James Jean and Adam Hughes again have been named winners in the Spectrum Awards competition, which honor the best in fantasy, science fiction and horror art.

Jean won Best of Show for his cover for Fables #67, and the Gold Award in the comics category for his cover for Fables #66. Hughes received the Silver Award in the comics category for his cover for Catwoman #75.

Variety reports that the Justice League movie, which was shelved earlier this year due to the writer’s strike, is back in business:

Scribes Kieran and Michele Mulroney are busy polishing up the script, which is expected back at the studio in several weeks, and the cast has been advised to keep training for their superhero roles. Director George Miller is in pre-production in Australia.

Adam Brody, cast as the Flash, is the biggest star in the superhero lineup. Rapper Common nabbed the Green Lantern role; other roles went to lesser-known thesps such as Armie Hammer Jr. (Batman) and Megan Gale (Wonder Woman).

Graphic Classics: Free Comic Book Day
(Eureka Publishing)

Written by Edgar Allan Poe, Rod Lott, Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Conan Doyle, Alex Burrows, Mary Shelley, Antonella Caputo, Lord Dunsay, and Milton Knight.

Illustrated by Gerry Alanguilan, Mark Dancey, Simon Gane, Anne Timmons, and Milton Knight

This Free Comic Book Day is shaping up to be pretty cool. First there’s news of an Atomic Robo offering, and then I got word that Graphic Classics is also getting into the fun. Better than that, I got a preview of the Graphic Classics FCBD issue and it’s worth getting excited about.

Unlike most Graphic Classics volumes, the 64-page FCBD issue doesn’t focus on a single author or even a single genre. Instead it presents a cross-section of the kind of stuff Graphic Classics puts out, which is what a FCBD offering should do. There’s a horror story by Poe, a one-page fable by Ambrose Bierce, a supernatural tale by Arthur Conan Doyle, a gothic love story by Mary Shelley, and a whimsical tale of world destruction by Lord Dunsay.

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I’ve been trying to find time to get some thoughts together about WonderCon … apologies if this seems stream of conscious and doesn’t make much sense …

While I attended the Fables Forum panel, my wife was at the Jericho and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles panels at WonderCon on Sunday, taking the pictures in this post. Above are Lennie James, Alicia Coppola and Brad Beyer from Jericho.

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Tom Brevoort really can’t help himself:

Perhaps I’m simply a bad person, but I’m finding the “audience participation” threads so fascinating to watch as they unfold that I’m going to try for another one. Not sure this is going to work quite as well–bear with me, I’m making most of this up as I go along.

So let’s see if we can’t select a few titles from the Marvel line to cancel, and come up with a few new titles to replace them.

Similar rules apply: each poster can nominate one title to send to the showers, and one new title that they’d like to see. And any poster can veto any nomination, either for book to cancel or book to create, for any reason.

Cancelled so far: New Warriors, Young X-Men, X-Force, Hercules, Wolverine: Origins and Nova. Why do people hate the bucket heads…?

Mark Millar will do whatever it takes for you to check out Kick-Ass, even if it means putting you in the book itself:

Okay, as you might have noticed, Kick-Ass hits the stores tomorrow. But remember: Johnny and I are doing all this ourselves. We have no Marvel marketing machine behind us here. It’s just two guys and one of them can’t even talk properly (I have a Scottish accent) so we need all the help we can get.

The big thing to remind everyone on a heavy Wednesday is that the book is actually out. Our orders were through the roof, but if people don’t know it’s on the shelves then it’s all for nothing. So to get the word out there we propose that tomorrow officially becomes KICK-ASS WEDNESDAY and we promote that fact by getting the following poster on as many websites as possible.

…The first 100 people to link will receive a thank you, by name, in the next issue of the book. Once all the comic boards have been done, extra points to anyone who can stick this on the other sites too. Movie sites would be great, but let’s see how mental it gets and see if we can get threads going in Popular Mechanics or whatever.

Thing is, Kick-Ass doesn’t appear on Diamond’s shipping list for tomorrow… Mistake (Criminal also doesn’t appear, surely both books can’t be off), or is the book shipping late without the creators’ knowledge? (EDIT: Dick has solved the confusion; the book is shipping. See the comments below.)

It looks like a good week for No. 1 issues. Heck, maybe even a great week.

At Marvel’s Icon imprint, there’s the debut of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s Kick-Ass, and the return of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ Criminal (with a new volume and new numbering).

IDW Publishing generates a new Doctor Who series, starring the Tenth Doctor and Martha, while at Dynamite, Alex Ross and Jim Krueger follow up a 0 Issue with Project Superpowers #1.

And then there’s Jeff Smith, who debuts his much-anticipated RASL tomorrow.

See? It’s good to be No. 1.

To see what other titles Chris Mautner and I think are worth mentioning, just keep reading. As always, let us know your choices in the comments below.

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Here’s another one I missed from this weekend because I was at WonderCon … Marc-Oliver Frisch, who does the month-to-month analysis of DC’s books over at The Beat, says there are some problems with Diamond’s January source data:

For the record, if you’re waiting for the January month-to-month sales columns, it’ll probably be a while. Since everyone’s fairly sure now that there’s been a glitch in Diamond’s source data, we’re holding off on the columns until the numbers have been corrected.

Looking at the Top 300 charts, there are a few very odd things going on. Not only does there seem to be an inexplicable five-percent increase across the board, as I noted a few days ago, but the index points for individual books also seem to be a mess.

Take, for instance, the performance of the weekly Countdown to Final Crisis and the bi-weekly WildStorm: Revelations. According to the January chart as it currently stands, Countdown to Final Crisis #17 was supposedly outsold by the title’s four subsequent issues in January, without any readily apparent explanation. And, even more oddly, WildStorm: Revelations #1 was outsold by issue #2, if you believe the chart. This is bizarre, at very best, and it flies in the face of everything we know about comics sales

In the comments section of that post, John Jackson Miller, whose numbers-related column debuted on the main ‘rama site recently, wonders if Diamond will reissue the data:

As noted on Heidi’s site, I suspect first-week February reorders entered the picture somehow. If Diamond reissues, I’ll recalibrate — but I’m wondering whether they’ll do that. In any event, if the error is what I suspect, we might see February’s numbers reflecting it in the opposite direction.

DC Comics and Warner Bros. Animation have released more details on Batman: Gotham Knight, the direct-to-DVD animated anthology designed to fill the gap between Batman Begins and Batman: The Dark Knight.

We already knew the writers involved — Josh Olson, David S. Goyer, Alan Burnett, Jordan Goldberg, Greg Rucka and Brian Azzarello — but we were left trying to guess the Japanese directors involved. Now, though, the press release names the animation houses — Studio 4ºC, Production I.G and Madhouse — and the five directors: Shojiro Nishimi, Futoshi Higashide, Hiroshi Morioka, Yasuhiro Aoki and Toshiyuki Kubooka.

We’re also given an official release date: July 8.

The press release can be found after the break:

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Fresh from WonderCon, artist Sean Galloway posts more of his character designs for the upcoming Spectacular Spider-Man animated series.

The show debuts at 10 a.m. March 8 on The CW.

Related: Toon Zone interviews story editor Matt Wayne

Chip Kidd’s got an… interesting way to promote his new book The Learners.

Channel 4′s “4Talent” feature spotlights Phonogram artist and Suburban Glamour creator Jamie McKelvie:

With Suburban Glamour, Jamie has expanded his own horizons and moved into writing as well as art. The series blends mundane realities with the fantastical. A teenager feeling trapped in her Midlands town begins to have strange visions, then makes a startling discovery about her background. “It’s very much based on my own life,” admits Jamie — although he fictionalised the name of the town — “but I think — and this is backed up by letters I’ve had from fans — the experiences and lessons of it are fairly universal.”

Unlike much of Jamie’s earlier work, it’s also in colour, and a clear progression in his ability is obvious. “I’m usually most proud of the latest issue,” he agrees. “The older something is, the more I can look back at it and see what’s wrong with it. But I think that’s exactly how it should be. If I was happy with something I did a year ago, what would be the point of continuing to work?”

McKelvie also reveals that his first work for Marvel, an X-Men short story, will be published later this year.

Walrus Comics sits down with the American Splendor creator to talk about the pros and cons of doing autobiography:

You’re depicted in the press as a curmudgeon/eccentric, yet your work reveals a great empathy and sensitivity… Do you feel you’ve been misrepresented and to what extent do you feel you’ve played a role in perpetuating that image?

Well, I mean, I’m DEPRESSED A LOT OF THE TIME. I’ve actually been diagnosed as having major depression, you know… I’ve even… I mean, for a short period time over a year and half I was REALLY FUCKED UP, when I just retired and I didn’t know what to do with myself. The movie hadn’t come out and I was really messed up… Um, I don’t know… am I a curmudgeon? I suppose people can get that impression because I’m not a kind of guy who goes around slapping people on the back and tickle you under the chin or something but… I just leave it up to other people… I don’t think I’m particularly mean or anything like that. If someone calls me up out of the clear blue sky, NOT JUST FOR AN INTERVIEW… but if they want to talk to me, I mean they can invite themselves over to my house and Ill talk to them… and some of these people, I mean I don’t know what they want from me but… you know… I don’t mind that.

via the D&Q blog.

Lucas over at Shotgun Reviews sent me a link to this on Friday, but with WonderCon going on I didn’t have time to follow it. In a post titled “This Lie’s Been Bothering Me…” on his LiveJournal, Hart D. Fisher of Boneyard Press says he published Gerard Way’s first comic:

The most troubling side of this lie is the collusion of the comics industry at large. Boneyard Press was not a small time publisher that was a flavor of the month that got flushed after one year. We published regularly for over 13 years. Boneyard Press was a unique publishing house and held it’s own place in the comics industry, one that has not been filled while I’ve been active in movies. I was listed two years in a fucking row on the Top One Hundred Most Important People In the Comics Industry, and that shit happened a couple years AFTER the Dahmer affair began.

So why was it so easy to pull one over on the public and hoodwink everyone in the comics world that good ol boy Gerard was doing his first published work at Dark Horse?

–snip–

So did a big company like Dark Horse knowingly commit fraud on the public in their advertisements touting these books by Gerard as his first foray into comics, or were they unknowing dupes. How many kids bought this comic book, The Umbrella Academy, because it was the FIRST. It’s a well known fact that the first issue of any new series is the best selling, or the first issue of a celebrity’s FIRST comic ever published. You see where I’m going with this? Sales for a book like that are going to be much higher than for a an old comics pro coming back to the fold now that he’s famous. You think Dark Horse had any part in this, I’ve already shown motive.

Shotgun Reviews contacted Scott Allie at Dark Horse and Gerard Way. Allie said he doesn’t think they ever billed The Umbrella Academy as Way’s first published work, noting that he did something for DC when he interned there. Way said:

I sent [Hart] an email years ago, before we finished ‘Revenge,’ thanking him for believing in me, and never got a response. I think I emailed him once again as well…never heard anything back. I’m not ashamed of what I did for him, and wanted to see him in person and thank him. I’ve never had the chance.

I find these unbelievably creepy

On his blog, Stephen DeStefano shares the first four pages of a tutorial on how to draw the Venture Bros.

Flog has posted a 1997 interview with Bagge where he talks about his then ongoing series Hate and comparisons between Buddy and himself:

Q: Is Buddy Bradley an autobiographical character?

A: I used to tell people that he wasn’t. I mean, he is sort of a younger version of myself, but I think he’s a less well-adjusted version, as well as a more vocal, cantankerous version. One time a year or two ago a magazine asked me to answer a set of questions in Buddy’s voice. It wasn’t until I did this and realized that Buddy’s answers were exactly the same as they would have been if I answered them when I relaized that, yes, I am Buddy Bradley!

ComicBloc runs an apparently old (The end of the interview advertises books that came out three months ago) interview with Greg Pak that is still pretty good reading:

Few writers have had such a massive impact upon the genre and are as beloved by their fans as Gaiman and Morrison. So taking on a project in their wake is a pretty insane undertaking. At the same time, every single project I’ve done for Marvel has been following on the heels of giants—how dare any of us follow up on the classic stories of folks like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby? The answer is that of course we dare—that’s our calling and our job.

We may fall on our faces. But with every project we undertake, we’re striving to do our very best, to get to the essence of the characters, to build on the past while striking out new ground in telling the greatest stories we can.