Comics

They said it couldn't be done. Arising from a shambling mess of over-spending, poor planning, and bad management, against all odds the Spider-Man musical -- and its titanotheric top line of talent, including theater heavyweight Julie Taymor, guitar god Edge and immanence manifest Bono -- are actually coming to Broadway. Earlier in the week, the very first perplexing set concept art emerged, which you can see above. And today, Friday, a song from the musical will be performed for a mass audience for the first time, when Reeve Carney, who plays Spider-Man, sings one of the songs on Good Morning America. If you happen to be up and about at 7 am, you can even watch the taping.

Fantagraphics has just announced via PR the publication of a long-lost but much alluded to comic strip by William S. Burroughs and British artist...

We declared a moratorium on Bluewater Comics news a while ago due to their awful back-end work for hire contract (and were taken off their PR list as a result) but whatever we think of their business model, we do have to give credit where it is due: they are absolute monsters at PR, and the recently announced Betty White Female Force comic is no exception. It's popped up on our news feed from EW, the LA TImes, the New York Times and everywhere else; a Google search for "Betty White Bluewater" yields 74,000 results. Even the Today Show blog picked up the Reuters story about the comic.

Khepri Comics is a web-based comics seller that's been around for over a decade, offering a lot of indie books but specializing in work by Brian Wood, Cliff Chiang, Becky Cloonan, and other "new mainstream" creators. Over the years, owner Brian Scot Johnson has built a strong relationship with these creators by promoting their work via special sales and so on. By partnering with Khepri these creators -- who, in addition to their distinctive work, have well-defined fanbases which they maintain via web interaction -- would be able to, say, offer a blog preview of their small press work with a link to Khepri and know that consumers would be able to purchase a copy.

TOON Books, Françoise Mouly's imprint of comics for beginning readers, has announced a partnership with Candlewick Press. Previously a standalone line distributed by Diamond...

A new clip from RED, the Bruce Willis-starring movie loosely based on RED by Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner, has been released, and to the surprise of no one, it features what is the most eagerly anticipated aspect of the film: Dame Helen Mirren blowing shit up. We're told RED has been tracking very well and may even be the graphic novel base hit that perks up an otherwise painful year.

Image Comics house Top Cow has confirmed that they are resurrecting their Minotaur Press imprint, which will be a home for "darker, more nuanced stories." A previous version of Minotaur was once home to such books as Obergeist by Tony Harris and Dan Jolley and Felon by Greg Rucka and Matthew Clark. The new version kicks off with Echoes by Joshua Hale Fialkov and Rahsan Ekedal and Last Mortal written by Filip Sablik and John Mahoney with art by Thomas Nachlik. PR below:

Kari Yadro has joined Dark Horse at the new job of events and community manager, a position which will oversee both convention appearances and events and social networking channels. Yadro was formerly at Barnes & Noble. PR below:

A few days ago, we linked to Scott Morse's sweet poster for the ATP film festival that's being held this November, and suspected more cool old movie posters by cartoonists were forthcoming. Well, just call us Salander, because earlier today, Morse retweeted a link from Criterion to a huge photo of the whole collection, which includes posters by (squinting hard) Kate Beaton, Scott Campbell, Connor Willumsen, Robert Goodin, Jason Latour, Francesco Francavilla and many more. We're trying to get some images of the rest of the flyer, because they look amazing! The whole giant image is in the second link.

Looking to get high today? What If Kirby is a new site devoted to new, detailed, mind-blasting scans of Jack Kirby's artwork, and honestly just a few minutes of browsing sent The Beat tripping into new realms. Purchase of a membership in the Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center gives access to the real hard stuff however: even bigger scans.

There's a new Spider-Man franchise underway and it stars young Brit actor Andrew Garfield as the webslinger. But who is this man and will he be able to fill the tights and heavy eyewear of Tobey Maguire and Nicholas Hammond before him? Doing the rounds to promote his new film NEVER LET ME GO, he opened up for the first time about playing Peter Parker, and even if it's just his press agent telling him what to say, as is so often the case these days, Garfield has sold it beautifully:

Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' INCOGNITO is back, with a new miniseries, INCOGNITO: BAD INFLUENCES, and of course Phillips has provided a stunning cover for the first issue. The book is on sale on October 6.