Tag: Top News

As I tweeted the other day,. I am now definitely HOOKED ON STRIP SEARCH, the Penny Arcade produced reality show about cartoonists. We've now seen the first challenge and the first elimination (both above) and in case you are wondering THERE WILL BE SPOILERS.

Mike Baron is best known as the co-creator of Nexus and Badger, two of the signature comics series of the indie 80s. While the ups and downs of his nexus co-conspirator Steve Rude have been pretty well documented, what about Baron? We hear he's got a revamp of the Badger simmering at the resurrected First Comics. But he's also staying incredibly busy turning out novels by the bushel. In fact he has turned out three in recent months, with appropriately pulpy covers. Yes they are e-books, but no feverish novel about a spook called in to discover why the world's leaders are spontaneously combusting is complete without a pulpy cover!

The case of Jerry Ordway -- a talented veteran artist who is not getting as much work as he should— continues to resonate. It isn't really about Jerry Ordway. it's about comics, and about the manny many aspirants and passers by and the few who are called. Mark Evanier addresses the odds:

Walking Dead sees a big rise as expected, while Saga and Buffy sandwich the new Star Wars book, and Invincible’s one hundredth issue. Elsewhere, it’s a good month for all-ages comics, and Image have their usual batch of debuts. Dynamite have a poorer month than usual for sales drops, but a round of relaunches are on the horizon.

This May Fantagraphics is releasing OTHER STUFF, a compilation of various strips by Peter Bagge and his friends like Dan Clowes, Gilbert Hernandez, and R. Crumb. The stories in the book are mostly outside the famed Buddy Bradley saga, but no less hilarious.

If you've ever wanted to own the definitive version of Terry Moore's Strangers in Paradise saga, it's available once again in Omnibus form. Originally released as a hardcover, the 2400 page two-volume collection...

Comixology's reeling servers have forced the end of the Marvel 1st promotions announced at SXSW where Marvel was making 700 of its first and landmark issues available for free from Comixology.

Cartoonist Nate Powell (left) along with Rep. John Lewis and writer Andrew Aydin—all collaborators on the upcoming graphic novel March—walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma AL, March 2013, where in 1965 600 marchers protesting for civil rights, among them Lewis, were tear gassed and beaten with clubs by police.

This weekend I attended the fifth annual Tucson Festival of Books. TFOB is a among the top five book festivals in the nation. This year has attracted a lot of famous authors, including, Jodi Picoult.

The 90-year-old creator of NonNonBa, Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, and such yokai masterpieces as GeGeGe no chows down with relish. As recounted in the semi-autobiographical Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, Mizuki lost an...

As if creating the manga blockbusters Love, Hina and Negima weren't enough, manga-kaKen Akamatsu is launching a new manga this summer according to Japanese news reports. No details on the contents -- his previous hits were harem manga but in 2010 he declared that genre passé, so maybe we'll see something more genre busting from him. Akamatsu is notable for (in translation at least) being a little more focused on the business aspects of manga:

Time Warner has found its magazine division all too quittable: after an unsuccessful attempt to sell off the print division which puts out Time, People, Sports Illustrated, it has decided to just split it off into its own business, and hope stock investors come along who like to look at glossy magazine. It's a similar to the move Mr. Burns Rupert Murdoch pulled recently, splitting Fox into two divisions: The Fox Group, which includes movies and TV, and News Corp., which includes the newspaper division.