Indie Comics

Now this is a great way to spend your money! Cartoonist Jason Young has spent the last three years slowly commissioning an array of great indie artists to redraw FANTASTIC FOUR #9, the issue co-starring the Sub-Mariner. It's a Coober Skeeber/Strange Tales mash-up that proves the talents of all involved. Young writes:

Back when the deeds of Kyrax2 were making the rounds, we'd tagged a post we never got around to spotlighting by author Diane Duane, who lists her bio as "30+ years in print, 50+ novels, assorted TV and movie work, the NYT Bestseller List a few times, blah blah blah. Also: the Young Wizards series, 1983-2010 and beyond"--the kind of long-lasting, multi-media resume that superior writers build up. In a post on her blog about DC's women troubles, Duane talked about being a comics reader and creator over the years:

Anytime someone comes into a big sum of money, people will start asking what they're going to do with it, whether it's go to Disneyland or start a publishing company. So when WOMANTHOLOGY, the all-woman anthology started by artist Renae De Liz raised an unprecedented $109,000 on Kickstarter -- the biggest comics project ever and the 25th biggest project ever--it was inevitable that people would be asking a lot of questions. Especially since, as I learned myself, the contributors would not be paid. However, De Liz seems to have already answered most of the questions that have been raised.

programing has just been announced, and I'm doing two panels, both of which I'm super excited about, but as always the entire schedule, as curated by Bill Kartalopoulos, includes a ton of provocative, educational events. SPX will be held this year September 11-12, in Bethesda, MD.

On Saturday we broke the news that the MoCCA Festival in New York and Stumptown in Portland, OR would share the same dates, April 28-29, as MoCCA had finalized their dates for the same weekend. Since then, all the participant have spoken out regarding the unfortunate timing. MoCCA museum director Jack Walsh has just released a statement:

Terry Moore has a pretty amazing track record as a self-publishing cartoonist. He's wrapped up his magnum opus STRANGERS IN PARADISE, but instead of going into that awkward "I just finished my magnum opus" mode, he jumped right back in with a new series -- the SF-tinged ECHO -- and just wrapped up THAT. And now he's a launched a new thriller series called RACHEL RISING, which debuted at Comic-Con. However, as successful as he's been, Moore still found his new #1 underordered, and #2 orders cut back even more. It's a familiar problem in the direct market. In an interview with Russ Burlingame, Moore is askedthe inevitable questions about digital delivery:

WOMANTHOLOGY, the huge collection of comics by women succeeded in meeting its Kickstarter goals. In fact, it exceeded them by some bit, raising $109,301 in 30 days. The original goal was $25,000. Womanthology had some fantastic premiums to get people to pledge -- including contributions from Kevin Smith, Neil Gaiman, Jim Lee, and tons more. But thats still a crazy amount of money. Over 2000 people pledged, 433 of them between $65 and $100.

In a rather surprising turn of events, New York's MoCCA Festival has announced their 2012 dates -- and not only are they a change from previously announced dates, but it's the same weekend -- April 27-28 -- as Stumptown Festival, the alt-comix festival held each year in Portland. The Stumptown dates were announced months ago, so the change comes as a surprise. As one exhibitor who forwarded the letter told us, in previous years MoCCA and Stumptown were a week apart, which was hard enough, but now the already small pool of indie comics publishers and creators are going to have to skip one or the other.

MacDonald chaired a Comic-Con panel on Legendary Comics, the new comic book offshoot of movie powerhouse Legendary Pictures.

At Image's Creator-Owned panel, Image did what Image does best - original books by independent creators. Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard will be releasing a series of original graphic novels called Album.

Friday at San Diego Comic-Con has brought a boatload of indie comics news. Here's a quick run down of the highlights: At the Image panel, it was revealed that Ted McKeever will be doing a new comic called Mondo for Image Comics. Landry Walker and Eric Jones, creators of Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the Eighth Grade, will create Danger Club, a new non-family friendly comic, for Image.

A slew of Ignatz-Award wining guests will be at this year's SPX: