When Spider-Man 3 comes out next year and you’re watching Spidey fight Sandman, don’t marvel at the CGI that allows the wallcrawler’s arm to pass through his enemy … marvel at the work of kickboxing world champion Baxter Humby. Badtaste.com out of Italy interviews Humby, who was born with one hand and put on his childhood hero’s costume for a fight scene with Thomas Haden Church.

What can you tell us about the scene (or the scenes) you were involved in?
The scene I did was a fight with the Sandman and I helped set up the punch sequences. The reason they needed me was, Spiderman punches through the Sandman and they needed a shot with his arm going through him.

Check out Humby’s website for more information on this impressive champion.

Someday, articles recommending comics for girls will replace “The Kids Are Crazy About the Manga” and “Graphic Novels — They’re Comics For Grown-Ups” in newspapers and on the Internet (if not in our hearts and minds, of course).

This installment comes from Rudy Ascott at Associated Content, who writes: “It’s no wonder girls don’t read comics books. The comic book store is teeming with unwashed, testosterone drenched males, who generally all turn their head at the first sign of a female in the store. Even if the girl is willing to brave the perils of the comic shop, they’re treated to a large selection of huge boobed and often hostile female superheros.”

So he offers a list of his Top 5 comic books for girls, all available in trade paperback: Sandman, Fables, Bone, The Walking Dead, and Strangers in Paradise. No manga, though.

I’ll give Ascott credit: Four of them are standard “comics for girls” fare, but The Walking Dead is a new one. You can read his descriptions/explanations at the link.

Dogmatika has a lengthy Q&A with artist Brendan McCarthy about his return to comics with Solo #12, why he left comics some 15 years ago, and, um, Dr. Manhattan’s penis:

“Mark Chiarello saw a copy of Swimini Purpose when DC expressed an interest in publishing it last year. He tracked me down via Scott Dunbier at Wildstorm, a longtime advocate of my work. Mark asked if I would be interested in doing an issue of Solo. I had reservations, mainly because I hadn’t done any comics for nearly 15 years, and felt my ‘art robot’ mojo may be somewhat rusty… And also, with the Solo deal, DC Comics take all the rights of ownership… so I would have to be careful in what I created for them, other than in revamping their ‘established brand’ heroes. I held back a lot of new original stuff and that’s why there’s a bit more about DC characters in it than I would have naturally have produced. Frankly, I have very little interest in mainstream superheroes. Except Paradax! of course.

“My initial pitch was for a humourous story on Dr. Manhattan’s massive blue penis and balls from The Watchmen… I liked that when he became a giant, his privates also grew enormously huge. I wondered if it would now be OK to view The Martian Manhunter’s green J’onn Thomas, for example… But this was a case of only highbrow ‘arthouse’ nudity being allowed (“Glenda Jackson’s tits syndrome”) and it was rejected straight away. So I was getting an education in getting to know the boundaries of what is permissible in a DC Comic these days…”

McCarthy also addresses his teen-age obsession with Saturn Girl, life in Hollywood, and his creative influences. It’s a fun read.

Now Playing Magazine has an interview up with Tad Stones, director of the upcoming animated Hellboy DVDs, who pitched two Hellboy animated series before the direct-to-DVD movies were approved:

”Having worked in this process, I want to fight it going to series every way I can, because as a series of movies, it’s so much better,” Stones says. “Because the difference is, in a TV series the schedule is king. And if something comes in and somebody did a good job, but it’s not quite the way you wanted it — doesn’t say the things it should about the character — it’s got to go through. In a TV series, I can’t monopolize Mike’s time. So at most, we’d probably go over premises together. Whereas in the movie, we co-wrote the story, we looked at outlines, we looked at the script, we went to the recording sessions.”

Both films will appear next year on Cartoon Network before they are released on DVD. Voice talent will include several members of the movie’s cast — Ron Perlman as Hellboy, Selma Blair as Liz Sherman, John Hurt as Professor Broom and Doug Jones as Abe Sapien — as well as former Fraiser co-star Peri Gilpin as the voice of Kate Corrigan, a character from the comics who didn’t appear in the film.

For more information on the movies, check out Stones’ production blog.

If your dream has ever been to have the Kryptonian version of your name appear in a Superman novel or to appear as a character in a Chris Ware story (which is kind of a depressing thought, if you think about it), the First Amendment Project is auctioning these opportunities off in September.

The nonprofit, dedicated to protecting and promoting the freedom of information, expression and petition, ran a similar auction last year that raised $150,000. The idea of auctioning off a name in a book actually came from Neil Gaiman, who sold the name of a cruise liner in his novel Anansi Boys on eBay, with the proceeds going to The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. The First Amendment Project took the idea and ran with it, recruiting Michael Chabon, Brad Meltzer, Stephen King, John Grisham and many others. Jonathan Lethem auctioned off a character name in his upcoming Omega comic for Marvel.

This year’s participants include Kevin Anderson:

“I will name a character after you (or the person of your choice) in the my novel THE LAST DAYS OF KRYPTON, for HarperCollins books and DC Comics, a science fiction epic that tells of the destruction of Superman’s home planet. Note, that because Krypton names are alien (Jor-El, Kal-El, Zod, Cera-Si), your name will have to be ‘alienized,’ but still recognizeable. The book is due to be published in Fall 2007.”

and Chris Ware:

“The appearance in name and approximate drawn likeness, either as a ‘supporting character’ or more forthright personna, of the auction’s ‘winner’ in an upcoming comic strip by the author/cartoonist, to appear sometime before the end of 2008 in serial (probably newspaper) form, and later to be reprinted in collected form at an unspecified, and probably quite alarmingly later, date.”

… as well as Carl Hiassen, Edward P. Jones and many others. Go check out the complete list on eBay.

This front page — is that what they call it? — at AdultSwim.com made me laugh. Oh, those Venture Bros.

The Wedding of the Century is past, leaving us 94 more years to wait until another wedding to go down that will catch our eye, our imaginations, and maybe even… our hearts. Now, I’ll admit, I have been very cynical as to the T’Challa and Ororo courtship, whirlwind romance and marriage, when I realized that the hype was right, that this was the real Wedding of the Century because this is going to have not only a huge impact on the characters, but possibly the Marvel Universe itself. (more…)

It’s not necessarily comics-related directly, but this strikes me as something that may have reprecussions for manga fandom:

Bandai Entertainment has announced that it will seek to quash fansubs of the upcoming Ghost in the Shell feature, for which it has the U.S. rights (along with Manga Entertainment)…

In the announcement, Bandai said that it will “take all measures available to stop the illegal distribution of its titles…”  Bandai Entertainment president Ken Iyadomi said of the fansubbing practice (which makes translations available for illegally downloaded anime before they are released in the U.S.), “Fansubs, even those not sold for profit, are harmful to our properties and industry overall and we will be watching closely to make sure our rights regarding SSS are not infringed.”

…This move by Bandai marks a new, more aggressive stance, which is likely to be controversial in the otaku community.

For those who entered the Isotope’s Darick Robertson will beat the hell out’ve a superhero of your choice contest, I’m sure that you’ve already checked out five of the winners – and the YouTube video of the Robertson instore itself – over at the Isotope’s website already, right?

If you need more of a selling point, then I can offer only this: Captain Britain getting punched hard. You know you want to see that.

Onslaught Reborn artist Rob Liefield has posted preview images from the book, due in November, on his website:

Liefield writes: “Page 6 is a particular favorite as it showcases the mighty Thing punching one of my favorite Fantastic Four villains, Blastarr! Again, Matt [Yackey] colored the heck outta this page, adding the final blue rim lighting put it over the top.”

From an interview to a full fledged blog concerning all things Criminal related, ADD launches A Criminal Blog and he’ll even let you help him keep up with it all.

“Thanks for checking out A Criminal Blog, your support of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s new comic is most appreciated. If you’re anywhere near as excited about its release as I am, you’ll want to know everything you can about it as we count down to Wednesday, October 4th. So, what I’m asking is that if you spot any Criminal-related news, on a blog, message board, comics news site or anywhere, please e-mail me the info so I can share it with A Criminal Blog readers.”

Also, be sure to get today’s release of Walking Dead #30, which will contain a five page preview of the upcoming comic.

Related: Brubaker is interviewed at Word Balloon. Get the MP3 here.

Mark Smith and Dan Hipp have posted a three-page, color Amazing Joy Buzzards story on their MySpace and IGN.com blogs. Titled “The Fearless Vampire Hunters,” the short was created for Lo-Fi magazine, and is included in The Amazing Joy Buzzards Vol. 2 trade paperback.

The Village Voice looks at Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls, and provides a brief overview of the writer’s history of addressing sex in comics form:

Moore has been giving characters a sex life as far back as Maxwell the Magic Cat, which he wrote and drew for his local Northants Post newspaper from 1979 to 1986. And the famous “Rite of Spring” issue of Swamp Thing was devoted to a psychedelic sexual experience involving this “walking mass of putrefying vegetable matter.” Sex for both pleasure and power adds a dimension to more recent characters such as the superhero Tom Strong and, my favorite, the magical Promethea, primary vessel for the gnostic writer’s intense interest in diabolism, the kabbalah, and the greater esoteric tradition. Lost Girls, however, arose from Moore’s pre-magical conclusion that “sex was probably interesting enough by itself, without all the extraterrestrial or supernatural trimmings.”

There’s also a brief Q&A with Gebbie in which she touches upon pornography, art and reaction to Lost Girls.

Rogue Pictures has acquired the film rights to The Lost Squad, the Devil’s Due miniseries by Chris Kirby and Alan Robinson about a unit of Allied soldiers who battle Hitler’s supernatural operatives during World War II.

According to Variety, Adrian Askarieh (Hitman, Herobear and the Kid) and Daniel Alter (Hitman) will produce the project for Rogue, a division of Universal’s Focus Features.

The Lost Squad first appeared as an eight-page story in Digital Webbing Presents #7 in 2003. The six-issue miniseries debuted at Devil’s Due in September 2005.

Related: The Lost Squad blog

More film news: Adam Green (Hatchet) to direct Dead West adaptation

The Broadway Community Library is hosting a “Meet the Artists” session with American Splendor illustrators Dean Haspiel and Josh Neufeld this Thursday … details on the flyer below:

With everyone and their bands and projects getting a MySpcace page, it’s pretty easy to see how they have over 100 million registered members. Social networker Brian K. Vaughan announced he will be offering a ten page preview of his upcoming Vertigo graphic novel, Pride of Baghdad.

I just added a new MySpace page for my upcoming Vertigo graphic novel Pride of Baghdad, where I’ll soon be posting an EXCLUSIVE ten-page preview only for friends of that profile, so add it today, won’t you?

http://myspace.com/prideofbaghdad

Pride of Baghdad is inspired by the true story of four lions that escaped the Baghdad Zoo during Operation Iraqi Freedom. The graphic novel coming out on September 13th, 2006 is beautifully illustrated by Niko Henrichon. Make sure to check out Niko’s blog, it’s pretty sweet.

Fantagraphics’ Kim Thompson talks to Publishers Weekly about the high-end Ignatz line, and offers up a welcome alternative to the mainstream world of “WE HAVE SOLD OUT, WE ARE AWESOME”:

The Ignatz line remains just about break-even, which is still better than I’d hoped since I’m a born pessimist. I’ll be perfectly happy to support it pretty much ad infinitum if we just don’t lose too much money on it… They’ve performed okay [in the direct market] —we didn’t expect them to set the world on fire, and they didn’t, but they didn’t tank, either.

I now desperately want to read a Kim Thompson/Mark Millar conversation.

Retailer site ICv2 is collecting the opinion of retailers about Marvel’s Civil War being delayed. And, well, they’re pretty much what you’d expect.

(more…)

Paul Dini and Misty Lee visit the ice cream truck with Little Rashy. Hilarity ensues.

Mahrwood Press has announced a new charity anthology:

“Balm in Gilead” will be a prestige anthology featuring the top names in comics and genre literature. All proceeds go directly toward feeding, clothing and housing children [affected by the bombing in northern Israel].

The line up of creators includes Stan Lee, William Messner-Loebs, Peter David, Joe Kubert, Neal Adams, Colleen Doran and many more.

(Via Tom Spurgeon.)