Kevin linked to his first column last week, but I wanted to add that I’m really enjoying Rich Barrett’s Anatomy of a Panel feature over at Rescued by Nerds. In his second column, Barrett talks to The Damned writer Cullen Bunn and artist Brian Hurtt about a scene in the second issue of the Oni mini-series.

In conjunction with the third season of The Venture Bros., which kicks off on June 1 on Cartoon Network, creator Jackson Publick announces the Shirt of the Week Club. For one week only, after the debut of each new episode, you can buy a shirt from the show … or subscribe to all of them and get a bonus shirt. More details here.

– Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba finish up Casanova:

– Kerry Callen shares his theory on how to create a famous super hero.

– Variety reports that Dick Sutcliffe, creator of Davey and Goliath, passed away. I used to love watching the show on Sunday mornings before being dragged to church.

– Check out pictures from An Evening with Paul Pope at the Wexner Center in Ohio.

– Ben Towle breaks down how different artists draw water.

– Pass me the Bat-salve, Robin.

– The Canadian feminist blog Shameless has added a comic column by Tiina Johns called Comics Are For Everybody.

– Berlin makes the Wall Street Journal’s summer reading list.

– Ryan Kelly’s Lucifer art gallery.

– Marc Mason reviews the first episode of ABC Family’s Middleman adaptation.

– Tommy Lee’s life to become a cartoon. As if it isn’t already.

Christopher Butcher, manager of Toronto’s The Beguiling, gives Eye Weekly a crash course in porn comics (not entirely safe for work):

EYE: Has the wide availability of internet pornography affected your sales? These days, the demand for smutty stuff, especially fetish material, is generally sated by the internet. Our sales are still high, but they’re not what they used to be. People keep their kinks to themselves. Most of the customers we get for smut aren’t part of the computer generation — they don’t know how to get what they want on the internet.

Instead, to take their place, there’s this whole new wave of smut comics, called Yaoi. Yaoi are Japanese manga about male-male relationships, but they’re written and drawn by women, for women. They’re the number one growth category for manga here in North America, and women here and even some gay men have really been jumping on board. You get everything from really sweet slice-of-life stuff to more risque material.

He also covers censorship, shelving, and narrative versus sex in yaoi.

There was a lot of television and movie news over the long weekend, so let’s just wade in:

• Universal Pictures has launched the full website for Wanted, director Timur Bekmambetov’s adaptation of the miniseries by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones. The movie opens on June 27. [Wanted]

• Whiteout, Dominic Sena’s big-screen adaptation of the Oni Press miniseries by Greg Rucka and Steve Lieber, finally gets a release date: Sept. 19. [ShockTilYouDrop.com]

• A 15-minute preview of The Incredible Hulk reveals a mix of the ’70s TV series and various comic-book incarnations. Director Louis Leterrier says the film is partly inspired by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s 2004 miniseries Hulk: Gray. [Coming Soon, Sci Fi Wire]

• I’m convinced that, pretty soon, we’ll be able to watch all of The Incredible Hulk via promotional clips. Four more are floating around online. [Moviefone, MTV.com, MySpace, Yahoo! Movies]

• NBC’s Heroes will return at 8 p.m. Eastern on Sept. 22 with a one-hour recap, followed by a two-hour season premiere. [Futon Critic]

(more…)

Our friends at First Second have declared May to be Vampire Month, and we thought we’d play along by presenting some of our favorite vampires from pop culture (but mostly comics). So sit back, grab a warm glass of the red stuff and sink your teeth into these undead fiends …

Dane from 30 Days of Night: Dark Days

I was a big fan of the initial 30 Days of Night mini-series, so I really looked forward to the sequel Dark Days. Especially since Steve and Ben were going to get six issues to stretch out and develop their story. I was looking forward to watching Stella get her revenge on some vampires for what happened at the end of the first story, but I had no way of knowing how hard I was going to fall for her and some of the other new characters. Particularly Dane.

(more…)

I guess somebody took the word “teaser” to heart with this rather revealing — buttcrack, ahoy! — poster for the live-action Witchblade movie, announced a couple of weeks ago.

Uh, so … yeah. Buttcrack. Coming your way in 2009.

(Via First Showing)

AICN has a 1940 photo of the Minutemen — the first superhero team — from Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Watchmen. The Minutemen are, from left: Silhouette, Mothman, Dollar Bill, Nite Owl, Captain Metropolis, The Comedian), Silk Spectre and Hooded Justice.

Watchmen, based on the DC Comics miniseries by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, opens on March 6, 2009.

It’s not exactly comics, but design:related has a nice preview of the new Abrams book devoted to those snarky stickers that mocked everything product Madison Avenue every pitched. I may have to buy this.

The author of White Rapids has a rather spiffy new Web site up.

A cute widdle Webcomic by Queenie Chan.

The Oregonian chats with cartoonist Brandon Bolt about his webcomic, Nobody Scores!:

RUSSELL: So is “Nobody Scores!” sort of an id outlet? What’s the genesis of the strip?

BOLT: It is completely an id outlet — and it was an outlet for my political frustrations, as well. It started in June of 2006. I hadn’t gotten any work in a long time, so I decided to really dedicate myself to doing what I always wanted to do — which was a comic. Doing a webcomic seemed like the least bad of a variety of terrible options. Now, having done a bunch of educational work in the past — which involves being extremely ginger about a whole host of concerns, some of which are understandable and others ridiculous — I really felt the need to not censor myself. Additionally, like I said, this was June of 2006 — so things were looking really pretty grim.

So I came up with a sheet titled “Oh No! The Future,” and detailed a variety of apocalyptic scenarios. And I would have the cast (which I hadn’t finalized) carry out each of the apocalyptic scenarios — things like “peak oil,” “the greenhouse effect,” “asteroid strike” — and see how badly they handled it. If we were doing this conversation in person, I could actually show you the sheet that spawned it.

Want to see what was in that comic book Richard Alpert showed John Locke on Lost a few weeks back? A group of fans bought the comic off of eBay and have started posting pages from it on a blog.

Via

Toonzone.net talks to both J. Torres and Todd Nauck about Teen Titans Go!, the last issue of which comes out this week … Torres talks about what will happen this week and what might have happened if the title had continued:

Right off the bat, what can fans expect from Teen Titans Go! #55, the last issue of the series? Any hints or surprises you can pass along?

Without spoiling too much… a number of cameos, which sort of help bring together certain plot threads from previous issues… and… a villain we haven’t used in the series yet. That’s all I should say to keep it fun and surprising.

Now, there’s a lot you started to set up and explored in the GO! title. The next few questions will cover a few of the ideas you presented. So, let’s go! Towards the end of Teen Titans Go!’s run, you set up plot strands concerning Wildfire and Ravager. The former gave us the mystery of whether Starfire would be reunited with him, while the latter presented the possibility of Slade’s family, including Jericho, being further explored. Where were you planning on taking these two storylines?

I certainly wanted Starfire to find Wildfire. The story I had in mind for that involved the Titans heading off into space again. As for Slade’s family, I had rough ideas for more Ravager, possibly meeting Jericho, but nothing concrete for Slade’s re-appearance. We were planning to bring him back at some point, maybe #60, but we obviously didn’t get that far. Maybe if we ever got to do an annual or special, it would make perfect sense to go big and use someone like Slade or maybe Brother Blood.

Details here and here. Via.

The New York Times delves into the release of the direct-to-DVD Tales of the Black Freighter, which drops the week after the Watchmen movie comes out next spring. With DVD sales growing softer, Warner’s hoping that by releasing a tie-in with a theatrical event, they can help jumpstart the market and retailer interest:

The second film, tentatively called “Tales of the Black Freighter,” follows a side “Watchmen” storyline about a shipwreck and will arrive in stores five days after the main movie rolls out in theaters. The DVD will also include a documentary-style film called “Under the Hood” that will delve into the characters’ backstories.

Warner, the No. 1 distributor of DVDs, bills the effort as a way to renew retail excitement for little silver discs now that the once-booming market has matured.

After years of blistering growth, domestic DVD sales fell 3.2 percent last year to $15.9 billion, according to Adams Media Research, the first annual drop in the medium’s history. While it is still a blockbuster business, any decline is cause for concern because DVD sales can account for as much as 70 percent of revenue for a new film. Results for the first quarter this year were mixed, with overall sales flat but notable softness for some new releases like Warner’s box office hit “I Am Legend.”

Freighter will be animated, but according to a Warner rep has a budget that’s 30 percent to 50 percent higher than a typical direct-to-DVD project. Watchmen direct Zack Snyder says he was happy to do the DVD, because it meant he could use more material from the graphic novel.

Related: Studios should look to Trent Reznor for Future of Distribution

A crew of animators has formed their own webcomics collective called Dumm Comics, which launched in early May. It features comics by Gabe Swarr, Sean Szeles, Katie Rice, Luke Cormican, Ricky Garduno, and Fred Osmond, whose combined credits include shows for the Cartoon Network, Disney, Nickelodeon and Warner Bros., among others. Check out their work here, and Cartoon Brew has a roundtable with the creators here.

Tom Spurgeon has a nice preview of Fantagraphics’ handsome collection of classic Jules Feiffer strips.

Craig Thompson posts samples of some early, rejected strips.

Who won this year’s Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist.

More winners can be found via The Daily Cartoonist.