Cartoon Network has announced a whole bunch of new shows, including an animated sketch comedy show based on Mad magazine and a new superhero show, Young Justice. DC’s Source blog has a more details on both shows, including a poster of the Young Justice team lineup (follow the link to see the whole image), the names of each character and a few sentences about what the show will apparently be about.

DC Comics fans will note it’s a rather unexpected roster. In addition to the three shown above, who were the original line-up of the Young Justice team (well, the teen speedster in that was called Impulse, not Kid Flash, but close enough), the team will feature Miss Martian, a Teen Titan who was introduced in DC comics less than five years ago; a dark-skinned, blonde-haired Aqualad; and “Artemis,” who combines the name of a Wonder Woman supporting character with Arrowette’s basic costume design and Green Arrow’s favorite color.

The Young Justice comic was launched in 1998, spinniong out of the miniseries JLA: World Without Grown-Ups by writer  Todd Dezago and pencil artists Humberto Ramos and Mike McKone and one-shot Young Justice: The Secret #1, also written by Dezago.

Peter David replaced Dezago as the writer of  the monthly before it even bagan, and David wrote the book until it was canceled with issue #56 in 2003. Todd Nauck and Larry Stucker provided almost all of the art for the entire run.

The line-up grew to include Wonder Girl, Arrowette and new character The Secret almost immediately, later to be joined by a teenaged version of Lobo and new character Empress. Both the line-up and the creative team were remarkably stable, particularly compared to the teen team title that Young Justice was canceled to make room for—Teen Titans.

The book featured a lighthearted tone, mixing superheroics, melodrama and comedy in a way that was evocative of the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League comics. It should be interesting to see if the show will lead to new Young Justice comics, either in the form of out-of-continuity cartoon adaptations as usually accompanies cartoons based on DC comics, or a relaunched DCU title that more closely reflects the line-up of the show.

Eureka!: The good folks at Drawn and Quarterly share another treasure discovered in the process of putting together their John Stanley Library collections. This time, it’s a Peanuts strip by Jim Sasseville from within an issue of Nancy. Kinda weird seeing a Peanuts comic strip that is a) so long and b) by someone other than Charles Schulz.

“I don’t think any of us realized what it was”: Writing for the New York Times, James Barron tracks the case as David Saunders tries to track down the origin of a large Superman painting hanging in the Lehman College library.

In a perfect world, Kate Beaton would have a monthly Classics Illustrated comic, and it would just be pages and pages of stuff like this: Here’s a series of Great Gatsby comic strips, by the great Kate Beaton.

“Why Won’t People Stop Swiping Mark Millar?”: Chris Eckert  of Funnybook Babylon gives Millar a good kicking over the writer’s strange message board messages complaining of Marvel’s X-offices doing a vampire story after he claimed dibs five years ago.

I didn’t think it could be done, but someone actually made Teen Titan Jericho look kind of awesome: That someone is Jemma Salume, who redesigned Jericho and his sister Rose “Ravager” Wilson over on the superhero fashion blog, Project: Rooftop. I love Rose’s sword hilt.

“WOW BLACK CANARY IS BASICALLY LADY GAGA + JUSTICE”: Speaking of Jemma Salume and Project: Rooftop, check out the former’s redesign of Black Canary’s costume and look for the latter’s  Black Canary makeover project (the results of which will be announced and shown off soon). It’s a cool design (I love the boots and hair and make up), but is probably too different for DC to ever embrace. Of course, DC once put her in that ’80s atrocity with the headband and white boots, so who knows?

Sure, I’ll take one of those: “Hope Larson To Adapt ‘A Wrinkle In Time’ Into Graphic Novel Form”

Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s co-Creator Joe Shuster
Edited & Written by Craig Yoe
Illustrations by Joe Shuster
Published by Abrams

In 1938, Joe Shuster and his friend and colleague Jerry Siegel sold their idea, a muscular alien in a blue leotard who fought crime, to National Periodicals for $130.  The boys, barely out of their teens and from depression-ravaged families, received one hundred thirty dollars.  For Superman, a character that netted National billions (and counting).

When the boys’ ten-year contract with National ended in 1948, they sued to regain control of their character, and they lost.  To exacerbate the lost suit, Siegel and Shuster became essentially persona non grata at their former home.  Siegel went to various publishers, hoping to duplicate his success, never quite doing so, but always managing to find paying work.  Shuster, with failing eyes that limited his artistry and ability to turn work around quickly, found surviving in his post-Superman life more difficult.

I explain all this only as background.  Certainly we can debate the merits of their signed contract against the loosey-goosey laws protecting creators in that era ad nauseum, but that’s not really the point here.  I have my feelings on the matter; likely you do too. We’re actually here to discuss a recently uncovered project that Shuster worked on in the mid-1950s to keep bread on his table.

Nights of Horror was a pulp publication, grade-Z erotica with a bondage and sadism bent, limited to only a few thousand copies printed locally in New York City and distributed through the seedy shops of Times Square.  Editor and explorer of the most bizarre crannies of comics history Craig Yoe discovered a copy of Nights of Horror and, stunned, recognized the artwork of Joe Shuster in it.  From there, he found an erotica collector (and college professor) with a complete run and verified that yes, the entire run of Nights of Horror featured Shuster’s illustrations accompanying the overwrought, plum-purple gasps of sexual violence.

Half of Secret Identity is devoted to chronicling Shuster’s story and the history of Nights of Horror.  Yoe presents incredibly compelling testimony tying Nights of Horror to mafia publishers, and a series of attacks and murders committed by unbalanced teens in Brooklyn.  In the paranoid, Red Scare-ified 50s, the scandal led to state House hearings.  Somehow, Joe Shuster slipped through the hoopla, probably relieved to remain anonymous, and his role in the publications has only come to light now.  It’s fascinating information, well presented and well documented.  Unfortunately, it veers away from Shuster and gives very few details about his later life, but his role in the scandal that built to the eventual Comics Code Authority makes for a riveting read.

The latter portion of Secret Identity finds a very, very brief overview of each issue’s stories, followed by reproductions of each of Shuster’s illustrations.  Personally, I’ve always loved Shuster’s artwork; he remains to this day my favorite Superman illustrator.  The figures are stiff and somewhat crude, but energetic, and nobody puts bolder lines on a page than Shuster did.  Shuster channels a Chester Gould-type minimalism, blocky figures, exaggeratedly curved women.  Coming from the exploitative arena of superheroes, his style adapts very well to the violent sexuality of Nights of Horror.

There’s no way to know what Shuster thought of this work – it was probably just a much needed paycheck – but even with his failing eyes, he clearly gave each page his best effort.  Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s co-Creator Joe Shuster might be a book that Shuster never wanted the world to see, but it has a compelling narrative reconstructed by Yoe, great artwork from Shuster, and it’s an important document about how the comics industry has turned its back on its founders.

If you can find a copy of your local library, I strong encourage checking it out.

In recent years, there’s been an explosion of comics into the digital frontier. Comics being downloaded into phones, comics for digital readers like the Kindle and the iPad, comics on the internet, and the special category of motion comics. It seems everyone’s trying to figure out what comics will be from all different angles and presentation styles. Both Marvel and DC have their own unique formats (with Marvel Unlimited and Zuda respectively), and a mainstream book publisher is entering the fray as Tor.com has recently begun running webcomics.

Tor.com is an outgrowth of Tor Books and it’s parent company Macmillan. Tor is well known for its rich tradition of novels in the science fiction and fantasy realm, and if you’ve read any comics or been to any conventions – those fanbases and tastes overlap well with comics. Over the past year Tor.com has been running short one-shot comics, but recently it launched its first ongoing series: Red Light Properties by cartoonist Dan Goldman (Shooting War, Kelly). For this new comic they’ve developed their own engine for viewing comics, which uniquely blends the panel-by-panel viewing commonly seen with iPhone comics with a more subtle pacing that gives the comic creator an opportunity to control the pace of the reader not unlike a film.

With Red Light Properties being serialized online every other week and at the 100 page mark this month, Newsarama.com spoke with Tor.com’s Web Producer Pablo Defendini, who acts as both a project manager, content developer and editorial director for Tor.com – both the comics and non-comics content. We spoke to him by email about Tor.com’s comic reader and the Tor/Macmillan publishing giant’s plan for digital comics.

Newsarama: Pablo, the recently debuted comic Red Light Properties makes use of a new comics viewer Tor has. Tor has run comics online before – so what was the big push to come up with a new comics viewer in 2010?

Pablo Defendini: It’s all Dan’s fault. I met Dan at NY Comic Con in 2008, at a panel he moderated about digital art. We hit it off immediately, and I bought a short piece from him for the site. After that, we’ve continued our conversation, and we always came back to talking comics on the internet: modes of delivery, reader experience, etc. He approached me with the idea for Red Light Properties, and we realized that it was the perfect excuse to develop a comics viewer specifically with our concerns in mind: allowing the artist to control pacing on a fine level, but also allowing the reader to control their reading experience, much like in printed comics.

Nrama: What was it about Dan’s project that made it one you wanted to with, and make a comics viewer specifically for it?

Defendini: In many ways, Red Light Properties is Dan’s baby in a way that his previous work hasn’t been, and he was adamant about taking it somewhere where it could shine. The story is very compelling, and as a latin american living in the U.S., his characters and settings really resonated with me. Additionally, Red Light Properties is giving us a chance to experiment with online publishing, which is one of the central missions for the site.

Nrama: Will the older Tor webcomics be redone in this format?

Defendini: All the old comics have been migrated to the new viewer, but Dan’s is the only one that takes advantage of the panel-by-panel navigation, and that’s by design. Since none of the older comics were created with this type of navigation in mind, what we did was develop a viewer that could work both ways: with traditional page-by-page navigation, or panel-by-panel. The cool thing is that if other artists want to take advantage of the viewer, they can do so, or they can still do page-by-page comics, no problem.

Nrama Besides Red Light Properties, are there other webcomics in the pipeline for Tor.com?

Defendini: We’ve got a another long-form comic by Jim Otavanni and Leland Purvis slated to start at the end of 2010, which I’m really excited about. It’s a biography of Alan Turing, who is one of the fathers of modern computer science and cryptography (and the namesake of the famous Turing test). That in itself is enough to get my geek-antennae humming, but additionally, Turing was a homosexual who refused to be closeted, and suffered greatly at the hands of the British government for it (yes, the same government that he helped save during WWII by cracking the Nazi’s infamous Enigma code at Bletchley Park–the UK government finally apologized for this last year). So I’m really excited about that.

Additionally, we’re still running with Kurt Huggins and Zelda Devons’ delightful King of an Endless Sky, which I like to think of as a mashup of Antoine St. Exupery’s Le Petit Prince and Windsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland, but with killer robots and sentient gerbils. Kurt and Zelda are wonderful to work with, and produce gorgeous work. We’re also running more A Softer World strips, and we’ve got a couple of pitches in from some well-known webcomics people who have reached out to us now that we’re making a bit of noise with our comics (but I can’t really go into those just yet–still in the works!).

Nrama: While digital comics seem to be a new frontier for the comics medium, the inevitable question with any online comic is “when’s the print edition?” Will Tor be publishing print editions of Red Light Properties?

Defendini: Well, Tor.com is a separate imprint from Tor Books within the corporate umbrella of Macmillan, so we don’t generally track with their publication schedule, nor they with ours. While a print version of Red Light Properties isn’t entirely off the table, we really haven’t contemplated it too deeply just yet- Red Light Properties is made for the web, and that’s where it will live for the foreseeable future.

Nrama: Tor.com does more than webcomics – can you give us a idea of what all Tor.com encompasses?

Defendini: Tor.com is a community site for fans of science fiction and fantasy, first and foremost. Our main feature is a robust blog with contributors from all walks of fandom: professional authors, as well as bloggers and straight-up fans. Additionally, we have a strong short fiction and comics publishing program; we generally have weekly comics and a new short story or two roughly every two weeks. Tor.com also has an extensive sf and fantasy artist gallery, curated by Tor Books and Tor.com art director, Irene Gallo. We’ve also got a print book store, and are dabbling in ebooks here and there.

Nrama: Before we go, we have a lot of comics fans who also read SF and fantasy books like the ones Tor published. Could you forsee any Tor books being adapted as comics for the Tor.com site?

Defendini: Hm. I would absolutely love to see Tobias Buckell’s wonderful series of Caribbean-tinged science fiction books translated into comics. I’ve been trying to find a way to do this, actually, but the opportunity just hasn’t arisen yet.

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!

Absolute Green Lantern: Rebirth:

Clean thoughts, chums!

Archie #608: This is the first part of a two-part Archies/Josie and the Pussycats crossover, in which possible future player Archie Andrews, who has been marrying girls left and right lately, hooks up with Valerie from the Pussycats.

The Art of P. Craig Russell: Not quite comics, but definitely of interest of a lot of comics fans, The Art of P. Craig Russell is a 260-page art book devoted to the comics creator, illustrator and fine artist’s career, including never-before-published material. IDW has it at two price points—$80 for a signed copy, $50 for an unsigned one.

Blackest Night Director’s Cut: I can’t think of anything more annoying than adding the film term “Director’s Cut” to the title of a comic book. Like all of the Marvel “Director’s Cut” books of the past, this isn’t anything like a director’s cut of a movie, and not simply because there are no directors in comics or that comics aren’t cut (edited) the way films are. Additionally, it’s only 80-pages long, so it certainly isn’t a different version of Blackest Night, as the title implies, unless they “cut” the hell out of the hundreds of pages that comprised the actual event.

A more fitting name, given the contents, would be Blackest Night Bonus Features, if they really wanted to go with the film metaphors. Because apparently that’s what this $6 book will include. From the solicitation:

With the creative minds behind BLACKEST NIGHT as your tour guides, you’ll marvel at hidden Easter eggs and meanings throughout the series in our director’s commentary section. Discover shocking scenes that were left on the cutting room floor including actual script pages that were never drawn. Be astonished at incredible never-before-seen designs from the best-selling event!

See? Bonus features.

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The Gold Exchange is very late this time around; my conversation with Dan Jurgens on Time Masters: Vanishing Point took precedence over the monthly column, but also happened halfway through our e-mail interaction about this month’s issue of Booster Gold. The result is that there are some questions asked here, which have already been answered in part or indirectly. I’m going to leave the questions as they appeared when asked and answered, so as the column progresses you may notice that I seem shockingly ignorant in the asking of a few questions. Let it go and enjoy the conversation.

The Gold Exchange: So last things first…Time Masters #1? Rip Hunter starring in The Return of Bruce Wayne? I suppose the latter makes sense, but I didn’t see it coming. The former—where’d that one come from? Has this been announced or solicited and I just missed it?

Dan Jurgens: As you have probably seen by now, we just made the official announcement this morning. Given the fate of Bruce Wayne, it’s something that makes a lot of sense.

GX: Booster laments having too many time-travel missions lately; while you and Norm take over his and Rip’s adventures in Time Masters: Vanishing Point, do you hear that the plan is for Keith and Marc to do less chronal, more traditional superhero stuff?

Please click the image to enlarge to FULL SIZE.

WORLD OF HURT – The Thrill-Seekers – Episode 40: “Queensbury Rules”

I have a confession to make:  I actually enjoy drawing and writing the character stuff a lot more than the action scenes.  Most artists get a huge thrill out of fight scenes, but in WORLD OF HURT, I found that each I approached them with a certain amount of trepidation.  I think it might be due to the comic strip format.  In an adventure strip, the action sequences are the big pay-off for the reader, but with three panels to progress the story each week, I fear that a protracted fight, highly choreographed fight scene might bore readers.  Also, I wanted Pastor to do a little more than deliver roundhouses and haymakers to his opponents.  Creatively, I keep boxing myself into corners, but removing the standard, and most expedient solutions to resolve physical conflicts, like handguns and the standard punch ups.  Therefore, to keep it interesting for myself, the reader, and to stay true to Pastor’s character, you’re going to see a lot of dirty fighting in the strip.

New strips of WORLD OF HURT – The Internet’s #1 Blaxploitation Webcomicare posted every Wednesday at www.worldofhurtonline.com.

- JEP

So, guess who also won’t be on stage during the Spider-Man musical, Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark? Well, Evan Rachel Wood has already left, so the production is without a Mary Jane. Entertainment Weekly reports that now veteran stage and screen actor Alan Cumming (Nightcrawler from X2) has exited the production as well now because of his increasingly important role on the CBS series, The Good Wife. Cumming was to portray Norman Osborn, as well as the Green Goblin.

I remember watching the Tonys and becoming very excited when they aired just a snipped of Alan on the Goblin’s trademark glider. Alas, I guess it wasn’t meant to be.

So, without a love interest, or a lead villain, the show must go on. Or will it? I’ve heard nothing but woe about the production, mainly on the financial side, yet the show is still slated to premiere sometime this year (after originally supposed to open in February). So we’ll see. Coming from a theater background, I’ve been in productions thrown together very last second and still manage to pull it off, but I can’t imagine the sort of pressure the producers of this show are facing.

A local ABC news affiliate in Utah is reporting that mother Linda Hurst bought a repackaged two-pack of comics from a dollar store to put in her ten-year-old son’s Easter basket, and one of them was, in the the TV station’s words, “naughty comic book” The Spectre. She was mad about it, and, two weeks after Easter, this is a story!

No details about the book are given, other than that the first two pages contain large drawings of a naked woman, and that the rest of the book also contains nudity and violence. The cover shown on the station’s website is, three seconds on Comics.org reveals,  that of The Spectre #9, from the 1987 “New Format” series by Doug Moench and Gray Morrow. That issue guest-starred Madame Xanadu, so maybe she was the naked lady.

I haven’t read the series (I was only ten myself at the time it came out), so I can’t be sure if there actually is nudity in it, but man, it would be awfully weird if DC comics from 23 years ago, back when they used to sell ‘em on newsstands and drugstores to kids and everything, had actual nudity in them, whereas today nudity remains a no-no, no matter how graphic the violence is or how mature the rest of the content is.

I suspect the nudity is what’s sometimes referred to as “TV nudity,” with the bits that would earn a movie an R-rating (nipples, genitals) obscured by smoke or magic sparkles or wisps of hair or whatever, but I’m just making guesses about a 23-year-old comic book. They video version of the report, which you can watch at the same link above, shows the offending pages, but they’re blurred out. (Any of you guys read that issue? How nude is the nudity? How naughty is the comic book?)

This is a pretty weird case in that the folks selling the comic book (the dollar stores) are almost certainly unaware of the content, although the crusading journalists at ABC 4 still “went to the Dollar Tree for answers.”

Likewise, the person buying the comic book wouldn’t have been able to even give it a looksee first (as it was wrapped in plastic) and, no matter how mad anyone actually was about it,  it would be pretty fruitless for anyone to try and hold the people who published the comic responsible, since almost a whole generation has passed since it was published, and DC corporate and editorial structure has changed repeatedly since then (Hell, that Spectre woulda been Jim Corrigan…that was two Spectres ago!)

So who’s to blame? I guess whoever sticks two random comic books in a plastic wrapper and seals ‘em before sending them off to dollar stores, but jeez, how much oversight could you reasonably expect in that sort of situation?

It’s pretty cool that a comic book about the personification of the wrath of the Old Testament God, a ghost who fights crime by killing the guilty with elaborate ironic punishments, was given as a present to celebrate Easter though, a holiday celebrating the climax of the New Testament and its message of a kinder, gentler, mercy and forgiveness-focused God.

Also, there are a lot more skulls and scythes on that cover than one generally sees on Easter gifts.

So what’s the lesson here? Always buy your comic books from a local brick-and-mortar comic book shop, where you can look ‘em over and talk to someone who (hopefully) knows a thing or two about comics before you buy ‘em. And when looking for Easter gifts for kids, steer clear of the ones with corpses on the cover.

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

Hey readers! Check out this video I found from the Bat-blog. The voice of Batman for a generation talked to a small crowd at C2E2 and one audience member asked what he though of Christian Bale’s Batman voice. While Conroy did praise Bale for being an excellent actor, he said he thought Bale was “stirred wrong”.

While I understand Conroy’s borderline diss, I see where he’s coming from, especially some scenes in The Dark Knight. Though it’s a different interpretation of Batman, so I think some leniency should be allowed.

So what do you think, readers?

As C2E2 began to wrap up on Sunday, we took to the floor to ask reps and personalities from some of the big entities present to give us their thoughts on the inaugural show. Pros readily remarked on the great building (which featured windows all the way around the convention hall) and the vibe, as well as the fact that this show is in the city, as opposed to the outer reaches of Rosemont. This is a sampling of what we learned.

Nick Barrucci (Dynamite Entertainment): This was a very well run, incredibly professional show. It’s the example for what a comic show can be, with extra media attached. Reed should be commended. Even with all of the shows that they have, they treated this as if it were their most important show.

James Lucas Jones (Oni Press): Reed puts on a great show . . . well organized. Attendance maybe hasn’t been as high, but maybe that’s [expectations after] Emerald City and WonderCon. The facilities have been great.

Mark Waid (Boom! Studios): My first Chicago show was 25 years ago this summer, and this brings back the same sense of excitement. I would come back here next year if I had to buy a ticket.

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Did Kick-Ass kick enough ass?: Various studio bean counters are still counting beans, but this CNN article is pretty typical of the box office reports from this weekend. It’s safe to say that Kick-Ass isn’t quite performing to expectations, battling for the number one spot against a movie that opened a few weeks ago. It’s important to keep in mind that no matter how much Kick-Ass ultimately makes—whether it turns a healthy profit, whether it earns Mark Millar enough royalties that he becomes the second richest Scottish comic book character—when it comes to big Hollywood movies, it’s often more a matter of how a movie is perceived to do at the box office than how much it actually does. So if Kick-Ass does pretty well, but not as well as expected, it’s likely to be seen as a failure (See, for example, Peter Jackson’s King Kong, Superman Returns, etc.) Following the similarly disappointing Watchmen—for which expectations were sky high—this could imperil the future of R-rated comic book superhero movies for a while.

Speaking of Kick-Ass…: There have obviously been one million reviews of it this week, but I’d like to point you toward Jog’s review at The Factual Opinion because a) Jog is a smart guy and a great writer and b) Jog’s a comic book guy a lot more familiar with the source material and the dude’s who created it than a lot of film critics.

“My 10 most important books”: Check out this list of books from a Christian Science Monitor feature, particularly #7, “Mighty Avengers Issues #160-177.” “Avengers were my group, at a time when the FF was popular and X-men were trendy,” wrote list-maker Tim Kane. Huh. That’s food for thought. The Avengers have been Marvel’s B-Team for most of their existence, huh? I guess that makes the fact that they’ve been on the top of Marvel’s food chain for so many years now kind of remarkable. Behold the power of Wolverine and Spider-Man getting Avengers ID cards!

“District asked to remove library book”: And that library book is…? Jeff Smith’s Bone, one of the (if not the) greatest success stories of a comic book breaking into the library market and introducing kids to comics. I suppose it had to happen eventually, but man, how weird is it that it took until now to happen?

Dark Horse lets Hammer in: I’ve already pointed this out elsewhere (self-promotion!), but Dark Horse’s first Hammer collaboration is going to be a spin-off of the English language version of the Swedish flick Let The Right One In, which was based on a novel. Which would make it a spin-off of a remake of an adaptation, which is kind of cool or kind of depressing, depending on what angle you look at it from. I’m going to go with cool, given the publisher involved—they’ve had a longer and better track record of comics based on film properties than any other publisher. Just ask Star Wars fans.

“I’m not a big comic guy. Who’s not taken? Is anyone left?”: That’s actor David Duchovny, being asked by Time magazine which superhero he’d like to play in this Q-and-A feature.

Tim Gunn’s latest superhero crossover: Critiquing the costumes of super-women. Interestingly, he immediately runs into the tension between the two extremes that fans are always talking about on the Internet: On the one hand, overly-revealing costumes are kinda dumb, but on the other hand, being a superhero is all about expressing idealized forms.

I can’t decide which cover freaks me out the most: Bully’s latest Ten of a Kind has all sorts of madness on it, from the site of Popeye reading a book to the…thing that greets Dagwood on the moon.

Will Eisner’s The Spirit: The New Adventures Archive

Written & Illustrated by Will Eisner, Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, Angus McKie, Neil Gaiman, Eddie Campbell, Steve Oliff, Tracey H. Munsey, Chris Shadoian, Jim Vance, Dan Burr, Ray Fehrenbach, John Wagner, Carlos Ezquerra, Tracey Anderson, Daniel Torres, Mark Kneece, Bo Hampton, Ashley Underwood, Kurt Busiek, Brent Anderson, Will Blyberg, Alex Sinclair, John Roschell, Moebius, Michael Allred, Matt Brundage, Michael Avon Oeming, Laura Allred, Mark Schultz, David Lloyd, Paul Chadwick, John Nyberg, Bill Spicer, John Ostrander, Tom Mandrake, Dave Lanphear, Scott Hampton, Dennis P. Eichhorn, Gene Fama, Rick Altergott, Marcus Moore, Pete Mullins, Mick Evans, Jay Stephens, Paul Pope, Joe R. Landale, John Lucas, Lee Loughridge, Brian Bolland, William Stout, Tim Bradstreet, Grant Goleash, Peter Poplaski, Tom Martin

Published by Dark Horse

Okay, I’m not entirely clear why it is that DC publishes the current Spirit series and the twenty-six volume Archive editions of Will Eisner’s seminal Spirit strips, but Dark Horse publishes the Archive edition of Kitchen Sink Publishing’s 8-issue 1998 series Will Eisner’s The Spirit: The New Adventures.  And frankly, I’m still of the opinion that the world doesn’t really need a non-Eisner Spirit, as the character was never more than a cipher for Eisner’s astonishing creative whims.

But the book exists, and it’s a good one.  Dark Horse did a nice job designing the book to match DC’s editions, making an effective companion piece (and props to DC for allow Dark Horse to copy their design work). In case you’re unaware of The Spirit, in 1940, cartoonist Will Eisner was contracted to create a comic book supplement to run with Sunday newspapers.  Pressured by the syndicate to create a masked hero, Eisner gave readers an eight-page adventure of a presumed-killed police officer who returns wearing a fedora, domino mask and gloves to protect his beloved Central City from criminals and Axis spies.  The Spirit himself was rarely developed, often serving as tool for Eisner to explore the creative possibilities of the comic book form.  Noir and slapstick, science-fiction and the humdrum, Eisner crossed any boundary in his pursuit of a great story, and his design-intensive splash pages and creative page layouts remain among the most influential illustrations in comic book history.

After Eisner folded The Spirit section in 1952 to focus on other business ventures (including using comics as training and educational tools for the U.S. military), the character continued as a fan favorite among discerning fans.  Many reprint projects were begun over the years, climaxing in DC Comics’ recently concluded twenty-six volume Archive series that compiled the entire twelve year Eisner run, in addition to the brief daily strip (the only Archive I don’t have) and Eisner’s handful of post-1952 shorts and covers.  However, it wasn’t until the mid-1990s when Eisner (by this point back in the comics field as the author of many rightly acclaimed graphic novels dealing with themes of family, immigration and city living, among other subjects) agreed to let other creators have a turn at spinning tales featuring his famed hero.

The result was 1998’s Will Eisner’s The Spirit: The New Adventures from Kitchen Sink Publishing.  Eight issues later, Kitchen Sink collapsed in the midst of the industry’s late-90s struggles, cutting the experiment short.  The eight issues published featured two issue-length epics (Paul Chadwick in #5, and Joe Lansdale and Mark Nelson’s #8) and six issues of tales mirroring Eisner’s eight-pagers.  The debut issue featured three short stories by the Watchmen creative tandem, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.

Qualitatively, New Adventures likely made Eisner proud.  Nearly every story has a strong hook and good art, a crackling script.  On some level, as I suggested above, The New Adventures is far from required reading.  As good as Darwyn Cooke et. al.’s more recent Spirit series at DC Comics was, the Spirit is not a character who needs further development or offers up unexplored avenues.  Eisner treated him as tabula rasa, pursuing flights of absolute whimsy about a man who can fly one week, then perhaps following with a terse parable about the dangers of blind patriotism the next.  It wasn’t even uncommon for the Spirit himself to make only a cameo in his own strip!  On that level, creators don’t need the Spirit; they need simply pursue their creative impulses in a manner that would make Eisner proud.

But since they did use the Spirit, at least most of them used him effectively.  Moore and Gibbons, in their trio of interconnected tales, suggest two possible origins for Eisner’s ultimate antagonist, The Octopus, both dovetailed neatly into the Spirit’s own origin, before wrapping up with a humorous lark that echoes Eisner’s own flights of fancy.  Paul Chadwick dives deep into Eisner’s oft-maligned sidekick Ebony and his connection to his racial community.  Neil Gaiman and Eddie Campbell are among those who use the character as a cipher in an Eisnerian sense.  Even the least of the New Adventures revisit classic Spirit femme fatales effectively if not always memorably, and that’s not really a bad thing.

Will Eisner’s The Spirit is a must-read comic book.  Will Eisner’s The Spirit: The New Adventures is an entertaining nod to the master.  If you’ve read the former and want to see impressive creators pay homage to the masterly work done, read the New Adventures.  If you haven’t read the original, please do so right away.

Via Best Shots’ own Amanda McDonald, who has the scoop on some news concerning the popular t-shirt/design site Threadless at the inaugural C2E2.

As if Threadless doesn’t satisfy my need for quirky graphic tees enough, news out of C2E2 today made the fangirl in me squeal with delight. Threadless has collaborated with artists Art Baltazar (Tiny Titans), Cliff Chiang (Detective Comics), Tony Moore (Walking Dead) and Jill Thompson (Scary Godmother) to release a set of four shirts following a storyline written by Thompson. Shirts will be available individually, or as a set. A teaser of Thompson’s design has already been released, and well–  I’m intrigued. Depicting a sleeping girl surrounded by ghosts, skulls, a tentacle, and stuffed animals, we do not know where in the four shirt (panel?) story this image falls. Oh? You want to know NOW? I do as well, but too bad. Tees will be officially revealed at one of Threadless’ Summer tour stops– ComicCon.

  “We’ve had a lot of internal discussions about how to put the emphasis back on periodicals.”

 That was really the only particularly relevant piece of information that came out of the fan-creator love-fest that is the DC Nation Panel at C2E2 yesterday.

 (I mean—seriously! Even the fan who stood up to the mike to deride James Robinson’s creative abortion Justice League: Cry For Justice was won over by Robinson’s dubious excuse that he “always planned” for the gore-covered ending of the book and that in the DC Universe apparently you have to blow up a city and rebuild it from the ground up in order to give it character. I mean, really, James? I seem to remember back in the day someone could take a fairly blasé place like Opal City and make it really sing just by fabricating a backstory and a sense of shared identity and civic pride in the characters who lived there. I guess there’s nobody like that at DC anymore. Note to creators: Not every community can be Coast City…and in fact, after Bludhaven, Montevideo and now Star City, we really don’t need any more DC cities to try.)

 Anyway, I’m getting off-topic. It seems to me that Dan DiDio and Jim Lee’s determination that, even in the face of eReaders and a burgeoning trade market (my girlfriend works for Barnes & Noble and has told me several times that while most sections in the store are sinking as people warm to eReaders and just generally buy less in our crappy economy, the comics/graphic novels/manga section is consistently growing not just at her store, but at the numerous stores where she’s been called to assist in the last six months.), DC needs to focus its energies on shifting the focus to periodicals seems a little dated and more than a touch naïve. Do they really think that they can manage the way their customers choose to enjoy their product, sheerly by force of will? Let’s ask the music industry how well that’s worked out for them in the last decade or so.

 It does, though, paint a pretty distinct picture of their company. Even at a time when mainstream retailers are accounting for an increasing amount of revenue (those guys don’t stock many floppies, by the way) and the New York Times is finally recognizing graphic novels with their own bestseller list, they want to convince everyone that there’s “something special” about holding that 32-page floppy in your hand. But the phrase “shifting the focus back to periodicals,” along with the phrases “The Return of Barry Allen” and “Fear of a Black Firestorm” suggest to me a company which has ceased trying to court new, young customers and has resigned itself to the conclusion that their target demographic is Geoff Johns and James Robinson: white, immersed in pop culture, young in the corporate sense but quickly aging in the biological and decades behind what’s new and cool when it comes to their personal tastes. These are the guys who still resent John Byrne’s Man of Steel as a slap in the face to the pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths continuity of their youth.

 This is hardly a surprise; the promotions of Geoff Johns and Jim Lee fairly cemented in my mind the idea that the company was not interested in exploring editorial, creative or distribution directions into which they weren’t already fairly entrenched. They’re going to continue pimping the same five creators until their hands fall off or enough of their stories fail to sell that the whole company has to be radically reconfigured—a move that will be much harder to pull off now that they’ve installed a pair of co-publishers, one of whom is an ideologue (Johns—it honestly seems to me that Lee is just trying to help the company, and/or in it for the paycheck).

 Personally, I’ve got nothing against the floppies. I read most of my books that way, and the only ones I pick up in trade are the ones that I fell badly behind while reading and/or didn’t start buying until a trade or two had already been in print. But almost everyone I know in the industry has been talking for some time about how the writing is on the wall for most floppies (nobody seriously thinks that Superman, Batman, Spider-Man or Archie will ever go trade-exclusive). I’m not sure how a few higher-ups, whose point-of-view seems very narrow, can expect to change what has been broadly perceived as The Future Of Comics.

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

We want to hear from you, Newsarama readers. If you’re attending C2E2 this weekend, check in and let us know what you think of this inaugural event.

For my part, my immediate reaction is that I prefer this particular venue. McCormick’s floor has a terrific set of windows that make the floor have a light, airy feel that many shows lack. Panel attendance today hasn’t been that robust, in general. The floor seems busy without being overcrowded.

So again, let us know what you think! And if you’re still at the show, don’t be afraid to stop one of us and say hello. Except Dirk Manning. He’s in disguise.

In spite of their relatively low mass appeal, two superhero (sort-of) movies have made their way to the DVD market for the first time this month, compliments of the Warner Archive, a program where you can order DVDs directly from Warner Home Video’s website and get them printed-to-order. The program has been going for a while, but seems to have picked up steam lately, with not only Steel (starring Shaquilled O’Neal and based on the character from the Death and Return of Superman story) and Doc Savage: Man of Bronze, but also some other genre titles like The Amazing Captain Nemo (which starred Burgess Meredith of Rocky and G.I. Joe: The Movie fame as its villain). You can also buy a handful of motion comics titles, including Batgirl: Year One and Superman: Red Son on the site.

Steel is that movie that has a decent script (not good, mind you), but a terrible cast and a number of flaws, not least of which is a running “free-throw” gag that revolved around the fact that its star, Shaquille O’Neal, was well-known for having no skill at shooting free throws. They removed all but the tiniest of details that bore resemblance to the comic, and Judd Nelson vamps and screams his way through every scene he’s in.  All that said, it’s a lot better than I remembered it; of course, the last time I saw it, my friend and I were the only two in a 200-seat theater on opening weekend–and we didn’t pay because he worked for the maintenance company that cleaned the cinema.

Doc Savage, meanwhile, is a charming little camp movie along the lines of the old Batman TV show. It’s such a blatantly pro-US, pro-military movie that you actually get to see the “USA” in John Philip Sousa flash red, white and blue in the credits. At a time when DC has launched a new Doc Savage series after the debut of First Wave, there probably wouldn’t be a better time to reissue this DVD (at least unless or until the feature film that’s stumbling along finally gets made). It’s fun to see this different interpretation of the Arctic Fortress of Solitude, and the characters have potential, even if their execution is typical ’70s action camp.