The votes – well, preorders – are in, and Barack Obama has won the hearts, minds and wallets of the comic industry, winning Boom! Studios’ Decision 2012 straw poll for the 2012 presidential candidate most deserving of his or her own comic book. The poll was launched in August and ran until the end of last month, and gave readers and political wonks alike the chance to vote with their pre-order dollars for the chance to read biographies of Obama, Michele Bachman, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman, Sarah Palin, Ron Paul, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, with whichever books that got pre-orders of more than 1500 seeing print.

Only four books met that target: Obama, Sarah Palin – who is, of course, not actually running for President – Ron Paul and Michele Bachmann. Surprisingly, media favorite in the Republican field Rick Perry came dead last in the poll, with Mitt Romney only managing to rank fifth out of the ten candidates in this particular race. A sign of the left-leaning nature of the comic book industry, the disillusionment people have over the current field of Republican nominees (Oh, if only there had been a Chris Christie book offered!), or just more proof that people can’t get enough of those President Barack Obama comics? You be the judge.

Last weekend, comics lost a great up-and-coming artist when Minck Oosterveer, who’d co-created The Unknown with Mark Waid, and also worked with Waid on Ruse at Marvel, died in a motorcycle accident. Over at the Boom! Studios blog, editor Matt Gagnon remembers Oosterveer:

Minck was incredibly kind and thoughtful, funny and smart, passionate and genuine. As an artist, you literally couldn’t ask for anybody more professional and talented. His art was–is–transcendent. He would turn in beautiful comic book pages, every day, that were damn near perfect. Every morning I would look forward to opening my e-mail and seeing a new page from Minck. His work ethic and consistent level of quality was uncanny. There was a never a deadline he couldn’t meet. The man was truly a rare talent.

As a celebration of his work, Boom! have released both series of The Unknown for free on ComiXology, iVerse, Graphic.ly and MyDigitalComics. Hopefully, people go and check out the series; Oosterveer’s work on both was great, and fans of Waid will enjoy some of his sharpest writing in recent years.

Well, I guess we can all get settled in for another year+ of political comic book stunts again, with the announcement of Boom! Studios’ Decision 2012, in which fans – whether comic book or political – get to pre-order a biographical comic of the presidential candidate of their choice, with the most highly-ordered seeing print. No, really:

The whole concept of comic book’s first straw poll is that the comic book with the most pre-orders wins. That means that if you are a supporter of a particular candidate and you want him or her to win, you need to make sure you tell all your friends to pre-order your candidate’s comic book before September 29th, 2011.

I don’t know whether this means there will be lots of unseen material for the losers, or whether the stories will only be created once a winner has been chosen, but… this is either an awesome idea or a terrible idea. I mean, it’s A Death In The Family meets U Decide meets Bluewater’s political biographies and, if nothing else, that’s not what anyone was expecting, right…?

(In all seriousness, I’m fascinated by the outreach potential for this; the website includes a quick “What are comics, anyway?” in the FAQs, so clearly this is meant to go beyond the direct market faithful, so on that basis alone, I’m pulling for Boom! here.)

BOOM! Studios has been slowly ceding its Disney licenses over to Marvel, with Cars, Toy Story and The Muppet Show all migrating over to the House of Ideas in recent months. Then the “classic” Disney properties like Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse and Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories disappeared from BOOM’s schedule, and the writing was pretty much on the wall at that point.

Slipped into BOOM’s October solicitations, released over the weekend, was confirmation the publisher would be shipping its last Disney titles that month, with DuckTales and Darkwing Duck both coming to a close. From the write-up of Darkwing Duck #18:

Final Issue! “Dangerous Currency,” Part 4. The epic Darkwing Duck/DuckTales crossover event concludes right here! This is it fans, the last Disney single issue from KABOOM! has arrived. It’s the end of an era as we say goodbye to Disney at KABOOM!

BOOM! first acquired the license to Disney’s Pixar properties in 2008, with the classic roster of Mickey, Donald, Goofy, et al. following in June 2009. Comics like The Muppet Show and Darkwing Duck brought both attention and acclaim to the publisher, but when Disney bought Marvel at the tail end of summer 2009, it seemed inevitable that the Disney properties weren’t going to stick around at BOOM! forever.

Though whether or not Marvel has plans for the classic Disney characters or the “Disney Afternoon” titles like Darkwing and DuckTales remain to be seen, or if they’ll be producing any new material in the near future — Marvel’s Muppet Show and Cars releases are both reprints of BOOM’s previously published material.

Hey, did you know that George Lucas’ Star Wars franchise is popular in other countries that aren’t even America, even some countries that are in Europe, a cradle of actual culture, and not just pop culture?

I suppose I sort of knew that, in the back of my head, but I was still surprised to see actual evidence of it, in the form of Space Warped #1, the first half of a Boom Studio’s published translation of Herve Bourhis and Rudy Spiessert’s Rustic Wars.

The new title alludes to the source material being parodied, but the original title better reflects the premise. It’s well known that Lucas sought inspiration from a variety of sources, including Jack Kirby’s Fourth World comics, Japanese cinema, Westerns and Joseph Cambell-digested world myth, and Bourhis and Spiessert essentially take the original Star Wars movie as Lucas created it, and then walked it back toward some of that inspiration.

In other words, it’s still an adventure story with elements of fantasy set long ago and far, far away, but the long ago is pre-Industrial Revolution, and the far, far away is Europe.
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It has to be said, Shannon Wheeler has a much better attitude to accidentally being left off the Eisner Awards ballots than I would have; besides the above cartoon, he also wrote that he hoped the slip up – described by the Eisner committee as a “computer glitch” that left Wheeler’s I Thought You Would Be Funnier off the online ballot for Best Humor Publication; it’s since been corrected, and votes can be revisited in that category as a result – didn’t lose him too many votes, adding “Though now I can blame the computers if I lose. Ha.” Eisner Voters: Don’t let the humorless robots win.

Charles Schulz’s Peanuts has long been available in book-length collections, the slim, often topical paperbacks a staple of children’s departments at libraries and old book stores.

Such collections pre-dated the normalization of the term “graphic novel,” though—the technical definition of which could be argued at great length, but the current popular definition of which within the publishing industry is simply comics bound with a spine—which allows Boom Studios to proclaim Happiness Is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown the first Peanuts graphic novel.

One could argue whether or not that is the case, I suppose, but not without first arguing about the semantics of the term, so let’s skip all that. This is definitely the first Peanuts-branded comics packaged and sold as a graphic novel, as opposed to a collection, its the first that reads like a graphic novel and, more noteworthy to fans of the characters and their creator, it’s also the first new Peanuts comics material produced since the death of Schulz.

“New” probably needs some qualification, though. The 85-page book is an adaptation of the recently-produced animated special of the same name, and that was based on Schulz’s strips. The result then is a pretty perfect balance between providing new Peanuts material without resorting to someone other than the late Schulz doing it—No, he didn’t draw these lines, but these are still his gags and his story. The book, like the special, is therefore more of a respectful cover song than a whole new band exploiting the name of another one.

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Hellraiser #1 is in stores right now from BOOM! Studios, and the publisher is also offering an eight-issue prelude — not in stores. The only way to get it is download it in PDF format, and a result it’s spread far and wide across the Internet — in fact, you can download it right here, even!

It may sound suspicious, but we can assure you it’s fully legal and completely free, and sharing the comic is highly encouraged by the publisher, saying “READ IT. SHARE IT. e-mail. upload. tweet. torrent. link. facebook” (Still holding on to that hyphen in email that the Associated Press eliminated last week; stay strong, brothers.) The eight-page prelude is co-written by Hellraiser mastermind Clive Barker and Christopher Monfette, with art from Leonard Manco.

The PDF ends with a list of ComicsPRO-participating retailers and an ad for the Comic Shop Locator Service, clearly establishing the purpose of this digital comic to drive people to physical stores to pick up the print product. The Best Shots team has a review of Hellraiser #1 here.

(And oh yeah — it’s a little gory and probably NSFW, which you may have gathered on your own given the fact that it’s, y’know, a Hellraiser comic.)

The clever idea at the center of Dracula: The Company of Monsters is an obvious one, suggested by the “Bloodsucker vs. Bloodsuckers” tagline on the back of the first volume collecting the ongoing series.

Dracula may have been a ruthless prince who impaled his foes, literally did a deal with the literal devil and became an undead blood-drinking fiend, but at least he’s not a modern CEO.

The “You know who the real monsters are…?” statement is a staple of horror and monster entertainment, and its one this comic has the cognizance to apply to the major problems of the day. Certainly the commentary may at times be a little too pointed, as when Dracula makes a “That is the difference between a prince and a chief executive” speech, disgusted that the corporate CEO that engineered his resurrection and is keeping him chained in the company HQ’s basement has laid off hundreds of workers in order to improve the balance sheet.

But then, perhaps there is some poetry in a the sub-text of a story about the undead refusing to stay buried.
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Earlier this afternoon, Marvel announced Disney•Pixar Presents, a 96-page magazine featuring comics starring characters from Disney/Pixar films including Toy Story, The Incredibles and Cars. Ross Richie, CEO & publisher of previous Pixar license-holder BOOM! Studios, sent Newsarama official comment on the news:

“The team over at Marvel is some of the best in comics publishing — Dan, Joe, Axel, and Tom are great at what they do, and I’m sure the characters will be in excellent hands.  I certainly love the material they’re collecting from our CARS: RALLY RACE graphic novel.  Landy Walker and Marcio Takara were unable to finish their last arc of THE INCREDIBLES so I hope Marvel’s able to complete the story, I for one would love to read it.  Working with Disney and Pixar was a highlight in my 6 years of BOOM! publishing. Those are some great folks!  Meanwhile, Mickey, Donald and Darkwing fans can look forward to some great stories from BOOM Kids! and all the BOOM Kids! fans need not fret — BOOM Kids! 2.0 is right around the corner.”

Cars: Rally Race was published in collected edition form by BOOM! in May of last year, and originally appeared in print as Cars #0-3 in early 2010. Though Marvel did not explicitly state that they were reprinting BOOM! material in their press release, the statement disclosed that the magazine would be “a mix of brand new stories, classic adventures,” and the creative team and concept mentioned by the publisher match that of Cars: Rally Race. Newsarama’s Vaneta Rogers interviewed writer Alan Porter in an article published in January 2010.

Richie’s allusion to “Mickey, Donald and Darkwing” appears to confirm that, for the time being, BOOM!’s non-Pixar Disney licenses — which include currently ongoing titles Mickey Mouse and Friends, Donald Duck and Friends and Darkwing Duck — are unaffected by today’s news.

BOOM!’s Disney/Pixar licensed comics launched in 2008, and announced the acquisition of the Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck license in June 2009. Disney announced their acquisition of Marvel in late August 2009. Despite that, BOOM!’s licensed Disney comics remained largely unaffected until the cancellation of previously solicited Pixar titles last month. The first Disney product published by Marvel following the acquisition was Tron: The Betrayal, a limited series that debuted in October and tied-in to last December’s Tron: Legacy feature film.

More disappointing news for Roger Langridge fans: Following the news two weeks ago that Thor: The Mighty Avenger, the Marvel Comics title he writes with artist Chris Samnee, was ending with issue #8, Langridge shared today on his blog that his next arc on BOOM!’s acclaimed The Muppet Show Comic Book would be his last. (more…)

The second of three titles from BOOM!’s Stan Lee line hits tomorrow, The Traveler by Mark Waid and Chad Hardin. And though you may have thought those Xtranormal videos with the two cartoon animals talking in Stephen Hawking voices peaked in early 2009, BOOM! Studios has shown there’s still some unusual marketing potential there in this video, lightly satirizing the current superhero comic book climate while pushing The Traveler. Hey, here it is!

Was the preview of Stan Lee’s Starborn we ran last week not enough for you? Well, as is the rage these days, BOOM! Studios has produced a teaser trailer promoting the series. It’s only 28 seconds, but hey, the first issue is out next month. And here it is:

Harvey Kurtzman’s comics version of the classic insect fable was originally produced in 1960 for Esquire magazine, and almost 50 years later it’s still a remarkably relevant work. Perhaps that should come as nor surprise; 50 years is awfully recent compared to the original fable’s suspected vintage (Heck, the Bible’s Book of Proverbs includes a version of it).

Of course, it might also come down to the fact that this is a Kurtzman comic we’re talking about, and the late, great cartoonist’s work boasts a vitality and originality that makes it always seem fresh and new. (When I first encountered his work, it was his covers to the earliest issues of Mad that were reprinted in various price catalogs and histories of comics, and I remember being quite shocked to learn that those drawings were done before my parents were born, but looked just as fresh as the previous Saturday’s Saturday morning cartoons).

Kurtzman’s The Grasshopper and The Ant is a 37-page story, with each page consisting of a single large drawing, the edges of the page making each page its own de facto panel, with the lovely hand-lettering in dialogue balloons sometimes breaking the single image into several moments, by virtue of the time it takes to read all the words. (We probably shouldn’t get into this now, but Kurtzman does some pretty amazing stuff in these pages when it comes to manipulating time through the interaction of the words and pictures…it’s particularly amazing given the perfect uniformity of the pages and panels; given the format, each page should “last” as long as every other one, but that’s not the case. Shit, this is a comic not just to read, but to study).

You probably know the basic story. There’s a grasshopper and an ant. The former wants to sing and dance and play all year around, while the latter works gathering food; when winter comes along, the grasshopper has nothing to eat and either starves or is saved by the ant so he can survive to learn his lesson.

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Update, 9:51pm EST: Bluewater’s Darren G. Davis contacted us earlier this evening in order to make the following statement:

Hey Troy –

Thanks,
Darren

So, y’know, maybe it is Boom! And if it is, big ups to them for using the Vancouver, WA P.O. Box as a clever fake-out (unless of course that was just some happy internet weirdness).

As it stands, sometimes when you speculate, you speculate wrong. Our own Tom McLean got a load of, uh, guff when he posited the likes of Jim Lee and Geoff Johns alongside Dan Didio as DC leadership candidates, and look how that turned out. I’d say that as wrong guesses go, it’s still got a ways to go before it touches “People will love New Coke!” or “People will love Leno at 10pm!”

And with that, I admit that “I Was Wrong” with a little help from Mr. Ness and Friends.

Original Story: As reported on Bleeding Cool and others, an ad campaign has launched in print and across the web using Stan Lee’s signature declaring “STAN’S BACK!”

There’s even a website aptly titled stansback.com that again shows Stan’s signature in white on black.

Rich Johnston (and his commenters) noted that this campaign is somewhat similar to the BOOM! Studios “Mark Waid is Evil” viral campaign for Irredeemable, leading to speculation that BOOM! may be working with Stan the Man in the near future.

This didn’t feel quite like BOOM! to me, though, so I did a little looking via WhoIS. WhoIS, for those not in the ‘net know, is a site that tells you who domain names are registered to.

All of BOOM!’s sites are registered to CEO Ross Richie.

The StansBack site is registered (as of last November) to a P.O. Box in Vancouver, Washington. It would seem a pretty elaborate ruse for BOOM! to privately register to a P.O. Box for a simple marketing campaign. While MarkWaidIsEvil.com wasn’t registered to Richie, it was still registered in L.A.

So who IS in Vancouver, WA? Well, you saw the title of this blog post: Bluewater Productions. The company that gets by mostly on their biography comics could very well be simply running this little campaign to drum up promotion for: a Stan Lee Biography comic. It wouldn’t exactly be the biggest pay off, but it wouldn’t be so far-fetched, either. Bluewater has also published superhero books, so that’s not out of the question, but with Stan’s recent Archie deal, that would seem like a larger reach.

So is Stan Back, merely as the subject of a biography?

Boom’s newish “Boom! Town” imprint will be publishing a book entitled Repuglicans by Pete Von Sholly and Steve Thatham. The subject? Well, the title and cover kind of say it all, don’t they? It will be a 130-page, six-by-nine inch softcover priced at $15.

Given the attention a single piece of a single panel in a background of a Captain America comic garnered, I wouldn’t be surprised if we hear a lot more about this book as time goes on. Will Boom’s EIC Mark Waid end up apologizing to anyone? Unlikely. Waid tweeted that he was “humiliated and mortified on behalf of” his “entire industry that Fox News is able to bully us into apologizing to lunatics” in reaction to Joe Quesada’s marvel culpa.

Aw thanks, Boom Studios! I didn’t know you cared! The publisher, which currently holds the licenses on a bunch of Disney characters and concepts and has been making fine use of many of them, has put together a heck of a Valentine’s Day present for fans of classic comics featuring the core Disney mouse and duck characters.

The 130-page, six-story collection is similar in scope and format to the publisher’s 2009 Walt Dinsey’s Christmas Classics collection, with the stories selected comprising a sampling of work from various eras, creators and countries of origin (In fact, every decade between the ‘40s and the ‘80s is represented by a story in here).

The highlight is probably the lead story, 1941’s “Love Trouble” by Floyd Gottfredson, Merril de Maris and Bill Wright. At 36 pages, it’s the longest piece, and features the story of Minnie finding a new, much taller, more charming, more talented and more well-off boyfriend than Mickey, Montmorecny Rodent (although he pronounces it “Rodawn”). Humiliated over and over, and unable to compete, Mickey fights fire with fire by taking up with a beautiful, rich, blonde mouse new to town, and then proceeds to couple-stalk Minnie and Rodent, driving Minnie insane with envy.

Given the way they behave to one another, and use other people (er, “people” probably isn’t the right word…), I’m not sure what the two mice see in each other, but I suppose they’re better off together than inflicting their social dysfunctions on others. Just I suppose I have now thought way too much about the love lives of two cartoon mice from a fast-paced, lovingly and energetically drawn screwball comedy comic strip.

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There’s no faulting The Anchor #1 (Boom Studios) for a lack of scope. It opens in Hell itself, where the mysterious title character is single-handedly responsible for beating back the hordes of hell with his big, pink fists.

It then jumps to downtown Reykjavik, Iceland, where a giant ice monster is on a rampage. The title character, referred to as God’s anchor to hell by a member of the demon horde and Clem by a volunteer worker who notices he’s wearing a symbol of Saint Clement, is there too, fighting the monster.

“My soul is in hell,” he explains. “It wrestles with demons there…the wounds my soul suffers are borne by my earthly body.”

Writer Phil Hester doesn’t delve much deeper into who The Anchor is, how he came to be, or why his memory seems so addled and he sometimes talks in psalms without even realizing they’re psalms (Actually, the fact that the ice monster hits him with a truck might explain those last two, come to think of it).

And while all that is usually welcome in a first issue (especially see this is a $3.99 comic), that all that info isn’t present certainly isn’t because Hester’s dragging his feet or anything. He does establish plenty of intriguing clues and suggestions, introduces and half-introduces some characters, sketches out a concept and, most importantly, establishes an appealing tone that teeters between supernatural melodrama and comedy.

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Talk about stepping up your game — based on an announcement issued yesterday, you can tell that BOOM! Studios is dead serious about getting their books out.

Why do I say that? The company announced yesterday that they would be teaming up with Haven Distributors, who would distribute all second printings of both the BOOM! Studios lineup and BOOM! Kids — which by the way houses their line of Disney licensed comics — to direct market stores.

The English translation here: first and foremost, having an alternate distributor is a fairly big deal. When BOOM! Studios sells out a first printing of a book, the company no longer has to wait for Diamond to send second printings out, as they work with specific monthly distribution points. Instead, if a store runs out of a book and orders a second print, Haven is free to send stuff out whenever they want.

“Retailers have been begging us to get our second prints into their stores at a faster pace for the past year,” said BOOM! Studios CEO Ross Richie in a press statement. “We’re happy to be able to offer retailers another choice in getting an important part of our product line to their stores and into the hands of their customers.”

This deal goes in conjunction with BOOM!’s deals with Simon and Schuster and HarperCollinsCanada, who distribute the company’s graphic novels to the mass market in the U.S. and Canada respectively.

What happens when the world’s greatest hero becomes its greatest villain?

Someone has to step up to take his place.

Mark Waid, writer of BOOM! Studios’ Irredeemable, has the flipside to his Superman-gone-wrong, with new series Incorruptible. Following Max Daring — formerly the super-criminal known as Max Danger — the story explores what happens when the world goes to hell, and how a bad guy can make good.

“While you don’t need to be reading Irredeemable to enjoy this new series, Incorruptible continues that complex study of caped morality at the end of the world,” Managing Editor Matt Gagnon said in a press release. “Readers will be shown a shockingly different perspective of The Plutonian’s world, where a super-villain, pushed by an insurmountable force, dares to be Incorruptible. “