Craig Thompson and Process on Instagram

Earlier today, via facebook, Craig Thompson announced a new instagram, where he's posting pictures of his process for his upcoming all ages outer space adventure, Space Dumplins. I can't post the pictures here, but using that particular popular smartphone application to document a workspace as well as and alongside documentation of his process is clever; it's a good reminder that comics, any art, really, is created by people in places at a certain point in time and that to argue otherwise is contradicted by the evidence at hand. 

Wednesday's New Thing

Uncanny X-Men #1. More on this soon. 

From the Deepest Darkest Corners of the Internet

"Deep Dark Fears" by Fran Krause (@frankrause)

Do you like humor?

Of course you do.

Are you afraid of entirely irrational horrifying things that could never actually happen but oh god oh god what would you do if they did?

Of course you are.

Well one comicsmith has combined these two things in a single brilliant, hilarious, terrifying webcomic: "Deep Dark Fears".

Each installment either illuminates something I was already irrationally afraid of or reveals to me something I hadn't previously thought of that I should absolutely have already been irrationally afraid of. Very educational.

Proof of its usefulness? Google "deep dark fears" right now and no psychologists' websites pop up. Only the webcomic!

Seriously now. "Deep Dark Fears" is brilliantly executed. It truly does plumb down deep into the strange part of the human brain that creates every-day scenarios just on the edge of believable and makes you laugh while doing it: What would happen if juuussst the edge of a speeding car clipped a part of your body? Is that sharp thing juuussst the right shape to really screw me up? What if I'm tired and fall asleep on my feet at juuuusssssssttttt the absolutely wrong moment? What if we're surrounded by ghosts all the time and we don't even know it?!

You'll be immediately impressed by Krause's cartooning:

The economy of line used to show you a closed eyelid and a set of pursed lips is awesome. THAT'S good cartooning. (Can you see where this strip is going?)

The one about video game logic applied to real life struck me because I've had nearly the exact same thought in the same context (a contender for best comics of 2013):

THAT'S hilarious.

Then there's the one about ghosts, that is so simple and so wonderful that it's already on the Long and Shortbox best comics of 2012 list.

"Deep Dark Fears" is worth a look because it's holding a mirror back at your crazy, needy, terrified, over-active subconscious and being funny while doing it.

Or maybe that's just me? EEP!

"Deep Dark Fears" appears weekly and is hosted on Tumblr here.
The comicsmith Fran Krause maintains a website here.

~ @JonGorga

A New Field of Battle

The intrepid and versatile Jason Latour (@jasonlatour) has released preview pages on Flickr.com just yesterday for an upcoming comic with a remarkable battalion of talent around him!

Industry giant Mike Mignola (@artofmmignola) and his sometimes collaborator John Arcudi are writing the story and the inestimable Dave Stewart (@Dragonmnky) is coloring Latour's line-work:

Notice the sound effects! They're hand-drawn and the "eeeeeee" continues from the first panel to the second in a graphic way that's really fun and feels accurate. Notice the choices in relative panel sizes for presenting details, a scale of height, and then a scale of destruction. It works! It's awesome.

The comic's name is "Sledgehammer '44" and I choose to be excited about it because it looks like the best elements of "Atomic Robo" combined with the best elements of "Band of Brothers". WWII Sci-Fi fancifulness with a hint of gritty. To my knowledge, no publisher or release date has been attached to this project.

Now don't just click on this link and only read page one, it was page 4 that first made my eyeballs do that "Wolf and Red"-thing. Page 3 [excerpted above] is actually even more beautiful and displays awesome storytelling choices, while being slightly less dramatic. Read the whole preview.

Get excited.

~ @JonGorga

P.S. ~ If you're too young for "Wolf and Red", I think this will clear everything up.

Wednesday's New Thing: Young Avengers

  Out Today: Young Avengers #1 by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie. 

Variant cover by Bryan Lee O'Malley

Paul Pope's "Battling Boy" Pages Pop Up

If this is as good as it looks, Paul Pope may hit the top of my list of comics creators.

A preview was released yesterday morning (hot on the heels of our recent post about a new color edition of one of Pope's earliest works) of what I believe is only his second full graphic novel, rumored to be near completion for some time:

"Battling Boy"

That's a suitcase. Falling from the sky.

How sweet is that? Dramatic. Sharp. Gorgeous.

Oddly, the preview seems to have been released through EntertainmentWeekly.com.

Why, on EARTH ONE OR TWO, our first look at it has been dropped there is beyond me. Says something about where comics has come as a medium though, me thinks: this preview wasn't in "Comic Shop News" but Entertainment Weekly's website. Mainstream-ization, slow but sure.

Regardless, you need to see this. Go look at this preview.

"Battling Boy" is an attempt at freestyle superhero sequential art and the roughly 200-page part 1 releases October 8th to awaiting fans everywhere.

~ @JonGorga

The Wide World of SPX

I drove twelve hours in the last few days, from upstate New York to Washington, DC and back, so that my brother and I could go to SPX in Bethesda, MD. It was a long way to go for a expo, I know, but I had never been to one like this-- various things have kept me away MoCCA and, in June, I missed the first iteration of CAKE because I was in California, roadtripping down the coast to attend baseball games in each of that state's five MLB parks-- so I wanted to go, and my brother said he would come with, and so I drove down on Friday.

In the morning, he and I ate at the Steak n Egg, hopped on DC Metro's red line and headed to Bethesda, where we gorged ourselves on minicomics and sated our appetites for more lengthy fare-- he picked up Corpse on the Imjin and No Straight Lines, and I grabbed, among other things, Black Lung and Heads or Tails-- we did pretty well for ourselves, all things considered. Still, although the expo gave us an excuse to stimulate the economy, what we really found at SPX, what I was really looking for in Bethesda, was a sense that comics folk get together more often and more cordially than at the crush of humanity that is a major comic con. What I found at SPX was the same thing I love about NYCC or C2E2, a confluence of people who care about a particular form, for one reason or for another, coming together to celebrate, but on a much less competitive, scale.

Looking back on that celebration, something occurred there that was very peculiar: unlike at a larger con, where there's simply no way to talk to everyone or stand in every line or sit at every panel, at SPX it was hard to avoid the sense that you just might manage it, if you tried hard enough. That kind of intimacy, although slightly illusory, made the small world of comics seem even that much smaller, and that in turn made me acutely aware of how little I know, of just how big that small universe really is. In a room that feels like that, where you can turn around and just kind of stumble upon Dan Clowes and Chris Ware signing, sitting, heads bow, at the tops of lines that number a few dozen at most, you begin to wonder if you should be standing with those people, even though you've never really read the work of either, the copy of Jimmy Corrigan in your backpack that you read half of a year ago and brought with you to be signed but won't, because it feels kind of wrong to present it to Ware, to ask him to do the work when you have not, not withstanding. In a room like that, free from the overwhelming size of the Javitz Center or McCormick Place, it's much easier to remember that you know very little, no matter what you think you know.

And that seems important for our community, somehow.  The fact that I haven't read Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, and that I also know that I haven't and that I should, says that we're in the right spot, the place where we're still enough of a solid demographic to feel almost united, but where there's also enough stuff that for me to be as knowledgeable as I like will always been an aspiration, enough stuff that driving six hours to Washington and six hours back will be worth it because sometimes you happen upon something you've never heard of just as you walk past one of the industry's great lights. As you hurry by the kind of person who makes work that they hang in a fine art gallery but whose work you've never read, you think, "Oh, yeah, that's Chris Ware. I really should read Jimmy Corrigan," and then you move on. That possibility is what that little room in Bethesda felt like this weekend, and its why I'm glad I'm here, or, rather, why I was glad to be there.

Assembling To Protect A World That Loves and Hates Them

Next month, the Marvel universe is starting over, or, at least, parts of it are. There's a whole slew of new #1's, from an Avengers one pictured above, to new Captain America, Thor, and Iron Man volumes, some of it really interesting sounding and some of it, well, less so. What's going on, though, is not a hard reboot, like the kind DC did a little over a year ago with The New 52. It's not really even a soft reboot, either, since no continuity is being reset; instead, many of Marvel's characters are simply entering new phases of their ongoing stories, with new creative teams on the books that star them.

One series, though, is conspicuously absent from the books that have been solicited so far. There has not, at least not as of yet, been an announcement of a new Uncanny X-Men. That book, the flagship of America's second most popular superhero family,has been published with only two interruptions since it first emerged in the early Sixties, and, so, this disruption, the second in as many years, is much more interesting than any of the various and sundry renumberings that are going on, since, for example, this must be the seventh or eighth volume of Captain America and the above images represent, I think, the fourth volume of The Avengers, which is less ridiculous than the fact that we're on the third volume of New Avengers, a title that Marvel has been using for only seven years. Of course, the fact that there's no new volume of Uncanny is sort of explained by the new Uncanny Avengers series, written by Rick Remender, which is premised on a post Avengers vs. X-Men alliance between the two groups.

On its own, that seems like a typical big two throw-anything-at-the-wall-and-see-if-it-sticks sales strategy, but by publishing an Uncanny Avengers without publishing an Uncanny X-Men, that is, by shifting the Uncanny moniker away from its classic association and towards a new brand, I wonder if Marvel is tipping its hand. The whole thing sort of suggests a solidification of holdings, both in corporate and story terms, under the newly, massively, fortified Avengers brand. We've known for a while that Remender's book is going to prominently feature characters from both groups (and art from John Cassaday!). I remember reading a mention I can now no longer find of preview art for a Wolverine and the X-Men issue with a heavy Avengers presence in the Jean Grey school. And, oddest of all, in the interlocking covers for the first three issues of Jonathan Hickman's new Avengers series, Cannonball and Sunspot, two of the New Mutants, are the only featured characters who are not associated with the team in some prominent, iconic way.

This kind of synergy with the rest of the Marvel universe is sort of new for the X-Men, who were sort of left to do their own thing, particularly since they moved across the country and onto Utopia. The cynic in me says its about weakening a brand that the company doesn't totally control, and thereby strengthening the case for the inclusion of some of these characters in upcoming Avengers spin-offs, Fox be damned. I also suspect that, solely in the terms of the economics of comic books, it will be good for sales, since the two franchises are the best selling in all of American comics, and this sort of permanent crossover builds off of both the premise and success of Avengers v. X-Men. I don't know how wide ranging this effect will be, since I don't know how many New Mutants readers there are who don't already Avengers, but I guess you never know.

In story terms, this new synergy presents some interesting questions-- does the acceptance of mutants into the Avengers on a more general basis than Beast and Wolverine mean that mutants are no longer hated and feared by the society they're sworn to protect? Does that mean Xavier's dream is realized? And is that really only possible because the good professor is now, again, dead?*

All that, of course, sets up some really interesting possibilities having to do with Brian Bendis's All New X-Men series, and my whole theory might fall apart in the pages of that book. If it turns out that All New is Uncanny's replacement within the insular X-Men family, it won't be too surprising. But consider that these characters on the covers are all, excepting Magik and Emma and those two in the background**, iconic X-Men, ones that were used in the nineties cartoon, which is still probably the most recognizable group for much of the comics reading public, and certainly for my generation. They're also, again excepting Magik and the two question marks, characters that have been used in movie versions of the characters, so maybe we're not seeing a solidification so much as a kind of shift, which moves many of the excess X-Men under the Avengers umbrella. This could both strengthen the former brand and broaden the latter one, particularly if Bendis can build on the last few years' good work by Kieron Gillen and Jason Aaron, and if Hickman and Remender can manage the onslaught of characters effectively.

I'm surprised to find myself writing this, but I'm actually pretty excited for what comes now-- rather than feeling forced and random, like the New 52, this seems like almost a natural progression, everything seems to fit together, despite the fact that some of the decisions were probably made for artificial reasons. It's All New, and All Different, and that can't possibly be bad.***

----------------------
*I haven't read Avengers v. X-Men #11 yet, but, when I do, I suspect I'm going to have some very critical things to say about how the book handled the death of Xavier. As an idea moving forward, it's not bad, particularly in the context I'm talking about above, but it doesn't really ring true in terms of the crossover's plot, in part because he shows up absolutely out of nowhere in #10. I don't even think we've seen him since Matt Fraction left Uncanny and his death just doesn't have any gravity, given how unimportant the character's been since Joss Whedon chastised him a few years ago. But maybe they handled it really well. I won't know until I go to my LCS.

**Is that one on the far right Rachel Grey?

***By the way, the powers that be at Marvel, I have a request-- can we get the 616 Nightcrawler back?  Please?

Heart of Ice

Yesterday, we got our first glimpse of Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's first post League of Extraordinary Gentleman: Century collaboration, which stars Captain Nemo's daughter, Janni. You can read the full synopsis on the Gosh Comics site.

This project, which must be set between the first and second Century volumes, is in particular interesting because both its length and its solicitation text seem to suggest that it is going to be much simpler than that recently concluded arc, which was so thick with reference and allusion that it often seemed a parody of Moore's original project. Here, we get a short work, only 48 pages, and only two explicit references to the tradition in literature in English, Poe and Lovecraft, Americans both (no matter how much H.P wished he'd been born across the pond). Invoking those two suggests that Heart of Ice is going to dark and horrifying as well as lithe, a prospect that has my pulse up, if only a little. Of course, the quality of the project is going to be directly related to whether Moore can control impulses towards excess-- if he can, this may very well be the best League adventure since the band got back together.

Moloch Whose Comics Are Judgement!

I have to say that, of all these silly Before Watchmen books, the surprise solicited J. Michael Straczynski and Eduardo Risso Moloch is the second most tempting, after that one that I already bought an issue of.

Moral issues and problems with the premise aside, its always good to see Eduardo Risso's name on a comic book, particularly since Spaceman, which had some high quality issues, seems to have fallen off of my pull list for one reason or another. His drawing, when he takes his pen to characters that are not his own, has a revealing, almost transgressive, quality, one that I think is perfect for the Before Watchmen project. And to apply it, of all the Alan Moore creations that have been so far violated in this manner, to Moloch? Moloch, who was more of a cancer-ridden plot device than a real character? Moloch, who, even under Dave Gibbons's steady hand, already looks like something from Risso's sketchbook? This new mini is suddenly the most interesting of the lot of them.

Of course, that doesn't make the Moloch book interesting or in any real way necessary, and it certainly doesn't make the project any less toxic. Although it's hard to look at the preview art and not be tempted to deal with the demon, Alan Ginsberg seems apropos:

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
      their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi-
      nation?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
       tainable dollars! Children screaming under the
       stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
       weeping in the parks!

The Criminals Always Return To The...

In November, Image is reissuing Scene of the Crime, Ed Brubaker's first collaboration with Michael Lark, who would later draw much of the writer's supreme Daredevil run. Lark is a fantastic illustrator of crime comics, one of the best in the business, and the fact that he's inked here by Sean Phillips, another longtime Brubaker pal and maybe the best crime cartoonist right now, can only mean good things. If this book is half as good as those Daredevil comics or a quarter as good as Brubaker and Phillips' work on Fatale, Incognito, and Criminal, we're looking at one of the best reissues of the year.  

Here's To You, Joe Kubert

It's been a bad year for the elder statesmen of comics. Back in December, we lost Jerry Robinson and Joe Simon within days of each other and, today, Joe Kubert passed away at the age of 85. I can't say that I'm particularly familiar with Kubert's work, unfortunately, except for a Sgt. Rock collaboration written by Brian Azzerello. That book, though, Between Hell and a Hard Place, is one of my favorite graphic novels, a very honest sort of war story made all the better by Kubert's feeling impressionism. He handled all the visual elements of the work himself, and the soft lines and light colors come together to give the book a sort of distant, gauzy feel, one that contrasts with the way his storytelling ability drives home just how serious of a work Between Hell and a Hard Place and its horrific subject really are. Kubert, who served in Korea, very clearly knew that the way we remember the Second World War and the way it actually was are two very different things, and, in evoking both, his artwork reveals the flaws inherent both in an idealized view of history and in a sanitized account of the violence of war.

Because I love Between Hell and a Hard Place so much, I always sort of figured I'd take in some more of his work sooner or later and, while its never too late to dig deeper, my reading of his work will now always be marked with a certain cheapness, a certain sadness, the spectre of the fact that I started to read Joe Kubert's life work because he had died before I could get around to it. Which is not to say that I won't start in, just the opposite. It just won't be the same as it would have been if I had read it before today.

Move easy, Joe. You'll be missed. 

On Captain Marvel

We've talked before about how awesome the new Captain Marvel costume is, and there have been a lot of people having a lot of fun with it. To wit:

 Terry Dodson's cover for Avenging Spiderman #9

 Conley 

Cameron Stewart

...and then there's Ed Mcguinness's sweet cover for Captain Marvel #1

These are all great and, like McKelvie's design, marvelously fun and cartoony, which is part of what makes the look work. For the book itself, though, we're stuck with these dark, sludgy, pointy, deadly serious Dexter Soy paintings. It's like Marvel is trying to get the book canned. 

A New Defender: Jamie McKelvie

iFanboy has the second best news involving Matt Fraction that I've read all day:

Today at C2E2 in Chicago, Marvel announced at the Next Big Thing panel that fan favorite artist Jamie McKelvie would be joining Fraction with The Defenders #8 as the regular artist.

 They also have a page:

Isn't that pretty? As sad as I am to see Terry and Rachel Dodson go, I think its awesome that McKelvie gets a monthly gig, and on one of the the most exciting books that Marvel is publishing right now, as opposed to some backwater, like New Mutants or something. The only downside, as near as I can tell, is that it won't be nearly as easy to talk to him at conventions anymore; he and Gillen are regularly my favorite artist's alley conversations and, two years in a row now, I've walked right up to him without having to wait in line, had a quick chat, and bought something from his table. It's hard to be too upset about that loss, though: if you love a comic book artist, you should set them free, right?

Good on Marvel for this one; good for McKelvie, too.

This Is Exciting.

David Aja's covers for his new Hawkeye series, with Matt Fraction.

Even if the strides, in terms of quality, that Marvel has made in the last six months go to shit after Avengers vs. X-Men, at least there's this come August.

David Aja and Matt Fraction: Putting The Band Back Together

Matt Fraction and David Aja are two of the three creators responsible for my favorite superhero comic of all time, The Immortal Iron Fist. Marvel is putting the two back together for something they're going to announce at C2E2 this weekend, and it's got me on the edge of my seat.

Now if we could only get Brubaker involved.

UPDATE:
Rich Johnston says it's a Hawkeye series. It's an odd choice, but maybe these two can make me care about Clint Barton the way they made me care about Danny Rand. 

Yesterday, at Wondercon out in Anaheim, Marvel announced a new Captain Marvel series, starring Carol Danvers, written by Kelly Sue Deconnick and drawn by Dexter Soy.

Jamie McKelvie designed Captain Danvers's new costume, which just looks great:

Our idea was to give her a kind of swash-buckling costume that invoked a sense of her history as an Air Force officer. Her hair is slicked back at the sides when in costume - so her Kree-style helmet can form when she needs it.

The darn thing even looks like it keeps her arms and legs warm while she's all the way up in the sky like that, unlike her last costume. I do wish that I liked Dexter Soy's art anywhere near as much as I like McKelvie's, though; as great as the new costume is, I'm not sure I can shell out four bucks for a book that looks that stiff and pointy on a regular basis.

Another Legend Gone

As much as it saddens me to have to do this, to post about the death of one comics great right after a post about the death of another, I don't really have a choice, since Joe Simon, co-creator of Captain America, passed away on Wednesday. Because I'm in the final throes of the most stressful finals of my life, I don't have the time to spend on a post commemorating Simon the way he deserves, but there'll be one, after the first of year.

In the meantime, here's to you, Joe Simon. 

The Gentleman of Comics is Gone

People revered Jerry Robinson in our industry because he created The Joker and worked on Batman when he was seventeen years old. I revered Jerry Robinson because he survived our industry with his integrity intact.

He died two days ago, here in New York City.

[via NYCGraphicNovelists.com]

In 1938, he started working for Bill Finger and Bob Kane on Batman as a letterer and assistant inker. A year later, he was inking the book, then naming Robin, on to creating The Joker, Two-Face, and the best butler in popular fiction: Alfred Pennyworth. Soon, he was the key writer, then he switched to penciling the adventures of the Dark Knight.

Later he moved over to newspaper strips, creating two different strips in the 60s and 70s, which in turn led him to two terms as the president of two different nation-wide cartoonists guilds. He next tried his hand as a comics historian, penning a comprehensive history of comics in newspapers.

Most remarkably, in 1975, he and superstar artist Neal Adams secured credit and a lifetime stipend for Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, long-since cast-away. Siegel and Shuster were literally brought in-house and eventually fired from DC after selling them their biggest cash-cow: the first superhero, Superman. Thanks to Adams and Robinson, a small permanent salary was established and their names have been attached to every piece of media featuring Superman ever since. Although even partial ownership rights to their creation was still not granted to them or their families until quite recently, the first steps were made by Adams and Robinson.

In 1978, he upped his commitment to this industry and founded an international syndicate of comics creators, one that still exists today.

This man's accomplishments are not just wide-ranging, not just impressive. Not merely great. They were genuine. They displayed integrity.

When I met Jerry Robinson, very very quickly, in October 2o1o, I was delighted to discover that he was a gentleman. I also learned about his versatility that night: Artist. Writer. Historian. Humanitarian.

Jerry Robinson was an inspiration. A direct inspiration, as I foresee in his legacy a world where comics creators don't have to be cheated out of their rights or their pay.

Losing this man is a loss for us all.

~ @JonGorga

Ilias Kyriazis Self-Publishes New Mini-Comic

Mister Ilias Kyriazis, Greek comicsmith of "Falling For Lionheart" (the graphic novella of last year I had huge anticipation for, really enjoyed, and included on my Best of 2o1o List), has a brand new short comic called "The Dragon And The Ghost" soon to be self-published and available exclusively on his website.

[via Ilias Kyriazis' Google+ account]

Look at this gorgeous thing:
"Falling For Lionheart" was sad, funny, beautiful, enlightening, smart, explosive with action, delightful with romance, and still clear in its main plot-line. Drawn in smooth, simple, cartoony lines, still solid enough to give weight to the characters' realism, and colored vividly and dramatically. Further, the use of the two very divergent styles: slick superhero and rough underground make the story tick in a new beat from one moment to the next.

The comic is so good, it nearly defies description. And that is only part of why a review of it never appeared here from me. I really should have completed one, because there is not nearly enough awareness of European comics here in the US.

His few comics online are also great. If you're a Beatles fan, prepare for a mind-fuck of a comic in "The One and Only Billy Shears". Marvel at his adaptation "The Iliad in Sixteen Pages". The two pages of POV from within an ancient Greek helmet deserve an award in and of themselves.

"The Dragon And The Ghost" has been previewed here (in Greek) by Comicdom.com and I'm excited even though the article isn't in a language I can read. The comic's promotion is for several reasons... inscrutable.

The opening line of the comic's short description up on the website is:

"Deep in the forest lives Therr Zon Aakh, the last American dragon."

This is the three-quarter splash page that got me a bit tingly:

Yes, that does appear to be a cavern full of treasures of history, art, and nature. I'm not entirely sure what all that means? At all? But I'm in.

"The Dragon And The Ghost" mini-comic is available exclusively directly in his online store that opened here yesterday.

~ @JonGorga