Comics

It's the first ever Peanuts graphic novel, Charlie Brown! Last week people were speculating over the announcement that kaboom! -- BOOM! Studios' new all-ages comics imprint -- would be publishing something Peanuts-related. Was it strips reprints? Comic book reprints? What? The reality is that it's an ALL NEW adaptation of a new Peanuts animated movie, Happiness Is a Warm Blanket Charlie Brown, which Warners Home Video is releasing in March.

A beautiful Peter Kuper poster and the guest list have been announced for this year's MoCCA fest.

...unless you read old comic strips. Fantagraphics' Floyd Gottfredson reprint project was a big news item at last year's San Diego, and you can bet that the book (due on April 15th) will get people talking some more. FBI released a pdf of the promo materials and here's a sneak peek.

A new name joins the fabled Spider-Man musical.

A new poster for S.P.A.C.E., the Columbus indie comics show, has just been released. It's by Tom Williams of drawrobot fame.

Oji Suzuki is the latest in D&Q's gekiga projects, and Tom Devlin explains why:

The Wizard World Miami show kicks off this weekend at the Miami Airport Convention Center -- it's the first Wizard show in this venue so we'll see how it goes. Renee Witterstaetter announced some exclusives from the Eva Ink Artist Group:

A few pages from a recent Jonah Hex story:

Chinese artist Xiao Bai was just presented with the Gold Award in the International Manga Awards. The prize, founded by Japan's former otaku-loving prime minister Taro Aso are presented to recognize international achievements in the manga style. Bai won for “So Far, So Close,” a time travel story about a woman who meets her own son.

Legendary Archie artist Stan Goldberg started his career in the Golden Age coloring countless covers for Atlas, but in the Silver Age he was as a colorist for Marvel, working on such things as the cover to the very first issue of The Fantastic Four and desinging the color schemes for much of the seminal line. So it's fitting that he's been tagged to draw a variant cover for the new FF #1 featuring the new line-up, which features Spider-Man. The interiors are by Jonathan Hickman and Steve Epting while other variant covers are by Daniel Acuna, Gerard Parel and Marko Djurdjevic.

United Media, the syndicate behind such beloved comic strips as Pearls Before Swine and Get Fuzzy (above) and scores of other great strips of the past, is outsourcing its comics syndication business to Universal Uclick, according to a press release. In syndication terms, this is as if DC suddenly outsourced its publishing to Marvel. New York-based United and the similarly named but Kansas City-based Universal uClick -- which is owned by publisher Andrews McMeel, were long two of the three biggest comics syndicates -- King Features is the third -- and oversaw the immensely lucrative and popular icons of the comics pages for decades.

Here's the lineup: