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.

Cartoonist Mike Dawson (Freddie & Me) is trading in his sequined rock star outfits for boy scout colors in his new webcomic series Troup 142. The comic, which has been serialized for a few months now,follows the fictitious Boy Scout Troop 142 as they spend the week at summer camp. And if you’ve ever been to summer camp — especially a boys’ summer camp — you might have an idea what to expect.

Mature readers only, for sure. The third chapter, “Tuesday”, was recently completed with four more planned in the run. Fore more, visit the Troop 142 website.

The fabulous blog for all things Hayao Miyazki, the Ghibli Blog, has found a new treasure: a rare 1989 manga by  director Miyazaki called The Age of the Flying Boat.

This short manga served as the inspiration and precursor for the film Porco Rosso, and was only made available once in English — until now.

Read the full manga over at Ghibli Blog. link

With the recent release of New Moon and the success of the television series True Blood, vampires are in the hearts and minds – and throats – of the public-at-large. But in comics there’s a new kind of blood-sucker – the bovine kind.

Comics writer and former Blog@Newsarama contributor Michael May has assembled three friends and artists to help him create an anthology focused on a vampire cow named – aptly enough – Cownt. First appearing in an anthology organized by comics writer Steve Niles’ forum, this bloodsucking bovine became a cult favorite for readers. And in a case of “ask and she shall receive”, May is bringing back the Cownt in this new self-published anthology titled Cownt Tales.

We spoke with May about this book, and his other projects underway.

Newsarama: Cownt – a vampire cow; how the hell did you come up with that?

Michael May: I’m a little afraid that people will assume it’s a rip-off of Hell Cow from Howard the Duck, but the truth is that I didn’t know about Hell Cow until long after the Cownt was born. Turns out, the characters have nothing in common anyway other than the overall concept.

My brother-in-law and I created him one night during a role-playing game we were playing with some pals. It was kind of a slow campaign, so we started making up characters for a pretend comic book about a group of inept super-villains. Neither of us remembers who first said “vampire cow” or came up with the name, but he was our favorite of the bunch right away.
Nrama: Tell us about that first story in the Steve Niles fan anthology, and the response you must’ve got to continue the character here.
May: I’d met artist Gavin Spence on Steve’s forum and we’d started talking about making this “pretend” super-villain comic a reality. We weren’t too far into it when some of the other forum members – independently of our project – said, “Let’s make an anthology!” Gav and I wanted to participate, so we quickly scrapped our plan for a super-hero parody (thank God!) and decided to submit a story with our one horror-related character, who still happened to be my favorite and had also become Gav’s.

Thanks partly to the concept itself and partly because of Gav’s hilarious character design, the Cownt quickly became EVERYONE’s favorite. People seem to respond to how seriously the Cownt takes himself while looking so completely ridiculous. The challenge has been to create stories that live up to that visual.
Nrama: You’ve got a great line-up of artists here – how’d you do it?
May: Gav was an obvious choice. Since he was the first real artist to draw the character, I knew he had to be the one to tell the origin story.

Jessica Hickman and I also met on the Steve Niles anthology and she’s been one of the Cownt’s biggest supporters ever since. In fact, this book getting done at all is due entirely to her constantly emailing me with the single word, “Moo’bleh!” When I was distracted by other stuff and not entirely sure what tone the Cownt’s stories needed to have, Jess encouraged me and helped me focus. She was another natural choice. Her story’s about the Cownt’s first vampire hunter, a lactose intolerant farmgirl named Penny.

The third artist in the book is Paul Taylor, who does an amazing webcomic called Wapsi Square. Paul’s a friend of mine, but he’s busy enough with Wapsi that franky I had no hope that he’d be able to do this too. Even now, with the comic completed and in the hands of fans, I’m still having a hard time believing he said yes. Paul touches on the theme of body-image in Wapsi Square.
Nrama: How’d you come to self-publishing this book?
May: We started making plans for the book at last year’s FallCon, but hadn’t made a ton of headway on it by spring when the Twin Cities area has another, smaller convention. We were passing out Cownt stickers and postcards there and fans kept asking me, “When’s the book coming out?” And they were really excited about it. One fan had picked up a print at FallCon and was literally jumping with excitement when I told her there was a comic coming. She has her print hanging in her apartment and when people come to visit and ask her who that is, she says, “That’s the Cownt!”

So, thinking quickly – or not at all – I blurted out, “FallCon!” as my answer. And did this several times before realizing that that left us no time to find a publisher, much less solicit through Diamond. So in this case, self-publishing was a necessity to make good on that ill-considered promise. Hopefully people will like it enough to warrant a second issue that we can pitch to real publishers.

Nrama: And for people who didn’t go to FallCon can get it, where else can they get the book

May: I’m getting it set up right now on IndyPlanet, so it should show up there soon. Or folks can email me at michaelmay@michaelmay.us. I’ll also be updating the site with news and links to IndyPlanet once that’s ready to go.

Nrama: What else are you working on, Michael?

May: Comics-wise, Jason Copland (Empty Chamber, Perhapanauts) and I are working on a giant monster/giant robot comic. We’re still pitching that around. It’s a post-apocalyptic deal where giant monsters have all but wiped out human civilization. Most of what’s left of humanity is just trying to survive, but there’s a military group in Africa that’s developed a small team of giant mechs to fight back. The question the series asks is: since technology abused nature to create the giant monsters, can technology really be the answer to defeating them? Not everyone agrees on that answer and the consequences are rather disastrous. There’s a segment of humanity that deeply believes that we’ve brought this on ourselves and should just take our medicine.

I’ve also written a one-shot with Alex Ness called Jesse James vs. Machine Gun Kelly. A really cool artist named Greg Jolly is illustrating it. It’s not done yet, but when it is it’ll be sort of a What If? tale where Jesse survives Bob Ford’s assassination attempt and escapes to a Kansas ghost town where he retires and reconnects with his faith. The problem is that Jesse’s still a dark-hearted bastard and by the time he’s an old man he’s got a version of religion that’s deeply tainted by selfishness and prejudice. Enter a very young Machine Gun Kelly and his gang who are hoping to set up a still in the town. One of the gangsters is black and seeing him treated as an equal by the rest of the gang pretty much sends Jesse over the edge. It’s Jesse’s meanness and six-guns versus Kelly’s inexperience and Thompson. And when I called Jesse’s new home a “ghost town,” that wasn’t necessarily metaphorical.

Once we get those closer to publication, Jess Hickman and I have an idea that’ll combine our mutual love of pirates, jungle girls, and shark-people, but that’s a little ways down the road.

Blog@ friend and phenomenal cartoonist in his own right Stuart Immonen has turned me on to a fascinating little video game — or as the creator calls, it “visual novel game”.

Available for play on both the Windows, Mac and Linux platforms (!), Air Pressure is a little mini-game that has alot of heart. I won’t spoil it for you, so play it yourself. link

Cartoonist Carly Monardo has taken it upon herself a challenge: take the characters from one story and redesign them to fit another story or artist’s style.  Dubbed the “Whirring Blender Design Challenge” (and posted on a blog of the same title), she’s done this on several occasions… but this recent one seems like the most off-the-wall and just-plain-awesome yet.

Final Fantasy VII meets European cartoonist Gipi.

She’s done four examples, with the latest being the best yet: Barrett.

Check it out and cheer her on!

The above is an image of Machu Picchu by artist Paul Pope, which he recently posted on his blog.

Not quite. But maybe.

George Clooney’s production company Smokehouse Entertainment is working on a movie entitled Escape From Tehran, documenting the true story of how the CIA used a fake movie project to smuggle hostages out of 1979 Tehran. What does this have to do with comics legend Jack Kirby? Jack Kirby did the storyboards for this faux movie.

Back in 2005, Wired Magazine did an article about it which you can read in full at their website. Long story short, Kirby did storyboards for a prospective movie based on the  Rogr Zelazny novel entitled Lord of Light. It also chronicles attempts to make a Colorado theme park entitled “Science Fiction Land” based on Kirby’s set designs for the movie.

Sadly, the movie and the theme park were never made — but work from it was used as part of the subterfuge by the CIA against Iran.

This story, and the larger one about Tehran would make good movie magic. Let’s hope they have room for Kirby in there somewhere.

In addition to being a cartoonist and musician, James Kochalka also has a passion for what he calls “obsessive compulsive narcissistic twiddling” to insert himself into a hacked version of the classic video game Super Mario Bros.

The video game blog Offworld has posted Kochalka’s mod of the classic Nintendo game in which you can play as Kochalka himself. Game on!

Word just hit my desk that the British sci-fi series Razorjack is being given the limited edition treatment. Razorjack was a series by Watchmen colorist John Higgins in which he wrote, drew & colored that was published first by himself and later by Com.X. With a regular edition collection of the series just released by Com.X, this limited edition comes courtesy of British specialty publisher Foruli Publications.

According to Foruli Publisher Matthew Higham, there will be two limited edition box sets of Razorjack, the first of which being a “Deluxe” edition hard bound 96 page book in a exquisit handmade solander case. It will be accompanied with an original painting by Higgins and a hand pulled 8 color screenprint with 24 carat gold leaf — which each signed by Higgins himself, and limited to 15.

The standard edition comes with the book in a standard slipcase, with the hand-pulled 8 color screen print and signed by Higgins and is limited to 45.

If you’re a fan of Higgins or Razorjack or know someone who is, this would make a mighty fine Christmas present.

I don’t know about you, but I love getting sketches from artists at conventions. And artist Cliff Chiang is one of the many artists out there who excel at it, and from the looks of his sketches he enjoys it to boot. On his blog he regularly posts the sketches he’s done at conventions, and the ones from the recent HeroesCon

shows off some real gems, including this Captain America:

Click on the link to see more of Chiang’s convention sketches.

And before you get to thinking this DC-Exclusive artist is joining the House of Ideas, Chiang is currently hard at work  at Vertigo on the graphic novel Greendale with Joshua Dysart based on a concept by Neil Young.

Artist Sean Phillips (Incognito, Criminal, Marvel Zombies) has updated his blog with all illustration of the decadent Fu Manchu. This is the latest in a line of genre illustration Phillips does to introduce the essay extras Jesse Nevin has done for Criminal Incognito.

I’m loving his crime books with Ed Brubaker — but how much for some Fu Manchu action?

The always-excellent (and effervescent) illustrator Michael Cho has updated his blog with a new illustration of Marvel’s armored icon, Iron Man. Cho has a long history drawing Iron Man — while not professionally for a Marvel comic (yet), he admits to frequently doodling Tony Stark — and even has a seperate blog chronicling his drawings of Iron Man, and others.

Let me ask you this, readers — would you like to see Michael Cho do an Iron Man strip for Marvel?

Digital comics purveyor Uclick just announced the release of a free Eisner Awards app for iPhone and IPod Touch. In addition go giving a brief background of the Eisner awards and their namesake Will Eisner, it also gives information and images of each of the nominated works in the 26 awards categories.

No doubt journalists like me will be using this app while sitting in on the awards ceremony itself on July 24th at Comic-Con International: San Diego. Uclick promises to update the app with the winners shortly after the ceremony.

Enough jabber — here’s the link which will launch your iTunes program.

The always-great cartooning blog Drawn! brought to my attention a recent music video which portrays our own 44th President of the United States Barack Obama as a superhero.

And here’s a link to the full video. This video was created by JibJab studios, and premiered at the recent White House Radio & Television Correspondents Dinner.

Coinciding with this weekend’s release of the prehistoric comedy movie Year One starring Jack Black and Michael Cera, Blog@ has dug through the mists of prehistory to pull out our top five cavemen of comics. From unsophisticated paleolithic predecessors to refined gentlemen, these are top five comic characters who crawled out of the caves to make an impact over the years.

B.C.: The titular character of cartoonist Johnny Hart’s famous newspaper strip B.C., he and his friends depicted in the long running strip are a group of cavemen and creatures living in a prehistoric world. Blending contemporary humor in a fantasy setting, B.C. is an eclectic mix of pre-historic elements such as cavemen and dinosaurs mixed with modern accoutrements like dictionaries and eyeglasses.

Anthro: Recently appearing as a “bookend” character in Final Crisis, Anthro debuted way back in 1968′s Showcase #74 as the first modern boy in the Stone Age. Born of Neanderthal parents, he goes on to be the originator of the modern human race. After his debut, Anthro had a short-lived solo series and later appeared in Crisis on Infinite Earths #2 and 2006′s Tales of the Unexpected. In Final Crisis, Anthro worked as the “first boy”, working hand-in-hand with the “last boy” Kamandi, and later appeared as an old man passing the proverbial torch to an recently-deceased-but-seemingly-alive Bruce Wayne.

Tor: Joe Kubert’s prehistoric protagonist  was a thinking man’s caveman, more than just a bash ‘em over the head club-wielder, putting him at odds with the other neanderthals of the time. Originated created as part of a failed newspaper strip, Tor leapt on the comic page in 1953 with a short-lived series. After several appearances over the resulting 50+ years, Kubert returned to the character in 2008 with a six-issue miniseries.

Vandal Savage: Although he may not look it, DC Comics’ Vandal Savage is arguably the world’s oldest villains. Born in 50,000 BC as the caveman Vandar Adg, a run-in with a radioactive meteorite gave him the gift of of immortality and intellect. Fast forward thousands of years  and he’s carved a swath of blood on the human race, claiming to rules in the guises of Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan and Vlad the Impaler amongst others. In a caveman high school yearbook, he’d be “Most Likely To Succeed”.

Moon-Boy: This Jack Kirby creation, with his ever-present partner Devil Dinosaur, is an oddity in the larger Marvel Universe. The descendant of an ape-like species called “Small-Folk”, he was initially dubbed as the “first human” but later retconned at different times to be a mutant or an alien. Currently he and Devil Dinosaur call the Savage Land home, and appeared in the out-of-continuity series Nextwave.

While not a sales juggernaut like some artists (*cough* Hitch *cough* Lee *cough), artist Chris Sprouse does have a dedicated fanbase… one of which I am a part of.  So it’s great news to read on Sprouse’s blog this week an update on his comics projects. He’s currently at work on a new Tom Strong miniseries with writer Peter Hogan called Tom Strong: Robots of Doom. While original writer and co-creator Alan Moore isn’t returning to the character, Moore has given the blessing for his co-creators to continue on the ABC creations if they would like (such as the recent Top 10 miniseries).

According to an earlier blog post by Sprouse, the plan is to do several miniseries “so that Tom Strong can live on–Hellboy-style–as an ongoing series of self-contained mini-series.” While this new miniseries hasn’t been official solicited by DC/Wildstorm/ABC (is that confusing?) yet, this writer expects a Late Fall 2009 release.

The first issue of Morrison & Quitely’s Batman & Robin hit shelves just under a week ago, and Quitely’s tweaking of the costumes have got artists buzzing. Above is artist Joel Carroll‘s rendition of Robin aka Damien Wayne. Carroll is an member of the faculty at Full Sail University and is a frequent contributor to the Flight anthologies.

Note: SmArt is me showing off comic-related art I find while spelunking on the internet.

Attendees to both the upcoming MoCCA and HeroesCon conventions can add one benefit to going to the show: AdHouse Books is previewing a “98% complete” copy of the third volume of artist James Jean‘s art book series Process Recess.

Process Recess is a ongoing series of artbooks documenting preliminary sketchwork and off-hand doodles done. Jean burst on the scene in 2001 illustrating covers for DC/Vertigo’s Fables series, which he did the first 75 covers, and won 5 Eisner awards for “Best Cover Artist”. In 2005 I interviewed him in a 2-part interview for the mothership.

Samurai are invading webcomics. Announced via his personal livejournal, cartoonist Rami Efal is debuting a serialized graphic novel entitled Seven Lies online, which he describes as “a universal story of the nature of conflict, discrimination and prejudice among peoples and persons and inside each individual own mind and heart and the seeking for freedom of that.”

Seven Lies is said to be about a Samurai who is forced to raise his seven-year old son alone after his wife passes away. While raising his son in the samurai code of conduct known as ‘bushido’, the samurai father is wrongly imprisoned for treason and awaits the hangman’s noose — leaving the son with choices to make.

For more, check out Efal’s various blogs… and see the actual comic beginning June 11th on Act-I-Vate.