Looks like the test was successful. From Marvel’s last round of shipping updates to retailers:

Starting with the 06/06/12 On-sale items, all 32 page Marvel Universe comics that don’t carry a digital code will be printed with 50# Coated interiors and will be Self-Cover.

That’s this week’s books, for those bad with calendars. It’s odd that that is starting so soon, considering the “All $3.99 books get digital codes” policy isn’t scheduled to start until next month. What I’m curious about is whether or not we’ll see more 24 page $2.99 books a la the recent Fury’s Big Week…

I’ll admit, I haven’t picked up Jim Zub and Edwin Hoang’s Skullkickers before – but having received these teaser images for next week’s #14, I think that’s about to change (Click to embiggen):

Apparently, #13 – out now – and next week’s #14 are great jumping-on points for the series, and I’ll be trying out that theory for myself. What convinced me? It’s not wondering about the secret of the gun – although, I admit, I’m kind of curious now that I think about it – but the captions at the bottom of the full page. Something that knowing and parodic of comic book convention that still works? Yeah, I’ll check that out, definitely. Any Skullkickers fans out there want to tell me what I’ve missed so far?

I’ve mentioned the Hugo Tate re-issue a couple of times here before, but this Forbidden Planet blog post by creator Nick Abadzis is weirdly fascinating for the technical aspects of “repairing” original art so that it can be re-used:

When I pulled the original art out of storage a few years ago, all the pages from this section of the story were an archival disaster. I’d used a lot of zip-a-tone (or as we called it in the UK, ‘Letratone’) and this stuff hadn’t stood the test of time well. Letratone came in big sticky-backed sheets and you stuck it down over the area you wanted to cover and then cut out the bits that you intended to remain white with a scalpel. Every single page of O, America that had dotscreen tone on it (most of them) needed some kind of restoration work done.

Ink had also changed color – these are pages almost 20 years old, after all – or bled outwards over the course of time, and everything, it seemed, required some level of crack Photoshop touch-up in order to keep it presentable. “Photoshop and the advent of digital image manipulation technology makes undertaking this kind of meticulous work easier, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t laborious,” Abadzis notes, adding that “Realistically, it took me years, on and off.” Think about that next time you wonder why a collected edition of classic material ships a week or two late…

Congratulations, Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard and The Walking Dead:

Even though the second season of the AMC adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead ended in March, the TV-drive sales of a phalanx of The Walking Dead graphic novels continued to dominate bookstore graphic novel sales in April according to a report from Nielsen BookScan.  Just as in March The Walking Dead took seven out of the top ten spots, though this time Kirkman’s collections swept the top four spots, whereas in March they just took the first and the fourth positions.

Overall, The Walking Dead has twelve of the top twenty spots on Bookscan’s graphic novel chart for April, which is just… amazing, really. The other spots are taken up by manga, the collected edition of Dynamite’s Game of Thrones adaptation, Gene Yang’s Avatar: The Last Airbender comic for Dark Horse and an Avengers Character Guide from DK Publishing that isn’t actually a comic; nothing from Marvel or DC at all. I love looking at the shape of markets outside the direct market, and seeing what they’re like, but… Man. Kirkman and Adlard, you’re doing well in bookstores…!

Mark Millar is back in love with the comic industry:

You know what? I was reading almost nothing last year.

It felt a lot like 1999 where I’d barely read a comic in 2 years. Last year none of the big companies were really putting out much I was excited about and Walking Dead was about the only thing I was reading consistently. But how much things have changed in just 12 months. DC’s reboot worked out really well for them and there’s a few really interesting books (not least of which being Snyder’s Batman), Marvel’s spiked in the charts again with a fun crossover done by all their biggest writers and the sleeping giant of creator-owned has just begun to stir… Saga, Fatale, Mudman, America’s Got Powers and a half a dozen other new books in the last few months (not to mention Kick-Ass 2, Jupiter’s Children, Supercrooks and many OTHER Millarworld books) really makes the shelves look completely different from last year. It’s like all my favourite creators are back and working full blast again, a bunch of brilliant new ones coming of age too.

In contrast, I was just telling a friend the other day that I was feeling a little burned out on Marvel and DC for the most part recently – Although I loved Action and Earth 2 a lot this week – and have really been focused on indie books… I’m curious: How’re you feeling about the industry’s output these days? Is everyone riding high? What’re you reading? And what could be better?

Sure, we all know now that the first Saturday of every May is when we get free comics, but you might not know why that is. John Jackson Miller explains the origins of Free Comic Book Day:

Giveaway comics were a major source of new readers for the comics industry over its history, from the March of Comics issues given away at shoe stores to the Big Boy comics still distributed in restaurants. I’ve done a lot of research into those and several other giveaway lines over the years — and it’s plain that many of the people who learned to read comics (and, odd as it sounds, the storytelling language of comics is something one does have to learn to read) learned it from ones they got for free. Most of those comics went completely away in the 1980s and 1990s. Joe’s suggestion in the article was that publishers could create sampler comics for their different lines — “just as Baskin-Robbins has 31 flavors of ice cream… a selection of samplers available from different publishers would allow stores to better cover the disparate tastes of those who’ll show up.”

Miller reprints the original column by retailer Joe Field suggesting the concept, along with a “Response From Diamond,” putting the whole thing in a historical context that almost seems surreal now. Joe Field, you did everyone in comics a solid with this idea. Thank you.

I love the honesty in this John Wagner response from the Dark Judges CBR interview:

I have to confess that part of the reason I brought Judges Fear, Fire and Mortis back is that I’m considering writing a new story to reunite the four, with the excellent Greg Staples on art. My problem with the Dark Judges, and the reason that I’ve left them so long, is that I find it difficult to write any story without adding large dollops of black humor. This, however, tends to diminish characters like Judge Death, to dilute their level of menace. If I couldn’t handle them in the way they deserved, then it was better to leave them alone. So I’ve been prevaricating on a new story ever since Greg suggested it — until last week when he sent me a Dark Judge illustration he’d done. It was out of this world, simply stunning, and it made me think more seriously about a comeback. I’ll be considering it over the coming weeks. If I can find a way to make it work (without the humor!), then the project is on.

Maybe I’m so used to a more American, more “on” interview where everything is relentlessly upbeat and confident – “This is the greatest thing I’ve ever done!” and so on – but there’s something charming to me about admitting that you tend to write against the characters you’ve created and need to get over that in order for a future project to happen. Let’s have more reflective creator interviews in comics!

Todd McFarlane is no longer bankrupt, as the 20th Century Danny Boy blog points out…

In total McFarlane has paid over $2,200,000 to get himself out of the Chapter 11 bankruptcy hole that he voluntarily dug himself into back in late December 2004.

Half of that went to the Neil Gaiman lawsuit over ownership of Angela and Medieval Spawn, which just goes to show two things: Firstly, if you have the patience and money to spare, lawsuits can occasionally right wrongs. And secondly, if Gaiman owes you money, this might be the best time to try and collect.

Out today, and well worth picking up, is Dynamite’s The Spider #1 by David Liss and Colson Worley. I’d missed Liss’ Black Panther run, but based on this first issue, probably need to go and pick up the collections, because this is a pretty damn good pulp crime book with a fun twist at the end… What sticks in my head, though, is Worley’s art, which has double-page spreads like this:

Pretty JH Williams-esque, in terms of layout, right…? There’s more of that throughout the book, but it’s Worley’s colors that made me sit up and pay attention; he’s obviously doing it all online and his work reminded me of Frazer Irving and Fiona Staples in the way – The painterly approach using digital tools to create something that’s the best of both worlds, and entirely unique to their medium (and on time each month, too). Who’re the other artists working in this style that I’m not paying attention to? And where can I find them?

Valiant is back, and ComiXology has ‘em:

Valiant Entertainment is proud to announce that it has reached an exclusive digital comics distribution agreement with comiXology, the world’s largest digital comics platform available on iPhone, iPad, Android, Kindle Fire and the Web with over 60 million comic and graphic novel downloads to date.

Beginning today with the release of the all-new X-O Manowar #1 by New York Times best-selling author Robert Venditti (The Surrogates) and Eisner Award-winning artist Cary Nord (Conan), comiXology will offer same-day as print digital releases for all of Valiant’s upcoming titles. Additionally, Valiant’s expansive back catalog of classic content will also be exclusively available via comiXology.

It’s the latter part of that announcement that may seem like the immediate draw for fans, especially considering the lack of collections for the original Valiant books outside of the three hardcover collections for XO, Archer & Armstrong and Harbinger. Available today will be early issues of XO, Harbinger and Bloodshot, with issues of Archer & Armstrong, Rai, Ninjak, Shadowman, Eternal Warrior, and maybe most excitingly, Quantum & Woody promised soon.

Congratulations to both Oni Press and creators Brendan Hay and Justin Wagner on the news that their graphic novel Rascal Raccoon’s Raging Revenge has been picked up by Warner Bros. for possible movie adaptation. For those who haven’t read the book – which came out last year – imagine a cross between Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and “The Coyote Gospel” from Grant Morrison’s Animal Man: it’s about a cartoon character who crosses over to the real world after accidentally killing his longtime nemesis, out to find the animator that created the two of them.

The project already has a director attached, and it’s a good fit: A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas’ Todd Strauss-Schulson is the man planned to be in the big chair when the movie gets made, according to the Hollywood Reporter, with Matt Fogel on board to write the script for the planned CGI/Live-Action movie. With Warners being the studio behind the project, what’re the odds we’ll get to see some classic Looney Toons characters in there too…?

I think I’ve said it before, but Nick Abadzis’ Hugo Tate – about to come back into print in a new collection from Blank Slate books – is one of those treasured, classic comic texts for me, a comic that changed the way I thought about comics in general and remains one of my favorite books of all time. It’s particularly interesting/sad in a what-could’ve-been way, then, to read the wonderful interview Abadzis did with Tom Spurgeon and see this:

It was always my intention to give each of Hugo’s three sidekicks in Book 1 (A London Sequence) some stories of their own. Thanks to contractual disagreements at the time with Deadline, I managed one each for Stan and Dorinda but not Jason so I added a few pages between Books 1 and 2 to address that.

Looking back over all my old notes for Hugo III I don’t think I had the same clarity of purpose that I did for Book 2 (O, America). I was ambitious but I’d fulfilled a certain amount of what I’d wanted to do and I think I was afraid that I might not be doing Hugo III for the right reasons. Plus I was going through a divorce — I’d got married very young and extricating myself from that took up a lot of my emotional energy.

I do remember being amazed that publishers couldn’t see the potential in it, though (I’m talking British publishers in the early ’90s here), in comics generally. Everyone was talking about the “coming of the graphic novel” but what they were really talking about was Batman reprints or new spins on the superhero. No one could see the talent that was right in front of them, being published regularly in Deadline and elsewhere or doing their own mini-comics across the country. In that sense I was disappointed that it didn’t go anywhere.

I do find myself wondering sometimes what would’ve happened if I’d continued to just build a whole world around those characters, post-Deadline. My career’s been jury-rigged around lots of different aspects of publishing, both behind and in front of the editorial desk and I don’t regret anything as such. But sometimes I do find myself wishing that I’d found a publisher, early on, who’d believed in me and allowed me the sort of creative freedom that I saw other cartoonists abroad getting. But it didn’t happen that way, and I’m a practical sort of bloke, so I just worked bloody hard and hoped that eventually something would occur, which it did.

If you consider that the late ’80s/early ’90s anthology Deadline regularly had new work in it from Abadzis, Philip Bond, Jamie Hewlett, Brendan McCarthy, Peter Milligan and Steve Dillon (amongst many others, including as time went on, Evan Dorkin and more), it really is somewhat heartbreaking to consider what a graphic novel-based publishing line from those creators would’ve been like back then…

(Also: Everyone search out Hugo Tate when it’s released.)

MorrisonCon, the Grant Morrison-curated mini-convention happening in Las Vegas this September, has announced half of its guest-list. Attendees to the Hard Rock Hotel event in the last weekend of the month will not only get to see Morrison in full flow, but also collaborators Frank Quitely, JH Williams III and Chris Burnham, as well as Morrison fans and acclaimed writers Gerard Way and Jonathan Hickman. With four more guests to be announced, it’s the kind of thing that makes you want to pay attention for the announcement of details on how to attend when they’re released on May 9 – Or, at least, wish that you could go if it wasn’t happening over your wife’s birthday (Curses on the timing!).