Paul Pope has posted on his blog a really cool sketch based on the Dune series of books:

“I’ve always been struck by the taciturn Nietzschean aspects of M’uad Dib’s character as a leader,” Pope wrote on his blog. “One of Frank Herbert’s points in DUNE was a warning– beware of charismatic heroes. When entrusted with great power, they can do great damage to a civilization. Even a brief sweep of history can illustrate this point.”

Now, just to make sure we’re clear — I don’t think that Paul Pope is drawing a Dune comic. (I’d read that book immediately if it did come out, though.) But seeing him take a page from another source was just too cool to not share with you guys. Check out the rest of Pope’s thoughts (as well as the rest of the art) here.

Vertigo’s Graphic Content blog has posted a three-page preview of Grant Morrison and Sean Murphy’s Joe the Barbarian:

Click the above link for the two preceding pages. The book is due out this January.

Move over, Doctor Horrible, your monopoly on web-based video blogging is at an end. Because a fan has done a pretty damn good job at trying to replicate Heath Ledger’s performance with TheJokerBlogs:

The voice might be more than a little bit off, but the actual performance — and the writing — is top-notch, all things considered. Check out more of the videos by clicking here — there are some nice moments by some other Bat-characters, as the hunt for Patient 4479 is starting to heat up.

I saw this awesome-looking cover over at IDW’s web site, and wanted to share:

Snake Eyes, on the cover of G.I. Joe Origins #8, by Tom Feister. The book’s out October 14th, but man is that a nice looking cover. What say you?

Alan Moore, creator of Watchmen, Promethea and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, will be coming out with his own magazine, said his daughter Leah Moore.

Dodgem Logic, which is supposed to be a 21st century reimagining of the original underground alternative magazines, will “[draw] upon an overlooked and energetic pool of local talent as well as numerous friends and co-conspirators from comic books, the arts or entertainment.”

According to the press release Leah posted on her site, the magazine will have everything ranging from recipes to the environment to fashion to medical advice (try not to let that last one scare you too much). But perhaps most important from the comics standpoint, there will be artwork from Kevin O’Neill, Moore’s collaborator from the League of Extraordinary Gentlement.

The book will come out every other month from Knockabout, and will cost £2.50.

That is one tough-looking Kool-Aid Man: Check out this Houston Chronicle article on a gallery exhibit of Dawolu Jabari Anderson’s paintings, each created to resemble the cover of a comic book which doesn’t actually exist.

Jump Start just turned 20: In related news, My God, when did I get so old?

“Comic-book challenge dares artists to draw faster than a speeding bullet”: That shouldn’t be too hard. Bullets can’t draw at all.

“Not to sound like someone swinging their cane, but in the 1980s there weren’t a thousand other voices screaming to be heard at the same time…There was a quiet in the room that made being a commentator very exciting”: That’s Bloom County cartoonist Berkeley Breathed on the difference between cartooning 20 years ago and today. Geoff Boucher had a great feature on Breathed for the Los Angeles Times on Saturday, which you can read here.

I hope it includes the Green Lantern oath: From the looks of this blog, an Andrea Reid and a Maya Zeller are accepting poetry about superheroes for an anthology “tentatively titled Between Saviors and Villains: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry Inspired by American Superheroes.” If they’re also accepting copy-editing, I should point out that “Spiderman” has a hyphen and a capital “M” and is thus actually spelled “Spider-Man.”

I like these early panels of Keesa.

As well, Page 04 of the story I did for David Rodriguez and Dave Reynolds’ ShadowGirls is up. [Link to cover and Page 01] ShadowGirls: Getting A Piece of Asp Cover / Page 01

Find out more about Global Freezing here on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays or at ComicsByEgg.com.

Rotten #4

Written by Mark Rahner and Robert Horton

Art by Dan Dougherty

Published by Moonstone

Agents Wade and Flynn proceed to their next zombie mission out in the Wild West in Part Four of Rotten. In a comic full of clever dialogue and wonderfully structured stoytelling, both in the writing and the art, you could say it’s sort of a bonus to include zombies.

As the popularity of “Zombieland” should make clear, it’s not just zombies that bring in an audience. It’s always going to come back to the story and the characters. In Rotten, you’ve got a very different kind of story led by a couple of likable and authentic guys, Agents Wade and Flynn. They are under special orders from Pres. Hayes to investigate reports of attacks from creatures or,  “the undead,” out West.

Issue Four finds our heroes going undercover as commanding officers taking over a snow-bound and desolate Army fort. For all purposes, it shouldn’t even exist. There’s a lot of good tension-filled scenes between the new officers and the troops as neither group is eager to reveal everything they know.

Dan Dougherty is definitely the guy to be drawing this. He has a very distinctive style: sharp-edged and lean. He knows how to keep the story moving with tight compositions. He also knows his way around the subtleties of human expression. In this issue, the pressure is really applied on Agent Wade to not only act as a leader but to be one even when his orders sound outright strange. His every move must be convincing to a group of desperate men. Dougherty keeps us in the story and gives us a deeper appreciation of this complex character.

And what are these strange orders coming from Wade? Well, they’re nothing compared to what the men have been hiding from him. It’s spooky stuff in the tradition of “The Twilight Zone.” You don’t want to say this sort of thing too often but Rotten remains one of those best kept secrets in comics and I recommend you get in on it. This issue is the start of a new arc and a great place to dive in.

Ball Peen Hammer writer Adam Rapp must have one hell of a busy-looking business card at this point. He’s a playwright, filmmaker, young adult novelist and adult novelist, adding graphic novelist to his resume with this, his debut work in the medium. He’s working with artist George O’Connor, a picture book artist now on his second graphic novel (His first, Journey into Mohawk Country, was also published by First Second).

Their book, named for the tool used in a procedure best not spoiled here, betrays Rapp’s background in theater, as it’s an extremely talky one, mostly occurring in  two pretty claustrophobic settings. A cast of six or seven and minimal set design is all it would take to move this from the page to the stage, which points to a problem with the work: It’s a comic that doesn’t have to be a comic, and while that doesn’t make it a bad comic, I think it keeps it from ever being a truly great one.

I said it was talky, but it’s not at all poorly assembled. All that conversation is well-divided into different panels, so that the whole endeavor retains the form of a comic book and the experience remains one of reading a comic book—there are no walls of text, or panels overwhelmed by dialogue bubbles. It doesn’t read like a novel or screenplay or play being stuffed into a graphic novel for cynical reasons. Given how much of the story is told through the conversations—there’s no text prologue or narration to serve as shortcuts—it’s really quite remarkably assembled.

O’Connor’s lines are thin, and many when they’re needed—on brick walls, cross-hatched gloom, rotting diseased bodies, exterior long shots, a few rain storms—but his character designs are smooth, expressive, open and highly variant. The cast is a small one, but it looks great, and if you’re familiar with O’Connor’s children’s books, you may be surprised to see how he’s adapted his style to this form and this particular work.
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Courtesy of SplashNewsOnline, we get a peek at Seth Rogen as the Green Hornet and Jay Chou (who has replaced Stephen Chow) as his trusty sidekick, Kato. Now we all know that this film hasn’t had the best of luck, but the pictures show some sort of progress.

I’ve been a fan of the Hornet almost all my life. One of my first comics was the NOW Comics adaptation, and I’m a fan of the old TV show. I’ll be okay if they make this a straight-up action movie, for the sake of just seeing Rogen in that sort of role, but I hear it will be more comedy-centric. Though I think some comedy would be okay so people who are unfamiliar to the character don’t automatically compare him to Batman.

Either way, I’m enthusiastic about the project. So after viewing the pictures, what do you guys think?

Also, I really love how they made his stinger pistol.

The second release from Drawn and Quarterly’s John Stanley Library collection features a much better known property than Melvin Monster—Ernie Bushmiller’s comic strip heroine Nancy. As was the case with the Melvin book, Nancy Vol. 1 is a gorgeously designed and packaged book, something collection-ophiles can look at and handle with admiration.

Seth uses Nancy’s emoticon-simple face to great effect on the cover, title page and the pages between the five issues of Dell’s Nancy comic collected within,  making for a fine example of a book-as-art-object in and of itself, regardless of the contents.

But what contents! These late 1950’s issues were written and laid out by Stanley and drawn by Dan Gormley, and I was somewhat surprised by how similar they read to Stanley’s Little Lulu comics, of which I’m much more familiar (and also a great admirer).

Nancy and Sluggo fall neatly into the friend/enemy/paramour relationship of Lulu and Tubby (Is “boyfrenemy” a word? Can we make it one?), with fat jokes about Tubby swapped out for jokes about Sluggo’s poverty. Both little leading ladies are similarly precocious, smart, imaginative and basically good but capable of being quite annoying to adults. Each girl also deals regularly with a comically wealthy snob, a kinda creepy-looking best friend (Oona out-creeps Annie easily, of course), a bratty baby-sittee and neighborhood bully or bullies.

Both features also traded in amusing character-based humor and corny situational comedy often funny today for its precise lack of humor, and both work best when showing the intersection of the adult world and the children’s world.

As with Lulu, one of the many pleasures I took from the Nancy book was that weird nostalgia for a time I’ve only ever experienced in other old comics (Peanuts and Dennis the Menace and the like), for a childhood that doesn’t even remotely reflect what my own experience of growing up 30 years after Nancy and Sluggo’s adventures collected here was like. (Oh, and as with Lulu, there are plenty of reaction shots of adult passersby on the streets; those always crack me up).

Where Stanley’s Nancy differs most strongly from his Lulu (aside from the great differences between the way they’re being packaged these days) is the often quite strange clash in character design. The super-simplified Nancy and Sluggo seem to belong to a completely different strip than the gorgeous and almost representational wasp-waisted, delicate featured Aunt Fritzi, and all three of them seem to belong to another world than that of Oona, Spike, Rollo and most of the other kids and adults that pass through the strip.

The tension in the designs—intentional or not—only heightens the differences between the distinct sets of characters and the way they perceive their world, underlining the conflicts at the center of some of the best bits.

Not to over think it or anything. One could also just say it’s great cartooning applied to somewhat amusing mid-twentieth century kids comedy in a gorgeous package and leave it at that.

Sci Fi Wire has put up a trailer from RHI Entertainment for SyFy’s new Phantom pilot film, starring Ryan Carnes and written by Daniel and Charles Knaupf.

Look, I am all about giving a new product a chance — remember, this is the guy who raved about an Elektra tie-in miniseries, despite having a lot of antipathy for the character beforehand — but I’m pretty sure this trailer lost me at “MY PARENTS ARE DEEEEAAAD!!!!” Of course, you should keep watching to see the new Phantom suit in action.

That said, while it may not be my cup of tea, it could certainly be yours — what do you think?

“He’s not you typical western hero, but he was a lot of fun to draw”: That’s Thomas Boatwright talking about the main character in his Zeke Deadwood: Zombie Lawman in this article about a public library’s local author’s night. Five North Carolina authors were invited to participate, and Boatwright was one of them. He was also first graphic novelist to participate in the program.

There’s a verb form of “meatball?”: One of the coolest jobs on the planet, in my estimation, must be being one of the people who gets to think up headlines summarizing weekend box office performance, as it seems to mostly entail thinking up hilarioulys bad puns based on the titles of new movies. I think this one from Time, indicating that Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs out-performed The Surrogates last weekend, is like the worst one ever though. The article stresses Surrogates‘ comics routes and that was something that should have been part of “a recipe for minting money.” I wonder how many movies based on comics that will be perceived as box office failures there will have to be before Hollywood steps off that particular bandwagon, or if the occasional Dark Knight or Iron Man will keep comics a viable source for film adaptation, even if everything from Punisher War Zone on to Surrogates is perceived as not being a hit? (I say this without actually crunching the numbers or even looking very closely at any of them,  as I’m only talking about the perception of success or failure. Fair or unfair, even when movies end up making a profit, if they fail to meet certain, often arbitrary public expectations, they seem doomed to the perception of failure).

“This book will have you thinking about your own identity and may inspire you to start carving your own path, rather than go with the flow that everyone else follows”: That’s the Daily News on Abby Denson’s Dolltopia. They sure liked it.

“Sale makes sure everyone looks great, but that can’t hide the fact that the designated writer has the proportional spunk and gumption of an actuary on quaaludes”: I think that’s the first time I’ve ever seen the words “spunk,” “gumption,” “actuary” and “quaaludes” in the same sentence. Anyway, Noah Berlatsky just got around to reading Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s The Long Halloween, and he did not much care for it. It’s been a while since I’ve read any Loeb/Sale Batman stuff, so I’m not going to argue with Berlatsky or anything, but I thought his response was of note in that the conventional wisdom has always been that Loeb’s best work was his stuff with Sale, particularly Long Halloween and Dark Victory, right? No? At any rate, I still crack up every time I re-read that scene at the end of Dark Victory where Robin makes his first in-costume appearance, taking the Joker out with a bad joke and a club on the teeth.

“Of course, Geoff Johns has showed a facility for turning a weak story around with a very satisfying ending …but, well… that doesn’t make the story as a whole good”: Johnathan of Living Between Wednesdays has not been enjoying DC’s Blackest Night event as much as he thought he would, and last week he set about trying to come up with possible theories as to why this might be. Then on Wednesday, he read a Geoff Johns-written portion of the event, and realized the problem may just be the spin-offs weren’t as good as the spine.

A Nightmare on Elm Street in HD

Michael Bay has made a name for himself by doing two things: blowing shit up, and producing crappy, unimaginative remakes of classic horror flicks like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hitcher, The Amityville Horror, and Friday the 13th. (Actually, his Friday the 13th was superior to the original films, but that’s not saying a lot. The original Friday series sucked hard.) Next year, Bay once again dives headfirst into creative bankruptcy with his production of the Samuel Bayer-directed remake of Wes Craven’s classic A Nightmare On Elm Street.

As a longtime Nightmare fan, I’ve been dreading this movie ever since it was announced. The original is one of the most enduring horror films ever created, and Robert Englund’s Freddy Krueger has become an iconic figure in movie history. So while I understand why the movie is being made ($$$), I seriously doubt anyone has ever watched Craven’s original version and thought, “Hey, this movie really needs to be remade, because it sucks.”

Now that the trailer for Bay/Bayer’s quasi-reimagining has been unleashed, we’ve had our first glimpse of what the movie will be like. And since I have a tendency to be a judgmental ass, I figured I would share my initial thoughts about the movie.

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Via Great White Snark, an awesome mash-up by withonea:

There is absolutely nothing in that video that I don’t absolutely love. I would watch two hours of this if they let me. That said, I want Donatello to explain Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” to me.

More Keesa.

Today also sees Page 03 of the story I did for David Rodriguez and Dave Reynolds’ ShadowGirls.

ShadowGirls: Getting A Piece of Asp Cover / Page 01

Finally, today is the last day for Frank Cho and Doug Murray’s 50Girls50 Image Comic Contest. There have been some amazing pieces put in. I gotta recommend sifting through and finding your own favorite “undiscovered” artists in the mix!

50Girls50

Find out more about Global Freezing here on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays or at ComicsByEgg.com.

He’s the best there is at what he does. That is, if you’d kindly turn your @#$#@ing cell phone off during the performance.

You would have thought that having Hugh Jackman, better known to the comics reading populace as Wolverine, have a crossover with James Bond Daniel Craig — if by crossover, we mean play called A Steady Rain — would be awesome.

At least until last week, when an inconsiderate audience member kept their phone on. Embedding doesn’t seem to work, but if you hit Cinematical, you’ll see some the Suzuki School of berserker rage.

Snikt. That’s why you better have some proper theatre etiquette, bub. Or you might have do deal with something scarier than the stage manager.

  Brian Maruca and Jim Rugg, the creative team responsible for the short-lived Street Angel, the single greatest achievement of the comics medium, have a new book coming out from AdHouse in December, and I don’t think it’s too early to start getting excited about  it. And/or bugging your local comics shop to make sure they order you a copy.

I’ll let publisher AdHouse make their own announcement,  since they’ve gone to the trouble to think up so many rhymes for the solicitation copy:

The crew behind Street Angel hits the ghetto with the Afrodisiac—in SuperColor! There’s cats, gats, spats, and feathered hats…action as big as a Georgia ham and wool so fine it’ll blow your mind! Lock up your daughters, come hell or high water, cause here comes the king of the concrete jungle!

Afrodisiac, the be-afro-ed, bare knuckle-brawling, blaxploitation character that appeared in Street Angel #5 and in anthologies here and there over the last few years (notably AdHouse’s Project: Superior), will be getting his own 96-page, $14 hardcover, and I think it’s fairly safe to say that it’s going to be one you’re going to want to read.

Not convinced? You can download a 12-page preview, including the entire Afrodisiac vs. Hercules story the above panel’s taken from, by clicking here. Guaranteed to be the least jive comic you read all year.

If you like what you’ve read so far (c’mon, how can you not?) totally check out more super cute comics at:www.sosuperduper.com!

Now these are some interesting numbers. One day. Six hours. Only $3 to get in and grade 10 guests. The Albany Comic Con is in its fourth year and looks brighter each time. This year, guests include Jamal Igle, Dennis Calero, Herb Trimpe, Joe Sinnott, and Ron Marz.

I had the chance to talk to John Belskis, the promoter, to know what it’s like to put on such a show especially in this economy. “It’s difficult. Very difficult. There’s a lot of juggling involved, but there’s a big demand, locally, and we do what we can. There’s been a lot of support from the community, especially from Top Cow, to keep it going.”

In addition to the great guests, there’s a “day after” Halloween Costume Contest as well as the chance to pick up the Witchblade #131 with the exclusive cover done by Matthew Dow Smith (pictured above).

We have small shows like this in Atlanta and I always tried to make it when I could because I would always find great deals without the hustle and bustle of the larger conventions.

The Albany Comic Con is Sunday, November 1st at the Wolf Road Holiday Inn in Colonie, New York.