Comics

Friday afternoon news dump as Zuda Comics, DC's webcomic imprint, makes it official that they are leaving their competition format behind. VP of...

Let's end the week on a big UP note with the art of Kris Mukai, whose work we first spotted in this Comics from MoCCA slideshow,...

While we're all talking IRON MAN 2 right now, a look into the crystal ball revelas that a year hence we'll be all yakking...

A publisher in the UK has come up with the most commercial mash-up yet. Or we could be totally wrong and neither grade school boys nor junior high girls will like it. Kind of like brussel sprouts.

Another Icon comic is Hollywood bound, Michael Fleming reports, as INCOGNITO, the supervillain vengeance caper by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, has been optioned by by Fox. Peter Chernin and Circle of Confusion's David Engel will produce and the screenwriter attached is playwright Robert Schenkkan.

The summer of comic book movies continues as the trailer for JONAH HEX hits the internet. http://d.yimg.com/m/up/ypp/movies/player.swf I guess it might not be that bad, even...

I was moving an exercise machine - The Total Gym -down to the basement on the sly. My wife and I had discussed moving it from our bedroom – she wanted to keep it there and I wanted to move it to the basement. So, of course I moved the machine behind her back. Now, the thing weighs about 90 pounds and has ropes and pulleys so it’s awkward to carry. As I wrestled with it coming down the stairs, I missed the last step, and landed on my left ankle. As I went crashing to the ground, the Total Gym followed and came down on my chest…just as my wife was turning the corner. She screamed thinking I had died. When she realized that her idiot of a husband was alive, she started yelling at me for being an ass for carrying it down on my own and reminded me she didn’t want it moved at all. Even though the machine was still on my chest, my wife was crying and yelling, and my ankle hurt like hell and was ballooning up to the size of Schwarzenegger’s bicep, all I could think was; “Shit, the Neil Gaiman book is coming out soon – I have too much to do.” Then I asked my wife for an Advil. 2003 turned out to be an important year, for me and for graphic novels. DC Comics was publishing a BIG book, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman: Endless Nights. It was Neil’s return to Sandman comics and it was not a collection of comics, but an original graphic novel. There was the idea floating around the office that maybe, with Neil’s success with his novels and the fact that American Gods had hit the New York Times Bestseller List, we could have a bestseller on our hands. It was of a dream of mine, to have one of our graphic novels become a best seller.

Speaking of the obscure characters of pulp writer Robert E. Howard who managed to churn out a jillion characters before taking his own life at the age of 31, his Texan character Breckenridge Elkins is getting adapted as a webcomic by Gary Chaloner ( Red Kelo, John Law) and Cayetano Garza. Elkins was one of Howard's more successful character during his lifetime, and the comic has a nice rugged look.

Via Titan Books, a reminder that Peter O''Donnell , the creator of superspy Modesty Blaise, is turning 90 this year and fans can email him birthday wishes directly at happybirthday@titanemail.com or via post at Titan Books, 144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP, UK. A prolific author of short stories, novels, articles, plays and film, O'Donnell's best known character is Blaise, who debuted in 1963 as a comic strip drawn by Jim Holdaway, before going on to star in several film and novel adaptations. New strips stopped appearing in 2001, but reprint volumes of her adventures with sidekick Willie Garvin are readily available via Titan.

After a Minnesota mother challenged her school library on keeping Jeff Smith's BONE on its shelves -- citing smoking, drinking gambling and sexy innuendo as reasons it wasn't fit for kids -- the library board voted 10-1 to keep Bone on the shelves. The mother still objected to the books, but brought her two sons to the meeting, explaining that "It's important for them to see the process of how books are chosen," she said. Removing the book from 12 of the the Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan school district's 18 libraries would have been a very rare step -- only 20 books have been challenged in the past 20 years, the last being "All But Alice," by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, which was removed in 1997.

Cartoonists were showing off their upcoming books covers EVERYWHERE this week. Here's the cover of the first collection of Dylan Meconis's historical yet mystical webcomic, Family Man . And here's a photo of Meredith Gran's first Octopus Pie collection from Villard, coming in June. The book is shown with a cup of coffee for both scale and inspiration.

Via Super I.T.C.H The Deadly Upas Tree of Wall Street by Joseph Keppler, from Puck Magazine August 30, 1882. Click for larger version.