Hey, readers, turn your gaze to these fine works. Now super heroes are today’s mythology and can be perceived in various ways, but I’m really digging how Rogan Josh did these. Now, I used the Thor as an example of the “mod” style of heroes he has in his assortment, but if you wander over to his site you’ll see he has mutants, Avengers, Ol’ hornhead and many, many more.

Best part about it, is that he has an etsy shop, just in case you fall in love with a piece and need it hung on your wall pronto.

I love this sort of style and hope he does more in the future.

“When he’s good, he’s great and when he’s bad, he’s abysmal”: Chris Sims, a comics blogger who’s never been the world’s biggest Geoff Johns fans, covers Johns’ two big releases of this week—Brightest Day and Flash—and discusses The Two Faces of Geoff Johns.

“Ultimately, this is a book about how ‘brilliant’ it is to be Mark Millar and how wonderful it is to have a movie made of your work”: Johanna Draper Carlson, who hasn’t read Kick-Ass the comic or seen Kick-Ass the movie (and doesn’t plan to do either), nevertheless reviewed Kick-Ass: Creating the Comic, Making the Movie here. As part of her piece, she mentions an old Millar Legion of Super-Heroes pitch “that included all kinds of awful ideas, like Fertile Lass, whose power was to get pregnant whenever a boy looked at her.” Hmm, now I’m curious about a Millar LOSH…maybe he’ll eventually repurpose it into a creator-owned title using analogues, the way he did with Wanted…? Blogger Tim O’Neil linked  to the same review, and added a few paragraphs of his own about Millar and the controversial writer’s work.

Wow: Check out these Dean Haspiel pages for Cuba: My Revolution, a collaboration with artist-turned-writer Inverna Lockpez and colorist Jose Villarrubia.

Are $4 comics finally replacing $3 ones?: At Comics Chronicles, John Jackson Miller noted that, for the first time, in March “more comic books in Diamond’s Top 300 were priced at $3.99 than $2.99.” The observation set some tongues a-wagging…well, fingers a-typing. Here’s Tom Spurgeon (Post title: “You Bastards! You Blew It Up!”), Alan David Doane (“Have Shitty Comics Reached Their Platonic Price Point?”), and Sean T. Collins (“Personally I thought the $2.99 price point was ridiculous, too”).

“I remember very vividly finishing the first issue, and saying to myself, ‘Well, what the heck am I going to do now?’”: That’s Larry Hama talking about the original, Marvel-published G.I. Joe comic in this USA Today feature, occasioned by the Free Comic Book Day G.I. Joe #155 1/2, in which Hama will pick up where he left off with the series, now being published by IDW.

Map of My Heart
Written & Illustrated by John Porcellino
Published by Drawn & Quarterly

It seems, on some level, antithetical to call a self-created and self-distributed indie comic influential, but John Porcellino’s King-Cat Comix is probably the most famous and regarded self-published comic in the U.S.A.  So successful is the comic that Drawn & Quarterly has published two collections of King-Cat – King Cat Classix and the newest volume, Map of My Heart.

Map of My Heart will not be to everyone’s tastes.  I guess that goes without saying, but it’s worth noting here. Porcellino’s artwork is, to be incredibly kind, crude.  Flat line work, with little detail or perspective, a poor grasp of backgrounds and places, and only a rudimentary understanding of anatomy are among the obvious characteristics of Porcellino’s illustrations.  Yet there’s a certain appeal to the minimalist, untalented DIY quality in Porcellino’s artwork.

In truth, I find Porcellino’s work hard to review.  Many will dismiss it out of hand because of its crudeness.  Many will embrace it specifically because of that lack of professional illustrative prowess.  The stories, such as they are, range from nakedly confessional pieces, to visual diaries of lengthy nature walks, from illustrated poems to prose articles about recent events in Porcellino’s life or about plants or animals.

Porcellino’s devotion to nature is inspiring and engaging.  Following his outdoor excursions, even when seen through his limited graphic skills, offers a meditative beauty.  However, his poetry is less inspired.  Due to its intensely personal nature, I suspect that many readers will find Map of My Heart saccharine and trite.  Just as many others will think it the most personal and affecting work they’ve ever read.  Personally, I find it straddles both territories in equal measure.

If my will were all, I’d ask readers to at least sample Map of My Heart, the recent compilation of John Porcellino’s King-Cat Comix, if only because there’s really nothing else like it.  It’s a purely personal message.  You may not like it, but Porcellino is creating something unique, a confession of his own life, and it’s an experience readers should attempt to navigate.  Resembling a confessional blog, or perhaps a diary even, King-Cat is a deeply spiritual (though not religious) journey, through nature and love, with all the heartbreak, joy and absurdity inherent in such.  It’s the most personal experience anywhere in comics today.

Written with Gavin Higginbotham

What differentiates “Dragon War” from Marvel’s recent “World War Hulks” and related stories? Well, mostly plot. Whereas Marvel has had a succession of Hulk stories that can basically be summed up as “Hulks smash,” Erik Larsen points out to us that this month, “not a punch was thrown” in Savage Dragon. Certainly it seems to be gearing up for a pretty massive throwdown—what else do you expect when the title of the story is “Dragon War”?–but this month was all about establishing a direction for members of the Savage Dragon supporting cast, in the absence of a newly-villainous Dragon.

As usual, Erik Larsen joined us to talk about today’s Savage Dragon #159.

Russ Burlingame: Can you talk about the pacing of this arc? There have been a lot of very abrupt cuts between characters or scenes that don’t seem to have as natural a segue between them as you ordinarily do. It’s given the whole thing a kind of frantic, fast-cutting action movie kind of feel. Is that intentional or just the byproduct of having a lto of subplots feeding into one main story?

Erik Larsen: I generally don’t think in terms of arcs. I’m very much a single issues guy and I try to make each individual issue a satisfying read. Any isolated few issues have closure and beginnings and endings and there are enough drifting threads that it can work split up in any number of ways. When this is all put into trades the “Dragon War” arc will actually be split into two trades even though it’s a six issue story as far as the cover blurbs go. The first couple chapters will be in the Savage Dragon: Identity Crisis trade, which collects issues #151 through #156 and the rest will be in the Savage Dragon: Dragon War trade, which will collect issues #157-#162. And those trades read just fine split up that way even though, as far as the text boxes on the covers are concerned, they aren’t all part of one story. I don’t know how this particular story reads to everybody else but it’s not my intent to make it a radical departure from what I’ve done in the past. Some issues have had a crazy amount of quick cuts. This particular issue is somewhat of an anomaly because it’s almost entirely character stuff. Not a punch is thrown this time out. (more…)

Hey readers, check out this French featurette over at Trailer Addict which shows a behind-the-scenes look as well as a scene with Tony confronting Whiplash. It’s going to be some pretty intense stuff, but check out the quick shot at 1:18. Is that Thor getting a…mugshot? Now, this could just be typical fanboy speculation, but it looks like they stuck a little easter egg and possibly a little something-something that ties the films together.

Then again, maybe it’s nothing, but let the speculation begin.

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!

Is it that time of the year again, already? Yeesh, I feel I finally just got celebrating New Years.

Entertainment Weekly released their Summer movie preview issue this week (too soon?) and it’s chock-full with tidbits about this year’s biggest releases. Of course, what is a Summer preview without talking about Iron Man 2. Director Jon Favreau gives an interview basically explaining how he is expanding on the first blockbuster without repeating the same tricks. “We didn’t want to have just another armored suit for Tony to bounce off, because we’d already done that. Secret identities are pretty well picked over, so we went the other way: What happens to a guy who’s already bigger-than-life who then becomes exponentially more famous? That was our starting point.”

The issue also goes over The Prestige and The Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan’s (is this guy a household name yet?) upcoming Inception. I’ve seen the trailer at least a dozen times now, each time just as confused as the last, but Nolan doesn’t see it that way. “It’s not a rug-pulling, twisty, turny sort of film. It’s not a film that confuses people.” The story concerns a group of freelance dream thieves who steal people’s ideas for corporate gain by inserting themselves into strangers’ subconscious while they’re asleep. Toy Story 3 aside, this looks to be my favorite film of the Summer. Even the stars of the film are amazed on what transpires in the movie. Ellen Page admits this production has her doing “the craziest s— I’ve ever done.”

DOUBLE FEATURE! 9.15 “Conspiracy;” 9.16 “Escape”

Long time no talk, Smallville viewers! I want to apologize for the delays! Bad timing on my part, what with the recent big news about a Season 10 happening! I got behind on the show when they virtually took the month of March off (not wholly unwelcome by me due to my love of NCAA basketball and a much needed vacation with my wife.) I’ll get you caught up on things with a look at the February 26th episode, “Conspiracy,” and the April 2nd “Escape.” Look for recaps of “Checkmate” and “Upgrade” sooner than you know it!

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I never really noticed that DC Comics might have had something of an aversion to letting creators both write and draw books simultaneously. I just always assumed that work from writer/artists like Frank Miller’s two Dark Knight Returns-iverse books or Paul Pope’s Batman: Year 100 were few and far between simply because the company, like Marvel, had been producing comics continuously since the days in which the assembly line-style specialization of writing, penciling, inking and so on was established.

At least until I read this post from Evan Dorkin a few years ago, in which he shared the only two pieces of art he was allowed to do in for his 2000 Elseworlds one-shot, Superman and Batman: World’s Funnest.

Dorkin, himself a talented and experience writer/artist, wrote the book, and it was illustrated by an all-star roster of artists, each taking a different dimension or “Earth” as Mr. Mxyzptlk and Bat-Mite battled one another through the DC Multiverse, destroying each setting they passed through in the process.

It’s a great book, and if you haven’t read it yet, I’d highly recommend you look for it. Dorkin’s script is hilarious—I still giggle every time I think about who greets Perry White in heaven—and there aren’t a whole lot of projects in which you get work from Dave Gibbons, Jaime Hernandez, David Mazzucchelli, Bruce Timm, Frank Miller, Sheldon Moldoff, Scott Shaw, Alex Ross, Phil Jiminez, Doug Mahnke and others between the same set of covers.

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

PS.  I <HEART> pollen!  It makes me smile when I get to drive a yellow vehicle two months out of the year.

[NOTE - The preceding PS was not at all sarcastic.  Honest!]

David Petersen’s Mouse Guard is the story of of noble mice in a medieval setting, in a world without humans. Its engaging stories have won two Eisners, gathered a rather faithful following, and has spawned a pen-and-paper rpg. Petersen opens up to Blog@ about the future projects of Mouse Guard and talking to educators about using comics as reading tools.

Blog@: So, David, before we start talking about your upcoming projects, you recently made a trip up to Alaska to give a speech. What was that about and like?

David Petersen: The Alaskan Library Association invited me to be a guest speaker at their annual conference this year in Anchorage. I gave two presentations, one on myself and my career, and the other on graphic storytelling. It was wonderful to have so many educators and librarians embracing comics and graphic novels. There had been some acceptance using comic material as a ‘easy read book’ to get reluctant readers started, but now it’s more widely accepted with teachers and librarians that graphic storytelling is a medium in it’s own right, like film, or music.

We were up to Alaska last year for a reading program in Fairbanks. This year we went back to Fairbanks for a quick visit and some school appearances before heading down to Anchorage. It was a great trip, and Some of the groups up there are interested in having me come back again!

Blog@: So how excited are you about the new printing of Mouse Guard Vol. 1: Fall 1152? You must be really thrilled about it selling so well.

Petersen: I’m very excited! I think it’s amazing how well the book has caught on. When I started doing Mouse Guard I was hoping for a small, but loyal fanbase, and it seems I’m lucky enough to have recieved a large loyal fanbase that continues to grow. It’s heart-warming to know people like and continue to reccomend the book to new readers.

Blog@: There’s a few Mouse Guard stories coming soon. Can you talk a bit about those?

Petersen: The next Mouse Guard arc is a prequel story. It takes place before many of the Guardmice we know were born. In Winter 1152, Celanawe promises to tell Lieam of the day his paw first touched the Black Axe. This is my return on that promise to fans.

Blog@: Now you usually illustrate your books as well as write them, but you’ve got Ted Naifeh (Courtney Crumrin, Polly and the Pirates) on board with a project. Was it weird having somebody else do those duties for you?

Petersen: Ted came in as a guest artist on the spin-off Mouse Guard anthology: Legends of the Guard [coming out in May]. And because the project, by nature, is one that has other talented foks pulling the reigns, it wasn’t weird at all. When we started batting around the idea of doing this anthology, I had two names on my list: Mark Smylie & Jeremy Bastian, but I started thinking of creators I knew who I thought would be a good fit for Mouse Guard. I looked for creators who are both writers and artists in one. Ted was an obvious choice.

Blog@: So after the Black Axe prequel and the Legends of the Guard, you have yet another book in the works?

Petersen: I have the two story arcs planned after Black Axe. One is the Weasel War of 1149 that I refer to in my previous books. The other will pick up where the end of “Winter” left off….well sorta…there will be a gap in time between that story and the end of “Winter”. I want to give those some breathing room. Allow for time to have passed.

Blog@: You’ve mentioned in the past you have a difficult time putting battles on the page, do you think you’ve gotten better since then?

Petersen: Fight scenes can be tough for me. I like to try and coreograph them as much as possible to get the action and momentum to be believeable. And since most of the fighting in Mouse Guard is a tiny mouse against a big predator, it’s already pretty unbelieveable by nature.

I also walk a tightrope with the all ages aspect of my book. I want to make sure it’s accessable and that it won’t turn parents off, while still being interesting and edgy enough to hold adult interest. And battles are the trickiest part of that.

In “Winter” though, I feel like I had some good fight moments in there. I dealt with a battle that ultimately took a main character’s life. So I’m ready for the battles in Black Axe. Hopefully those will prepare me for a full-on war!

I had no idea those two Peanuts characters were ever an item…: And neither did Fantagraphics’ Kim Thompson, until reading a huge chunk of Peanuts strips in preparation for one of the publisher’s volumes of their Complete Peanuts series. What two characters are we talking about here? What other mind-boggling surprises are contained in the fifteenth volume, covering the years 1979 and 1980? Click on over to the Flog! Blog to find out.

“His latest book, Market Day, marks a return to the historical fiction that put him on the map”: NPR’s Glen Weldon has a rather positive review of James Sturm’s latest, Market Day (it deserves it; it’s a great book), embedded in something of a feature story about Sturm’s career. It’s a nicely written piece, and comes complete with an excerpt, but one quibble—Weldon erroneously refers to Adventures in Cartooning as an anthology. It’s not. It’s an instructional book about about comics-making, in the form of a very funny comic. And it’s awesome.

“To kill or not to kill, that is the question”: That’s Conor McCreery, co-creator and co-writer of Kill Shakespeare, talking about the project in this interview with Mondo magazine.

“The Top 10 Most Fashionable Comic Book Characters”: Writing for iFanboy, Molly McIsaac compiles a list…with some unusual, I daresay even controversial choices on it.

I’m torn: Part of me thinks these Manga Farming pieces by artist Koshi Kawachi, in which old manga are dipped in water and made into potted plants, look beautiful. And part of me recoils in horror at the thought of rendering comics, even ones written in a language I can’t read, unreadable.

I’m not gonna lie, this sounds scary to me: Sky.com is reporting a rumor that “Ryan Reynolds and DC Comics’ upcoming superhero movie Green Lantern is set to feature the first fully CGI superhero suit.” Does that mean we’re going to see a masked Ryan Reynolds head floating above a CGI superhero body…? Oh man, just thinking about this is making me really nervous…

The Book of Genesis
Written by The Hand of God (or so they say)
Illustrated by R. Crumb
Published by W.W. Norton and Company

We’re going to try to discuss this book without getting into the theology of it, all right?

R. Crumb is, of course, one of the – perhaps the – guiding light underground comix movement of the latter 1960s, producing culturally challenging work for Zap Comix (among others) while spinning sexually charged counter-culture parables.  His latest project certainly surprised many longtime readers.

Robert Crumb’s adaptation of the first book of the Bible is surprisingly reverent – or not surprisingly irreverent, depending on your mileage.  Crumb doesn’t touch the language of the text – he approaches the book as a pure illustration job, providing images and context to the words that were put to the page centuries ago.  In that respect, the language of Genesis is 100% intact (depending on your preferred translation).

As the Bible, and Genesis in particular, tells of bloodshed, incest, slavery, manipulation and countless other horrific happenings, readers may find Crumb’s willingness to bluntly depict nudity and violent bloodshed at conflict with the traditional imagery of the church. Ultimately, however, Crumb isn’t adding anything to the narrative.  In fact, he doesn’t really push any of his depictions toward any type of extreme; it’s all there in the text.  Crumb’s just visualizing the words, with surprisingly little sensationalism.

A terrific and detailed artist, Crumb’s lines add considerable heft to the stories of Genesis.  Outside of occasional layout hiccups – panels with one word balloon below and one to the right of a caption don’t always read in consistent order – Crumb’s a professional at pacing out each sequence and rendering it with an eye toward some historical accuracy.  Troughs for camels to drink from are crafted from stones, simple tents and tunics shelter the characters, and the rugged, barren landscapes of the Middle East appear desolate and challenging.

By not touching the language, Crumb ensures the intended tone and accuracy of the text.  His images provide only the slightest irony on two or three occasions, but he otherwise restricts himself to representing the truth proclaimed by the words.  There is both good and bad in this approach.  Believers and the curious can approach Crumb’s The Book of Genesis with the understanding that they will be treated to the Word as intended.  For less committed readers, many passages, particularly those detailing the ancestry of various Biblical characters, become tedious and rote.  Nonetheless, Crumb’s “sequence of headshots” approach provides at least some presence to the list of names given.

Crumb does allow for his own opinions in the book’s brief commentary afterword section.  At the book’s end, Crumb offers typically one- or two-paragraph observations about the source of each Biblical story.  Comparisons to strikingly similar legends and myths born of the same era but divergent literary traditions are presented.  It’s interesting, but not always insightful: confusing or contradictory stories within Genesis (such as why men often trick others by calling their wives sisters) are addressed with little more than a shrug of the figurative shoulders.

In the big picture, it’s not as shocking as you might expect.  It’s almost reverent, actually, particularly if the occasional nudity or violence won’t upset you.  Crumb’s The Book of Genesis is a surprising and interesting project in Crumb’s long and legendary career, and it’s a worthwhile reading of the most famous stories in recorded history.

Bodyworld: Dash Shaw’s follow-up to The Bottomless Bellybutton, this book is set in a futuristic, dystopian planned community, and follows a high-schooler with some drug issues. It’s $28 for a 385-hardcover, and it was originally serialized online, so you should be able to check it out here, but I think you should buy the paper copy and read that instead. Because I hate trees.

Black Widow #1: Marjorie Liu and Daniel Acuna launch the next Marvel ongoing series to be quickly canceled, a $4 ongoing featuring the always-a-bridesmaid, never-a-star supporting character. Will it outlast Doctor Voodoo or SWORD, maybe living as long as Captain Britain and MI13 or Agents of Atlas? We should know by the time the Iron Man 2 DVD comes out.

Brightest Day #0: The two Green Lantern comics writers, Geoff Johns and Peter J. Tomasi, kick off their bi-weekly series with this 56-page, $4 issue that will pick up on all those back-from-the-dead-for-unrevealed-reasons characters  from the second half of Blackest Night #8. Fernando Pasarin provides the art, while David Finch draws the cover, and boy, it’s not a very good cover, is it?

Cold Space #1: Actor Samuel L. Jackson gets in on the autobio comics craze with this graphic memoir, about the time his space ship crash-landed on a planet experiencing a civil war. No wait, I think it’s actually fiction. Jackson lends his likeness to, and helps co-write, this “hard-boiled sci-fi action-adventure” with his Afro Samurai collaborator Eric Calderon and artist Jeremy Rock. It’s a $4 book.

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Please click image to enlarge to FULL SIZE.

WORLD OF HURT – The Thrill-Seekers – Episode 39: 

Despite the timeframe in which WORLD OF HURT occurs, I didn’t really have a political agenda when I started the strip.  I just wanted to tell a good crime story against a somewhat familiar, but misunderstood, backdrop.  However, as the strip evolved, I came to realize that overall, “The Thrill-Seekers” was a revenge fantasy built around a slave trade metaphor.  The metaphor included the complicity of Black people in the acquisition and sale of their fellow Blacks (i.e. Duke The Pimp) and Alicia Patterson’s own harrowing version of the Middle Passage aboard Charles Bouchier’s yacht. 

Once I recognized that my own…biases (for lack of a better term) were subconsciously finding their way into the strip, I felt more comfortable in inserting some more overt political messages.  In this instance, it is my strong disdain for handguns.  There are so many senseless, cowardly crimes committed with easily concealed handguns, that I didn’t really want to have Pastor glorify their use.  Therefore, I decided to make it a running gag that whenever Pastor used one, or attempted to use one, things would go horribly wrong for him.

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

- JEP

The news of this being announced as a motion picture might have slid through the cracks at WonderCon.

According to a press release, Image Comics’ Elephantmen has been optitioned for a feature film and from what I’ve read, it’ll be in good hands since the treatment will be drafted by the series creator, Richard Starkings. “I’m very pleased to be working with producer Janet Zucker and everyone at Zucker Productions,” explains Starkings on the production. “Janet has a wonderful instinct for story and totally understands the more subtle tones of the Elephantman series.”

Elephantmen is a spin-off of Starking’s Hip Flask, comic strip about hippo/human hybrid that lives in a dystopian futuristic Los Angeles. The Elephantmen series concentrates on various characters throughout the same universe and has the same animal/human features.

Starkings has been approached by a number of companies and directors interested in optioning the project, but until recently he brushed them away, preferring to concentrate on putting out a the best book he could

“On the road to the creation of Elephantmen, I talked to everyone else in the business and listened to their advice. It’s taken a very long time to build the series — I created these characters fifteen years ago — and I’m very grateful for our loyal readers and the incredible professional support that the book has received.” says Starkings. “I didn’t set out with a movie in mind, but I am grateful that this opportunity has come along and allows me to continue to write something that is very dear to me.”

Now I wonder if they will do CGI deal or something in the vein of Where the Wild Things are.

Somehow, the things that popped in my mind when I thought about this were George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” and Fish Police.

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!

Let off some steam, Bennett — with Bluewater’s announcement that they will be doing a biocomic on Arnold Schwarzenegger!

Focusing on the Governor’s transition from bodybuilder to actor to politician, Bluewater said they will have Justin Peniston writing the book, with art from Matt Filer.

“The crazy thing is, as something of an action movie buff, I probably tended to dismiss Arnold’s accomplishments more than I should have,” Peniston said in a press release. “I didn’t realize, living in a culture that allows people to become famous for any old thing these days, how difficult it was for Arnold to make the jump from bodybuilding to acting.  I didn’t know that he was a millionaire before he was a successful actor.  I didn’t know that he’s been following a plan that he’s had in place all along.  I guess I’m saying that I knew he was a self-made man; but I didn’t know what that really meant until I took on this project.”

And for those of you who are curious, it’s also a little bit of a “meta” turn for Arnold, who became firmly entrenched in the country’s pop culture zeitgeist with genre thrillers including Conan the Barbarian, the Terminator franchise, and Total Recall. Excited for this book to pump you up? You don’t have long to wait — the comic is due out June 30.

Over at the School Library Journal, there was a recent poll that lists the greatest children’s book (with Charlotte’s Web in the top spot). Of course, the usual suspects were there: the “Harry Potter” series, Wind in the Willows, Wonderful Wizard of OZ, etc. I read most of the books growing up, as did probably some of you 20-30 somethings in English/Reading class in some way or another. Though this year, I was pleased to see that Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book (think Kipling’s Jungle Book, but being raised by ghosts instead of wolves) made the poll at a fair #80. That’s impressive considering it only came out not even two years ago.

I got the book last year for my birthday and it took some time before I got to it (I was in the middle of moving), but once I sat down and started, I realized I breezed right through it.

So just add this note to the book’s already prestigious list of awards, which includes a Hugo and a Newberry. Who knows, this might one day be on a school’s required reading list.