Comics

Now here's a nice example of "comics across the world." TCAF, the Toronto Arts Festival, has taken a booth at Tokyo's Kagai Manga Festa on November 18th, and will allow certain Canadian cartoonists to exhibit at the booth for free.

Well, despite what you're thinking Affleck's directing career—THE TOWN and GONE BABY GONE—is much admired within the halls of Warners. So much so that they are thinking of giving over the proposed Justice League film to Affleck. After all, he played a superhero once. He also knows Kevin Smith personally.

By: Henry Barajas The comic books projects on Kickstarter just keeps getting better and better. Here are two projects that I found exceptional and...

Another digital to print success story—Alex De Campi and Christine Larsen's VALENTINE, which made headlines as a digital only comic that was translated into multiple languages. As noted below it was a true digital pioneer, with more than 350,000 downloads. And now...you can hold it in your hand.

Koyama Press will be publishing Volume 4 of Dustin Harbin's Diary Comics this fall, presumably in time for the fall comics show circuit. If you can't get enough of @dustinharbin on twitter or his website, this collection should definitely amuse and enlighten.

The collectible retro poster craze is burning up, man. Now artist Juan Ortiz is creating 80 retro style Star Trek posters-- one for each episode of the Classic Trek. The first four posters, from Quantum Mechanix, are a set of 18x24 plated-printed lithographs on 100-pound, aqueous-coated, satin-finish paper. The set is available for a mere $34.95 from startrek.com and many other fine retailers.

On the scale of "Oh thank God," this ranks pretty high.Joss Whedon will be back to write and direct AVENGERS 2, as Disney CEO Bob Iger told an investors call. Immediately after the announcement, people started throwing money directly at Iger, just pelting him with dollars and quarters. "Take our money!" they cried. "Just take it! THE AVENGERS has already made $1.5 billion worldwide and the sequel will make even more."

As you may have heard, nail art is all the rage these days, and its getting more and more ornate. And some ladies are going for comics inspired pieces, such as this, by Brooklyn's Fleury Rose, who created this design for someone going to the Dark Knight Rises premiere in New York, who got to show them off to director Christopher Nolan, even. Who wouldn't want to sport these dark knails?

Yet ANOTHER creator owned digital anthology project, this one spearheaded by artist David Lloyd (V for Vendetta). Details of Aces Weekly have now been revealed. The impressive list of contributors includes:

This is firmly under the HYPE banner since I was a publishing consultant for this project, but Ham Fisher's venerable boxing-themed comic strip character has been updated to an MMA-fighter for IDW's Joe Palooka, the brain storm of boxing announcer Joe Antonacci, along with Mike Bullock, Fernando Peniche and Matt Triano. In the story, Joe Palooka is a discredited MMA fighter who travels the world desperately trying to clear his name while fighting to earn a spot in the legendary “Legion of Combat,” worldwide fight series.

After a successful roll-out at C2E2—and in light of how artists everywhere are doing it themselves—DC Collectibles is making more than 20 new posters available at their online store, all in the highly designed style that has become so popular with things like the Alamo Drafthouse and so on. Can we say, it's about time? You can see all the prints here—no creators given, alas, in the licensed style of the Warners and Disney stores, but there are some nice items.

Creator Gar Molloy wrote to us to say it was the 10 Year anniversary of his webcomic Neko the Kitty, with over 900 strips completed. We're not too familiar with the comis, but it has a kitty and that's good enough for The Beat, especially when it means kitties doing the happy dance to celebrate.