the ragtag crew intent on ending their pilfering ways.
Artist line-up for Ashes takes shape
After the falling out between Ashes writer Alex de Campi and artist Jimmie Broxton, de Campi decided to pursue having multiple artists draw the sequel to the 2005 series Smoke. This week in an update to the project’s backers on Kickstarter, de Campi said the line-up of artists is now complete.
Joining A Distant Soil creator Colleen Doran and Smoke artist Igor Kordey are:
De Campi said she plans to begin serializing it digitally in June and publish the graphic novel in December.
This weekend, it’s MegaCon
MeganCon 2012 kicks off in a matter of hours in Orlando, Florida, drawing thousands of comic book, science fiction and fantasy fans to the Orange County Convention Center over the next three days.
Comic guests include Tony Bedard, Dennis Calero, J. Scott Campbell, Greg Capullo, Nick Cardy, Frank Cho, Brian Clevinger, Amanda Conner, Darwyn Cooke, Dan DiDio, Chuck Dixon, Nathan Edmondson, David Finch, Cully Hamner, Phil Hester, Greg Horn, Dan Jurgens, Barbara Kesel, Stan Lee, Laura Martin, Phil Noto, Jimmy Palmiotti, Dan Parent, George Perez, Mike Perkins, Don Rosa, Tim Sale, Bill Sienkiewicz, Mark Texeira, Billy Tucci and Tom Zahler.
Media guests include Bruce Boxleitner, Nicholas Brendon, Charisma Carpenter, Tom Felton, Peter Mayhew, Eddie McClintock, Valerie Perrine, David Prowse, Tim Russ and Brent Spiner.
MeganCon begins today at 1 p.m. ET, and continues through Sunday at 5 p.m.
Comics A.M. | Archie, Graphicly partner to sell comics via Facebook
Archie Comics
Digital | Archie Comics will begin selling its comics through its Facebook page, which connects readers with Graphicly. With almost 120,000 fans, the page does seem like fertile ground. “It’s really a major move toward connecting the potential reader to the product,” said Archie Co-CEO Jon Goldwater. “We make it easy and hopefully create a new, lasting part of our fan base.” [The Huffington Post]
Retailing | Matthew Price takes the temperature in the room at ComicsPRO and says that retailers want stability — they credit the consistent shipping schedule for the New 52 for part of that line’s success — and creativity. The overall mood seemed to be optimism, with Diamond Comic Distributors reporting that comics sales were up slightly in 2011. [NewsOK.com]
Grumpy Old Fan | Growing the garden: DC’s May solicits
On this Earth-2, Wonder Woman has the metal headgear and the Flash (not shown) wears a skirt
The next phase of the New 52 begins in May, as six new titles debut and Rob Liefeld carves out his own niche with a handful of others. My first impressions of the Next Six remain largely positive, but we’ll get into that in a bit.
SEEMS LIKE OLD TIMES (GOLDEN AGE EDITION)
Basically, what we know about Earth-2 so far is that it has its own (multi-generational) version of the Trinity, it’s home to Alan Scott, Jay Garrick and probably Ted Grant, and at some point Darkseid invades. This does not mean that everyone who first appeared during the Golden Age still did. Indeed, we can suppose that, because the New-52 Huntress is apparently in her early 30s (at most, I’m guessing), that would make her parents at least 50-ish and probably closer to 60 or even 70. Thus, the Earth-2 Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle could have become Batman and Catwoman anywhere from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s. It’s a significant change from the original Earth-Two, where Helena Wayne was born in the early 1950s and became the Huntress in the late ’70s.
The two disappointments of Lily Renée, Escape Artist
I’ve found two major types of disappointment in my years of comics reading. The first, and most common, is one you’re probably all-too familiar with: the disappointment of reading a comic you fully expect to be good—because of the creators involved, the reputation of the publisher, the buzz among fans or at the shop, the positive reviews you’ve read, whatever—only to discover that it is not, after all, any good.
A rarer, and more stinging type of disappointment is when you come to a comic that you want to be good, only to discover upon reading that it is not, alas, any good.
I started thinking about this while reading Lily Renée, Escape Artist (Graphic Universe), a biography of woman who, as the subtitle reads, went From Holocaust Survivor to Comic Book Pioneer.
I felt a bit of the first type of disappointment, as this was written by Trina Robbins, a talented cartoonist and skilled and incisive writer of and about comic. But it was the second type of disappointment I felt most strongly while making my way through the book—which actually got to be a bit of a struggle after a while—and that type of disappointment only increased as I kept reading.
First look at the cover to Dark Horse’s fifth Dragon Age digital comic
Back at the New York Comic Con, Dark Horse Comics announced a “digital first” series for one of their newly licensed properties–the popular Dragon Age video game series. The Electronic Arts franchise has already produced two video games, an expansion, lots of extra downloadable game content, a Facebook game, three novels, a tabletop role-playing game and even a previous comic series published by IDW Publishing.
I’m a huge fan of the game and, with the exception of the tabletop game, I’ve read or played all of the above. The reason I like the game and the universe its set in comes down to the characters–noble, but somewhat goofy Alistar; dark and mysterious Morrigan; the likable liar Varric; brooding bad ass Fenris–unfortunately, the IDW series didn’t delve into further tales about any of these guys. While it was set in the same world and put the spotlight on one of the primary conflicts of the game (mages vs. templars), the characters were all-new creations. It wasn’t a bad comic, but it felt flat and lacked that one key ingredient.
Julie Taymor and Spider-Man musical producers settle royalties feud
Julie Taymor
The producers of the $75 million Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark have to pay $9,750 a week in royalties to ousted director Julie Taymor as part of a settlement with her union.
The New York Times reports that the agreement announced today with the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society affect the lawsuits filed against each other by Taymor and the producers, but instead settles an earlier grievance pressed by the union concerning Taymor’s contract rights as director. The dueling federal suits address her role as a creator and writer of the once-troubled show.
Taymor was fired in March from the much-delayed and -derided production following her resistance to making any major changes in the wake of a series of blistering reviews. (The producers contend she refused to create an original, family-friendly musical based on Marvel’s Spider-Man and instead “insisted on developing a dark, disjointed and hallucinogenic musical involving suicide, sex and death.â€) A new creative team was brought in to overhaul Spider-Man — many of Taymor’s signature elements were stripped in the process — transforming it into one of the most successful, if also most expensive, shows on Broadway. It regularly grosses more than $1.3 million a week.
According to The Times, producers had hoped to only pay Taymor royalties only through her firing nearly a year ago instead of, potentially, for years to come. They also agreed to pay her an undisclosed sum for subsequent productions or tours outside of New York. Taymor, meanwhile agreed to defer her royalty payments for collaborator — they amount to about $4,000 a week — until Spider-Man‘s backers recoup their $75 million investment, which will take several years.
