IGN is going along with Marvel’s tease of a sequel to a popular recent series:

We have an image here to share with you. Sadly that’s about all we can share with you. We can say it’s by relative newcomer Marko Djurdjevic. You might have noticed, but his art kicks ass. What you probably haven’t seen before is his art prior to being painted. So consider yourselves lucky.

What’s more important is where this art is from. We can say it’s for a project that is coming in December. We can’t tell you how long it is. We can’t tell you the name of it or what the overall image means. We can’t tell you who’s writing it.

Okay, so what can we tell you… Actually, nothing. Seriously! … What. Okay, fine. We’ll help you along with two words.

Civil. War.

Me, I think that it’s the cover to the already announced What If?: Civil War, but I could be wrong…

Bags and Boards reports that Platinum Studios has announced the winner of their Comic Book Challenge — Jorge Vega’s Gunplay. Apparently you can view something over at the AT&T Blueroom site about the winner, but I can’t get the site to come up this morning. Maybe you’ll have better luck.

You can check out some of his work over at DrunkDuck.com.

scans_daily has a one-page comic strip by Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham called “True Things” where Alan Moore tells people their future. In this case, it appears to be Pinocchio getting his fortune read. (Thanks, Tracy).

After spending the last few days in San Francisco, which is experiencing an odd sort of heat wave right now, I can sympathize with the bird in Rosemary Mosco’s webcomic Bird and Moon. Her cute comic strip’s about global warming and one bird’s anxiety about it.

On her blog, Becky Cloonan walks through the process for creating the cover of East Coast Rising, Vol. 2, from thumbnail sketches to rough color mock-ups to final illustration.

Brian Heater over at The Daily Cross Hatch has the first part of a two-part interview with Peter Kuper about his new book, Stop Forgetting to Remember:

When you’re tackling a piece that covers such a large portion of your life, how do pick a logical place to end things?

You know, I figured out the ending when I got to the end. I wrote the end, exactly how it came out, in a very close time to finishing the book. I had general ideas of where things were going, but I hadn’t mapped everything out. In fact, I started the beginning of the book, but was having trouble with something so big, figuring out how to thumbnail through the whole thing. So I just started in, and got lost a little bit. I threw out a handful of pages that I never ended up using, but as I got further into it, I started to map it out more, and things like writing about the relationship with the friend that dissolves–I had some trepidation about that, because I thought, ‘am I going to re-dissolve that relationship?’ Actually, he was initially hesitant, but then he was very encouraging. Curiously, some of the people who saw the book were angry with me for their being in the book, and some people were angry at me for their not being in the book, so I knew I was doing something right.

Writing for The Guardian’s book blog, Ned Beauman considers manga for the uninitiated:

The particular problem with manga, though, is that there’s no way to know if we’re really getting the best of the medium. Manga comics constitute 40% of the books published in Japan, so of course only a tiny fraction will ever be translated – and at the moment, that tends to be the best-selling titles, especially the ones beloved by American teenage girls, who are the main market in the English-speaking world. (Manga aimed at teenage girls is called “shoujo”, and manga aimed at teenage boys is called “shonen”.) I’ve got nothing against American teenage girls, but what if the Japanese were forced to judge western cinema on the basis of nothing but Ashton Kutcher films?

Still, Mr. Kutcher does have a surprisingly diverse body of work, and indeed most of the manga I’ve read is wildly imaginative, if not (at least to this untutored eye) all that sophisticated.

If you make it past the Ashton Kutcher comparison, Beauman goes on to recommend Naruto and Hot Gimmick.

Tim O’Neil contemplates the problems Marvel has had over the years in dealing with a happily wed Spider-Man and yet still trying to keep the character fresh:

Spider-Man has been married for exactly twenty years, 4/9ths of the character’s existence. There have probably been just as many stories written with a married Spider-Man as not. Many generations of comics readers have grown up with a married Spider-Man as the default (Ultimate version notwithstanding). Some of my favorite Spider-Man stories (for nostalgia’s sake, if not on a strict aesthetic basis) have been married Spider-Man stories. I think Sal Buscema’s married Mary Jane from his long Spectacular run is one of the sexiest comic book females ever. But writing good married Spider-Man stories has gotten progressively harder. How do you keep the character interesting without darkening the tone of the books to a regrettable degree? From that perspective, it isn’t hard to see why the Clone Saga happened: they needed to do something to shake the character up, and with his personal life in forced stasis, they could only impose plausible status quo threats from external forces. When J. Michael Straczynski delved into all that bullshit about Spider-Totems and mystical junk, he was taking the franchise in an unpleasant leftward direction that worked against its strengths, but with Spider-Man’s personal life – the traditional engine of his best stories – essentially no-man’s land, it was probably the best he could do with the materials he had to work with.

Japanator has posted (and translated) a Super Mario manga that ran in Shogaku Ninensei (Grade School Sophomore) magazine way back in 1987. The plot involves Bowser leading Mario and Princess Peach through a dangerous maze or some such nonsense. Plus there’s some other nifty items, like an ad for Dragon Quest III (at least I think it’s an ad). You can find more scans from the magazine in question here.

Viz Media unleashed “Naruto Nation” last week, releasing three volumes of Masashi Kishimoto’s international phenomenon into the book market. So, it should surprise absolutely no one that all three cracked USA Today’s Top 150 Books list: Vol. 18 at No. 116, Vol. 17 at No. 123, and Vol. 16 at 131.

Meanwhile, the 17th volume of Natsuki Takaya’s Fruits Basket fell 42 spots at No. 76.

The USA Today list tracks all genres and types of books sold in some 4,700 brick-and-mortar and online stores.

“Naruto Nation” continues through the end of the year, with Viz releasing three new volumes each month to catch up with the Japanese series in time for the start of a major new story arc with Vol. 28.

The three new volumes of Naruto are due in comics shops next week.

With the debut of The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite less than a month away, Dark Horse continues its promotion of the miniseries, by My Chemical Romance front man Gerard Way, artist Gabriel Ba and colorist Dave Stewart. On its website, the publisher provides a glimpse of the production process, showing six pages of Apocalypse Suite #1, from script to inks to final product.

Related: Dark Horse Editor Scott Allie interviews Gerard Way

Found via TCJ.com, font designers and typographers discuss comic book lettering:

“I guess I see type innovation in comics so rarely that it baffles me that other methods have been adopted more readily—like the art, coloring and overall production—but lettering seems to wallow in old-school mediocrity.”

“The Punks publication seems to use all-caps Myriad Condensed, with some kind of image-wash filter applied. Is that what’s considered innovation? I suppose if all the banks and corporations that use Myriad were to switch to a comicraft font, that might be considered innovative too ”

“I think part of it is that comics are artist-centric, so their use of type tends towards that understanding. Often the subtle art of typography is too…different from the typical forms of visual expression, such as painting and drawing. Letters, words, and paragraphs carry an odd payload with them that can frighten away some from touching them at all. Others treat them as separate from the art, and their noodling just ends up widening that divide. Worst is when it makes the words harder to read. Word balloons are just safer, even with some typeface futzing/coloration. This is a fasinating topic and I think there’s a great deal of unexplored territory. I wish I had more time now to get into it.”

Steven Grant considers the value of scarcity in comics:

It’s an era – let’s face it, it has always been an era – where coming out of nowhere and trying to establish any sort of market traction at all is damn difficult. I can see where a company like Heroic would trot out the “Studio 54″ ploy: “we’re so hot you can’t get through the doors.” But that only works when people do want to get through the doors, and at least some people are seen going through the doors.

It’s all in how you approach the mega-event tie in.

If you pick the book up off the shelf thinking to yourself, “Oh god, like I don’t spend enough on comics already!”, you’re missing out. If you roll your eyes at the slew of books with nothing more than a cover banner, a corresponding story and a dream, you might miss out on something original. Sure, I see the big list of books and get just as daunted, just as confused and just as exhausted, but sometimes there’s that one book that overcomes the whole mega-event to not only take a snapshot of the battle from their particular viewpoint, but self-promote as well.

World War Hulk should generate the easiest of tie-in books: the big fight. Despite this being not so much a ‘world war’ (or really a ‘war’ for that matter, discuss!), Marvel is at least sort of hinting, if not show out-right that every hero is throwing themselves against the Gamma Wall and failing to stop his revenge. Every title on the shelves has the chance to line up and take their shot at the big bad guy, to either fail or limp away as needed. So far, the Spirit of Vengeance has placed his stamp of approval on the Hulk’s revenge, the new Initiative Avengers have tried to take on an opponent, we get an all new team of gamma soldiers (who I still doubt will make it out of this event to even guest star), some in the trenches reporting, and a visit to the Mini Mutant Refuge in Westchester.

WARNING: The following contains spoilers for the World War Hulk: X-Men mini-series. Find some copies (it’s only a three issue series!) and read along!
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This week we wrap up the summer-long resurrection of one of our favorite features, I ♥ Comics, where comics bloggers, creators and fans discuss the things they love about the medium.

This week, our guest contributor is Joe Casey, who has written comics like Godland, Automatic Kafka, Rock Bottom, The Milkman Murders and Full Moon Fever, in addition to just about every major character for Marvel, and many of DC’s as well.

They say honesty is the best policy, so I’ll just come right out with it: It might not be an easy thing to explain, this love I have for superhero team books. But I definitely have it. And I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. In any given month, usually more than half of the top ten best sellers in the Direct Market are team books. The fact is, team books have always been popular since the very beginning. The book that ushered in the Marvel Universe was a team book. The DC book that inspired that book was a team book. Just about all of the greatest success stories at both major publishers have been team books.

Now, there’s got to be a reason for this… some basic commonality that superhero team books — and their fans — share that can somehow illuminate their appeal in some sort of academic sense. Actually, there probably is, but for the most part I don’t think about that stuff. Sometimes love truly is beyond all rationalization. Like I said, that odds are that I really won’t be able to explain it with any great degree of clarity. But, what the hell, I’m going to give it a try…

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Neatorama discovers another little comics-related gem: The Howtoons series of DIY comics for kids, by Saul Griffith, Joost Bonsen and Nick Dragotta (The Losers, X-Men: First Class Special). I’m pretty sure I’ve seen something before on the books — they’re published by HarperCollins Children’s Books — but they’re certainly worth pointing out again.

The Howtoons site has a creator blog, and other features, including some of the comics.

Ambrosia Publishing announced this week that they’ll publish two previously released comics, Plastic Farm by Rafer Roberts and Nantucket Brown Roasters by Jason Asala , on the web beginning in October, with collections to follow in 2008.

I’m not familiar with Plastic Farm, but I do own a complete set of Nantucket Brown Roasters — five of them, I think — and I also fondly remember Asala’s first comic series, Poe, which was published back in the 1990s. Now they just need to get the rights to publish a Poe collection, and all will be right with the world.

You can check out the press release after the jump …

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The San Francisco Bay Guardian talks with cartoonist Kyle Baker about Special Forces, Nat Turner, and self-publishing: “I didn’t feel that DC Comics was doing their best with my stuff. I was looking at the sales figures and thinking, ‘I bet I could do this badly.’ And I could!”

The Memphis Commercial Appeal reports that Diamond Comic Distributors is moving its distribution center from Memphis to Olive Branch, Miss., just across the state line.

The new site is 600,000 square feet, more than double that of its current warehouse on East Holmes Road. The company also maintains space at 4292 E. Raines Road in Memphis.

Diamond moved the distribution center to Memphis from Sparta, Ill., in 2002. The Maryland-based company has additional warehouses in Torrance, Calif., and Plattsburgh, N.Y.

Neatorama points out Rob Sacchetto‘s recently completed Fearless Frankie, an EC Comics-inspired zombie tale set in the jungles of Vietnam.

You can read the comic for free online, or download it as a PDF.