By Filip Sablik

Boy, it’s been a long time since I wrote one of these blog posts for Newsarama! I hadn’t realized quite how long until I sat down to write this one and looked at the date on my last entry. The summer has a way of getting away from you when you work in comics, particularly on the publishing side. Comic-Con International in San Diego becomes more and more of a monster to plan each year and while it usually ends up being great fun, it is exhausting trying to prepare for it. Since we’re well past Comic-Con at this point, I won’t bore you with a convention report. Suffice to say, we announced some exciting multi-media developments, new projects, debuted new product, and brought out a metric truckload of talent to sign at the booth. You can read more about HERE.

On of the benefits of living in Los Angeles, is a thriving comic book community. I had the pleasure recently of having dinner with some comic folks including a retailer and a fellow area publisher. We got to talking about the state of the industry and what was working and wasn’t working. These conversations are almost always both sobering and inspiring for me.

One thing the retailer said really stuck with me, “There’s not enough innovation and excitement in the market today.”

And while my initial reaction was to bristle and get defensive, I realized that he was speaking from a hopeful place. He wasn’t saying this simply to be negative, he was saying it because as a retailer he wants, in fact, needs there to be product that excites and inspires his customers. And when I stopped to think about it, I realized that after five or so years of innovative moves, the industry at large does seem to be resting on its laurels a little bit. Just take a look at the top 25 selling titles each month and it becomes clear that there hasn’t been much shaking up in the last year.

There are exceptions to the rule (of course). Blackest Night seems to be thrilling the market right now, and it’s apparent that Geoff Johns and the team at DC are pouring a lot of time, planning, and love into that event. Wednesday Comics is a bold, fun experiment in comics and certainly has this comic fan excited. The long-awaited Spider-Woman motion comic looks like it is finally getting ready to debut on iTunes. Our partners at Image Comics seem to be creating some buzz with Chew and the upcoming Image United.

But where are the Ultimate Universes, the Goons, the All Star lines, and the Walking Deads this year?

Maybe we’ll see them in hindsight, but I think my retailer friend did have a point that 2009 hasn’t had those series, which are causing fans to come rushing to the stores and fighting on eBay to get in on the ground floor. And this is not the time for resting on our laurels. It’s no secret that the economy is still in pretty rough shape, so why are we (the content providers) giving fans or potential fans a reason to drop titles or find their entertainment elsewhere?

I know at Top Cow we’ll be doing are darndest to excite for the rest of 2009 and certainly in 2010. We’ll keep pushing Witchblade and The Darkness to be most consistent, envelope pushing titles we can. We’ll be launching a new Cyberforce series in the spring with a team that promises to rock your socks off. But potentially the most innovative thing we’ll be doing in 2010 is launching Artifacts, a 13 part series that promises to change the landscape of the Top Cow Universe in the most drastic fashion yet. It’s certainly the most ambitious project we’ve ever attempted and we hope it’ll get you out of your seat.

Let me know what has you excited right now and pulling you into the store each week and why. What would get you even more excited about comics? What would get a non-comic reading friend into a comic book store?

Take care,

Filip Sablik

Publisher Guy

Filip Sablik is the Publisher of Top Cow Productions, Inc. He’s been in the business for eight years and just officially entered his thirties. Occasionally, he does a bit of writing and drawing. He loves comics. Top Cow Productions, Inc. was founded by Marc Silvestri, co-founder of Image Comics. Top Cow currently publishes its line of comic books in 21 languages in over 55 different countries. The company has launched 20 franchises (18 original and two licensed) in the industry’s Top 10, seven at #1, a feat accomplished by no other publisher in the last two decades.

The employees of Zeus’ Comics in Dallas, Texas aren’t just your regular, friendly-neighborhood comic shop guys and gal. Sometimes, when they’re not working retail, they put on sketch comedy/sit-com-like bits like the one above. It’s cute and on the nerd side of things. Everybody has their own character and it’s funny to me because, I think, we all know at least one person in these characters.

I see myself as a “Barry”.

I think I missed last month (again) with this column, so my apologies for that. I know you’re all waiting with bated breath to know what comics I might buy, taste-setter than I am.

Let’s get right into it, starting in the back as I like to do.

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I’m sure Hawkman and Hawkgirl would beg to differ!

Courtesy of Player vs. Player, August 10, 2009.

I waited to write this until this piece went up, and now I can’t even particularly remember why.

Regular readers here may know that I’m not much of a superhero comics reader, but that I’ve been branching out lately. When I was asked if I wanted to talk to Kieron Gillen and Steven Sanders about their new series, I jumped at the chance even though it required me to binge on Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men so I had some clue of what I was talking about.

If you’ve read the comics, or are mildly aware of my love for Whedon’s work, you can probably guess what my reaction was to Whedon’s vision of the X-Men. Yep, I loved it. Intensely. Mostly, I loved Whedon’s Kitty Pryde.

As I’ve mentioned, I didn’t exactly grow up on comics, but I have a distinct memory of the X-Men cartoon and seeing this little brunette girl who looked kinda like me, who wasn’t all badass like the rest of the characters but could walk through walls (and didn’t I feel at times like I wanted to just sink through a floor and escape my life?). So Whedon, who likes to take those normal girls and make them extra-special, really did a great job with Kitty, contrasting her with the super-sexy and conniving Emma Frost and using her powers to save the world when all the offensive skills in the universe couldn’t have done so.

Of course the end made me sniffle a lot, but it also made me think about superheroes differently. I’ve always seen them as creations designed to allow people like me to transcend their normal lives; to become larger than life. I’ve never read books or comics simply because I identified with the characters (though I certainly have my share–Megan in Local being a prime example).

Yet the appeal of the X-Men has always been that they’re freaks; the world doesn’t understand them. As blogger Renegade Evolution noted:

The X-Men have the misfortune of being born different into a very intolerant world. They are mutants. Outcasts. Feared. Hated. Seen as dangerous…when for the most part, they just want to live and be left to it like everyone else. Hummm…imagine that? And it is odd, in my geekdome and time spent hanging out with other comic nerds, I have noted that a lot of people who are big into the X-Men are also somehow…well…different. Non-traditional.

Is it so weird, then, that of all the various reasons, and after all the explosions and action in Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men, that I love it because I see myself in Kitty?

From Funny or Die, comes this awesome little number.

Credits:

Laz Alonso as Doc
Alexis Bledel as Lady Jaye
Billy Crudup as Zartan
Zach Galifiankais as Snow Job
Tony Hale as Dr. Mindbender
Vinnie Jones as Destro
Joey Kern as Tomax
Joey Kern as Xamot
Chuck Liddell as Gung Ho
Julianne Moore as Scarlett
Henry Rollins as Duke
Alan Tudyk as Shipwreck
Olivia Wilde as The Baroness
and
Sgt. Slaughter as Himself
Also featuring Jamin Fite as Cobra Commander
Frankie Kang as Storm Shadow
Geoff Mann as Buzzer
Andreas Owald as Snake Eyes
Daniel Strange as Torch
Kevin Umbricht as Ripper

From World’s Finest, here is the back cover art for the upcoming Superman/Batman: Public Enemies feature coming out to DVD and Blu-Ray this September.

The cool thing about this, is that we have a clue about for the next installment in the “DC Universe Animated Original Movie” line, Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths. Now personally, I’d like that “Judas Contract” feature to move forward, but maybe that’s just me. It’ll be good to hear Tim Daly, Kevin Conroy and Clancy Brown reprising their famous roles again as Superman, Batman and Lex Luthor, and after seeing the snippet of this movie that was attached with Green Lantern: First Flight, I think we are in for a treat.

The Yellow Hat Guy over at SuperFunAdventureTime.com has written a convention story that, well, I really wouldn’t suggest trying to emulate:

I walked up to him and spake: “Hi, my name is Ryan Coons…”

“Hey!” said Rob Liefeld. He didn’t even look up at me; he just kept sketching away at yet another blocky, disproportionate, and overly-linear picture of one of my beloved childhood heroes. This time, it was Wolverine, in a mirrored swipe of Jim Lee’s cover for X-Men #11.

“…I am a huge Captain America fan…” I tell him with jazz hands and a huge fanboy gleam. “…and as such, I demand an apology for Heroes Reborn.”

Um… yeah. I’m not trying to pick on anybody here, but anyone who’s looking to get into comics, clearly you should know — DON’T DO ANYTHING LIKE THIS. But more importantly, this crosses a line that I think is just kind of uncool.

As somebody who writes reviews pretty much every week, it’s one thing not to like somebody’s work: everyone has their own particular taste, and nobody’s going to win everyone all the time. BUT — hearkening back to Neil Gaiman’s statement a few months back — comic book creators are not your bitch. Demanding an apology for a story arc from over a decade ago? When does it stop being passionate about an art form, and when does it become abuse for abuse’s sake?

I think the thing that people don’t realize is, comic creators — no matter how much anyone disagrees with their choices — are trying to make a book that that’ll sell well, that people will go to their bookstores and comics shops to enjoy. And while they might not always succeed, I’m not going to demand anything other than they keep trying to innovate and improve. At risk of sounding a bit cliche, despite any technical or story problems anyone might have, these creators aren’t out to smash anyone’s personal canon — they’re hoping they can improve upon it. What say you, Rama readers?

“That’s the good news. The bad news is that the ‘Batman’ serial is racist”: The LA Times has a short piece about a screening of the 1943 Batman serial, which depicts the Japanese in ways that are…well, less than enlightened. The LA Times loses 50 points for using “Holy zombies, Batman!” as the lead to the story.

“Kurtzman was the spiritual father of postwar American satire and the godfather of late-20th-century alternative humor”: Steven Ellis reviews The Art of Harvey Kurtzman for the New York Times, and finds it hard to overestimate Kurtzman’s influence on our culture.

Fall can’t get here soon enough: Tom Spurgeon has a list of many of the best looking books coming out in the latter half of the year, or, as he puts it, “A Potentially Astounding Fall.” You know, even if I still had summer vacation and start a new year of school in the fall I think I’d still be looking forward to the end of this particular summer, if it meant we’d start seeing some of these books.

“I have finally accepted that, although I can enjoy the Wonder Woman comic, I have no interest in Wonder Woman as a character”: 4thletter’s Esther Inglis-Arkell just isn’t that in to Wonder Woman, and explains why. Once again it sounds to me like many of the problems with the Wonder Woman character are problems with today’s Wonder Woman (and the Wonder Woman from the last, oh, fifty years or so now). The original Wonder  Woman? None of these problems. See DC, this is why you need a Wonder Woman Chronicles reprint project stat!

Until we get a Doll Man Archives collection, these will do: Here’s a big post full of the little hero’s adventures, courtesy of Golden Age Comics Stories. Ray Palmer and Henry Pym wish they could make that outfit work like Darrel Dane could. (Link stolen from Dirk Deppey)

“Apparently, Marvel’s doing something with the Ultimate universe…”: Comics writer and blogger Kevin Church takes a look at an Ultimates—or is it Ultimate Comics: The Avengers now?—cover, and shares his thoughts about it. I kinda hope he’s on to something with his observation about Hawkeye’s costume.

A thought has occurred to me since my original reaction to Hal Jordan sexing with half the Birds of Prey: How old is The Huntress supposed to be now? And how old is Hal Jordan supposed to be? (Hal should be in his early 40’s, if Green Arrow sired Green Arrow II and Black Lightning had Thunder and Lightning by the time they were being superheroes, but whatever). Because Huntress also slept with Dick “Nightwing” Grayson and Roy “Arsenal-at-the-time” Harper, and those guys were both just teenagers when Hal Jordan was already a full-grown man Green Lantern-ing about. So, there should be at least ten years between Hal and the grown-up teen sidekicks, if not closer to 20. So was Huntress robbing the cradle with Dick and Roy, or robbing the grave with Hal? (And is it made extra-gross by the uncle/nephew relationship Brad Meltzer was depicting between Hal and Roy during his Justice League of America run?)

For everyone who missed the San Diego Comic Con this year, one thing that has been talked about repeatedly is footage of Iron Man 2.

Well, it has finally hit the web.

Courtesy of Aceshowbiz.com, here’s a (bootlegged) first look at Black Widow, Justin Hammer, and a certain silver-plated armored avenger, right after the cut!

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The main conflict at the heart of Kimi Ni Todoke (Viz) has a problem that will be familiar to anyone who’s seen very many American teen movies. Fifteen-year-old Sawako Kuronuma is extremely unpopular at school, and said to look like the scary little girl in Ringu, thus frightening all her classmates.

Yet just as Rachael Leigh Cooke with long hair and glasses is just as beautiful as Rachael Leigh Cooke with short hair and contacts, Sawako’s obviously drawn as a very pretty girl and, in fact, her attractiveness is part of the plot—Kazehaya, the most popular boy in class, is apparently secretly in love with her.

Manga-ka Karuho Shiina, who obviously has a lot more leeway than a Hollywood director, gets around that dilemma by keeping Sawako’s physical features consistent, but often framing her the way the villain or monster in another manga might be framed.

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No, not from me this time. Just in case you can’t get enough Twilight and comics blogging, the fine folks at Comicopia have started a blog just for Twilight and comics–both the upcoming manga and Stephenie Meyer comic, and recommendations for comics that Twilight fans might like.

In the wake of all the disputes around SDCC and fangirls, it’s nice to see someone picking up the ball and making an active effort to get Twilight fans to be more involved with comics. There’s a ridiculous amount of people out there reading Meyer’s books, and if more of them were buying comics and coming into comic shops for merch, it would be a nice boost for the industry, whatever you think of the books (and by now you should know how I feel about ‘em).

Thursday afternoon, teams representing both DC Comics and Marvel Comics assembled in Central Park to settle things the way things are meant to be settled: on the softball field. Although both team play in separate leagues and the game didn’t count toward anybody’s playoff hopes, you’d find few in either dugout who regarded the contest as less than the most important game of the summer.

Despite their lead-off hitter being gunned down by DC’s legal eagles, LF Jay Kogan and 2B Joel Press, trying to stretch a single into more, the Marvel squad put together a string of hits and pushed two runs across in the first. DC responded with some small ball in the bottom of the frame, with 3B Mike Lorah (2-2, 2 runs, RBI) beating out an infield single, going first-to-third on SCF Doug Harrison’s (1-2) flare into short right center, and coming home on Kogan’s (1-1, run, RBI) sacrifice fly to left.

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That’s Stardust, The Super Wizard, thanks: A guy spends all that time busting his ass to become not only a wizard, but a super-wizard, and these critics go around just calling him Stardust. Feh. Anyway, here’s Crave Online’s  Iann Robinson on You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation!, and the work of Fletcher Hanks in general. I’m not sure I agree with a lot of what Robinson says about Hanks and his work (or the way he says it), beyond the fact that Hanks’ work is pretty awesome.

“The 16 graphic novels summarized below capture different facets of the era and the historic festival, which took place 40 years ago next week”: Woodstock’s 40th anniversary is next week, so Library Journal has a list of suggestions of graphic novels for librarians to display to coincide with the event. I’d just put up a bunch of Peanuts collections, as Snoopy’s little yellow friend was my first introduction to the word.

“I’ve been trying to avoid this all week… but it doesn’t seem to be going away”: Drew Friedman, the cartoonist and illustrator who drew President George W. Bush in Dark Knight Joker make-up last year for Vanity Fair, gives in and responds to that President Barack Obama in Dark Knight Joker make-up (plus the word “socialism,” for added message confusion) story. “The Obama/Joker image just doesn’t work as satire, humor or anything else,” Friedman says, while discussing what he was saying with his piece (which mentioned repeatedly during the week in conjunction with the Obama piece) and noting when he did it, which was the week Dark Knight was released.

It’s hard out there for an elf: Jessica McLeod’s Working Class Elf, one of this week’s online comics from Top Shelf 2.0, tells the story of a darling little shape-stacking elf that gets laid off from his shape-stacking job. It’s cute, timely, depressing and uplifting, in the space of 25 pages. (McLeod’s yeti comics, Bad Yeti and Yeti Party, are pretty swell too. Hooray for Jessica McLeod!)

A friend forwarded me this article on Slate on the new vampire phenomenon, and pointed out a piece of it that I haven’t thought much about: the new sexy vampires don’t actually drink blood. Or if they do, they don’t kill.

Yet, like many people who acquire mega-celebrity, the vampire has developed an eating disorder. Read the books. Watch the movies. You’ll see vampires who manage nightclubs, build computer databases, work as private investigators, go to prep school, lobby Congress, chat with humans, live near humans, have sex with humans, and pine over humans, but the one thing you won’t see them do is suck the blood of humans.

Grady Hendrix snarks on a lot of the most popular vampires of recent pop culture, starting with Anne Rice and moving on to the one that many of my peers grew up crushing on: Angel, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Faced with the impact of his diet on humans, Angel accepts a yucky, cruelty-free substitute, then endlessly lectures other vampires about their moral failings because they don’t do the same. He’s not a vampire—he’s a vegan.

I’ve more than once made the comparison of Angel to Edward Cullen in Twilight, but I hadn’t thought about the spiral this way: as one spinning from less and less consumption of human blood. (There are, of course, occasional recurrences of the bloodthirsty, evil vampires like those of 30 Days of Night, but I digress.)

But Hendrix doesn’t seem to actually be that up on the details of Buffy. Witness:

At least Angel, Anita Blake’s vampires, Sookie Stackhouse, and most of the rest of them have a lot of sex.

Well, I haven’t gotten around to Anita Blake or into True Blood yet, but I know my Buffy, and Angel didn’t have a lot of sex–because if and when he did, he lost his soul and turned evil. People love to compare Buffy to Twilight, but the fact is that Angel and Edward Cullen indeed have a lot in common. They can’t get it on with their human lady-loves, because something BAAAD could happen. They don’t drink blood, because they have consciences.

The whole story of both Angel and Edward Cullen, in other words, is that of the monster tamed by the woman he loves. The just-bad-enough boy who’s really a sweetheart on the inside. Sure, Buffy kicks Angel to the curb (after running him through with a sword) but soon enough she’s taken up with a new vampire–this one with a chip in his brain so he can’t, er, drink human blood.

I don’t agree with Hendrix’s faux concern for the way kids might be receiving mixed messages from their media, because I tend to read media for clues about the way we’re already heading, not look at it as something that shapes us. Pop culture as a symptom. So what does it signify to me that out of millions of books, I see more women (yes, grown women) on the subway reading Twilight books than anything else? After all, we’re adults. We’re not adolescent girls having our perception of men shaped by some sensitive emo-boy vampire. We already know that relationships are messy and fraught with danger.

True Blood is next on my Netflix list, so until then, I really can’t comment on the symbolism there, but this piece has set me thinking in yet another way about what it might be that we get from these defanged monsters. If you take away the blood drinking and sleeping in coffins (which neither Angel nor Edward do), what do you have but a boyfriend who never grows old?

Along with the release of its third issue this week, Image’s Chew saw a second print of #2 and a third print (well, three-and-a-half if you count the one in The Walking Dead) of #1. We sat down for a brief conversation with series writer John Layman about setting up the series, and his plans for the future.

Blog@Newsarama: What made you decide to just jump in headlong, rather than spending an issue or an arc getting readers acclimated to this new world?

John Layman: What issue are we talking about? I was sorta under the impression I WAS getting readers acclimated to the new world. There’s a whole of aspects to it people have not seen. Trust me, I’m rollin’ it out slow! (more…)

Geoff Johns has teased at conventions, interviews and most recently in the pages of the Blackest Night #0 Director’s Cut (included in Blackest Night: Tales of the Corps #3), that the big bad behind Scar and The Black Hand will be much, much scarier than any of the threats so far seen in the series. There’s no way I could possibly touch on all the likely candidates, but a few sprung to mind and I scribbled them on a pad of paper while waiting for a friend at a Chili’s the other day. That said, I figured a quick look down what I consider to be a list of fun possibilities for suspects is in order. (more…)

PW’s Beat blog posted its monthly analysis of the sales charts this week, and while I read those posts with great interest all the time, I did so with greater interest this month simply because I was curious to see how The Big Two’s embrace of $3.99 comic books might be effecting their sales.

I was surprised at the answer: Apparently not at all.

At least, not in any obvious ways. Here’s Paul O’Brien’s look at Marvel’s direct market sales in June. Marvel has been testing the $3.99 waters for so long, I can’t remember when they first started, but this year they’ve been much more aggressive, making some of their most popular titles $3.99-for-22-pages, as well as a majority of their miniseries. (I noticed last week, for example, that of the 28 new comic books Marvel shipped, 24 were at the $3.99 price point.)

But Marvel’s top books remain New Avengers and Dark Avengers, plus a Dark Avengers spin-off (Dark Avengers/Uncanny X-Men: Utopia). Ultimatum, another $4 book, is right behind that little Avengers-related pack.

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And yet here’s Steve “Captain America” Rogers smoking a pipe while ironically telling his pal Bucky that they should enjoy some fresh air. Sure, the panel is from a story in 1944′s All Winners Comics #12, but Marvel just republished it on Wednesday, as a back-up All Winners Comics 70th Anniversary Special #1. Aren’t they concerned about the tens of thousands—well, thousands anyway—of the impressionable 35- to 60-year-old readers who pick the book up are going to see their idol Cap smoking a pipe and take up pipe-smoking just to emulate him?

Artist extraordinaire Cliff Chiang has drawn up a nice Teen Titans-related send-off to teen comedy master John Hughes, who passed away unexpectedly yesterday:

I won’t give away Cliff’s Breakfast Club-style musings, so you should click the above link and check it out. For those of you who don’t know the poster he’s referencing, click here — but yeah, Donna Troy really is the DC Universe’s Molly Ringwald. And I can offer no higher a compliment.