Good news for those of us enjoying the current Star Wars output from Dark Horse:

First, they assured retailers that even with the Disney buyout of LucasArts, Star Wars will remain at Dark Horse for at least the entirety of 2014.

They will continue to make Darth Vader miniseries, Star Wars Legacy will remain an ongoing book and will alternate between artists every six issues and the mini-series based on George Lucas’ original drafts, The Star Wars, will have a radically different logo to differentiate it.

After an uncertain start, Brian Wood’s Star Wars has really grown on me. I’m glad to know it’ll stick around – and that the SW license will stick around at Dark Horse in general – for some time to come.

Something from the Dark Horse solicits that I want to bring to your attention:

THE BEST OF MILLIGAN & MCCARTHY HCPeter Milligan (W) and Brendan McCarthy (W/A)

On sale Sept 11
FC, 264 pages
$24.99
HC, 7 3/4″ x 11″

One of comics’ most fruitful collaborations gets its due in this deluxe collection of hard-to-find gems from Peter Milligan (Hellblazer, X-Statix) and Brendan McCarthy (Judge Dredd, The Zaucer of Zilk There is still nothing else like Freakwave, Paradax!, Skin, and Rogan Gosh, and this volume is the ideal starting place for new readers! Collecting twenty years’ worth of the pair’s finest work from Vanguard Illustrated, Strange Days, 2000 AD, and Vertigo.

• Rare classics of action and satire!

• Brand-new restoration and commentary!

It is almost impossible for me to overstate how excited I am for this book, and how excited I think all of you out there should be, as well. These were seminal comics for me in my youth, and remain some of the most exciting, inventive and just plain creative comics that I’ve ever read, filled with playfulness about the medium, both visually and linguistically. I don’t know if this collection contains all of their collaborations – or all of the available work, at least, I know some are lost to the ages, like Summer of Love – but I hope that Sooner or Later, the pair’s experimental 2000AD strip from the 1980s, is included. As far as I know, that’s never been reprinted to date, but remains one of my favorite strips by the two of them.

Either way, this is something that fans of the medium – and certainly fans of either Milligan or McCarthy’s more recent work – should look out for. These are great, great comics.

Consider this some potentially good news for those worried about the future of Dark Horse’s Star Wars license, courtesy of editor Randy Stradley:

I think you’re making assumptions based on, well, nothing [in terms of the license being usurped by Marvel in the near future]. Or unsubstantiated rumors. While it’s certainly a possibility that the license could move to Marvel at some point in the future, as of this date nothing has changed.

As someone who wants more Star Wars and (especially) Star Wars: Legacy, this makes me happy. Here’s hoping DH hold onto the books for awhile yet.

Nate Piekos, comic book letterer supreme, explains how he created the typeface for Francesco Francavilla’s wonderful Black Beetle series at Dark Horse:

I got to work right away on the font that would eventually become Blambot’s Tough as Nails BB. Since I try to come up with two new fonts every month, I was killing two birds with one stone—the perfect font for The Black Beetle’s dialogue and a new font for public release.

I remember making one solid pass at a finished design, showing it to Jim, and taking a day or so away from it. When I came back with fresh eyes, I realized the “pen style” was wrong.

The letterforms worked, but instead of a uniform Rapidograph style, the font would be even better if I made it look as if it was lettered with a calligraphy tip. To go one step further, I reversed the angle that most comic hand letterers hold their pens at so that the vertical strokes were thicker than the horizontal. This is not a matter of pushing a few buttons in AI; it meant reworking each letter individually. Meanwhile, the clock was ticking and I had to start lettering the pages coming in!

If you’re a process wonk like I am, this kind of thing is fascinating.

Well, we all thought it was going to happen, and now the Disney-centric blog Blue Sky Disney claims to be confirming that Dark Horse will lose the Star Wars license to Marvel:

The Suits in the know have determined that no new contracts will be given to Dark Horse after the current ones expire. So all new projects after 2013 will be handled internally by Marvel. It’s not known yet if titles will be worked into the regular line up, or will Marvel create a special branch of the company that deals with Star Wars. It’ll take a couple of years for the old deals to work there course, but the stories that Dark Horse have coming down the pipeline will be the last. And you can expect anything new from Marvel dealing with Star Wars to arrive around 2015.

So, potentially two years of Brian Wood and Gabriel Hardman Star Wars comics before Marvel takes over the license? I am perfectly okay with that (although, I admit, I wish it was slightly longer…). That Marvel’s line is being predicted to launch at the same time as the first Disney-fied Star Wars movie doesn’t seem to be a coincidence, either.

With the book’s creators now fully-fledged superstars at Marvel, iFanboy talks to Rick Remender, Tony Moore and Jerome Opena for an Oral History of Fear Agent. Here’s Remender explaining the early appeal of doing the series:

The idea was to just be untethered in imagination and to be able to do something that was grounded in a character that you cared about. The adventures that he would go through would be any amazing, cool, science fiction ideas that we had. We wanted to work in time travel and dimension hopping, doppelgangers, and every kind of wonderful sci-fi trove we could. We understood the important thing had to be Heath and his story and who he was.

The second installment (of three) is due to run today. It’s a great format for a classic series; I hope to see more of this kind of thing for other books soon.

Brian Wood is writing Star Wars. It has no subtitle, it’s not a mini-series, it’s an ongoing comic book at Dark Horse and it’s going to be exciting.

To talk about his plans, Wood came to Star Wars Celebration VI for an intimate conversation about his new series.

Wood’s series will be set directly after the first film, Star Wars, later subtitled Episode IV: A New Hope. The film leaves a nascent Rebel Alliance, a Luke who is gaining confidence, and a Leia who has been leading these Rebels for a few years.

Joined by editor Randy Stradley, Wood gave some hints to his plans for the future (past) of Star Wars.

“Everyone knows the future of the timeline. I do, readers do, but the characters don’t. I have to tread carefully; for example, you know that Luke and Leia are brother and sister, but they don’t, but I can’t push that to the point that it’s gross.

“I have to be aware of this world, this timeline, that the characters don’t know. It’s not an alternate world, or an alternate timeline. All the stuff has happened, or will happen to the characters, it just hasn’t yet.”

The story will take place in a very similar way to The Clone Wars, which fills in the blanks between episodes 2 and 3. We moved almost directly into Fan Q&A.

Wood will be introducing some new planets, locations, and characters.

“There’s definitely a core cast, and it’s large, everyone you’d recognize from A New Hope. There’s a secondary cast of pilots that start appearing about issue 3, but they’re secondary. The main cast is Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie, R2, 3PO, Mon Motha, Vader, Emperor, Wedge, I really wanted to put Wedge in there, I’m a really big fan of the X-Wing novels.”

Wood made a real effort to not re-read any of the old comics or books, to not “steal from them on accident!” He has read them all before though, as a big fan himself.

As to humor, a staple of the Star Wars universe? “That’s not really my strong suit, but I wish it was. I guess there are sarcastic comments!” Stradley says there are scenes that include a lot of character banter; “not exactly funny, but not all woe-is-me.”

Wood said he wanted to make sure it wasn’t “really dark, that’s not really what Star Wars is.”

Wood says while he knows where they end up in at the beginning of Empire, the story will be “more of a day to day thing, I’m not even thinking about that. The first arc will be them searching for a new place for a base, they’re on their last legs, and searching for a place to find their roots. I don’t think there’s anything that says Hoth was their immediate next base, it’s a long ways off.” Incidentally, Wood says, “That really is my favorite place in the whole Star Wars Universe, though, Hoth.”

Wood says he’s working hard to get the tone of the voices of the characters similar to the first film.

“It’s really fun writing Han, because he’s still kind of a dick. So that’s really fun, writing Han.”

There have been some small gaps in Wood’s knowledge on the deep intricacies of the Star Wars universe, but LucasFilm has been very helpful, things like ranking on an X-Wing. He said he didn’t have to dig through a lot of archives, though, as he’s internalized a lot of Star Wars knowledge.

Working with Carlos D’Anda on art, Wood hasn’t found a groove with him just yet, but tries to be helpful; in his scripts he includes links to visuals and reference where appropriate.

“I see things very very visually. When I switched over from being an artist/writer to being just a writer, I’d get really upset when the art wouldn’t come back looking like it did in my head. I’ve since trained that out of me, it’s really unfair.”

Wood says his one rule is, “I can’t write anything that will invalidate something that’s coming. As long as I don’t do that, I can do anything.”

Why come back to Work for Hire?

“I’ve hardly done any of it. I got to this point where a lot of my creator owned books were wrapping up, and I thought, if there’s a time, let me give this a shot. I’d never really done it before, so I figured it would help make me a better writer, a more well-rounded writer. I took on Conan, I took on X-Men, so taking Star Wars was part of that, stretching my wings. I also really thought, I mean, this is a really fun job. It’s really flattering to be offered something like this, if there’s something I’d want to write like this, it would be Star Wars.

“I still sort of consider myself a creator-owned guy. That’s the identity I’ve built up over all this time, but for now I’m having fun with all these books, so we’ll see where it goes!”

While Wood is mum on most plot points, he did hint that Luke will connect with someone outside the core cast, so there will be some other pulled in throughout.

A fan asked if there will be new tech or ship models, and Wood simply said, “Yes.”

There’s a current outline for about a year of stories, but Wood wants to keep taking smaller steps. Stradley says he wants him to keep writing “until he stops!” The first arc will be three issues, but “it’s not such a hard break, arc to arc. They’ll feel more like chapters of a book.”

The editor from LucasFilm Licensing re-iterated that this is the book to give to non-comics Star Wars fans, this is the entry point to the extended universe for them.

That’s all from Wood in this late-night panel. Stay tuned for much more from Star Wars Celebration VI throughout the weekend!

Hello and welcome back to our coverage of Star Wars: Celebration VI from the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, FL. Star Wars has a long history of existing in other media outside of the original films. This “Expanded Universe” as it is called gives fans a chance to see the way the universe of the beloved franchise exists on other worlds, in different eras, explore new characters and get deeper into the history, and future, of the characters they already love.

Dark Horse Comics has been making Star Wars series, mini-series, and graphic novels for 25 years. With comic books, they’ve been able to explore everything from the Dawn of the Jedi to the far-future Legacy of the Force. Today, Dark Horse brings John Jackson Miller, Jan Duursema, Doug Wheatley, Dave Marshall, and Randy Stradley to the fans to talk about what’s coming from the company in the world of Star Wars looking into 2013.

Stay tuned and keep the refresh button handy as we update LIVE from 1:30 pm EDT until 2:30 pm EDT, discussing the world of Star Wars comics!

(more…)

Good news for fans of Mike Baron and Steve Rude: Nexus is back, and Dark Horse Presents has got him. Here’s Baron talking about the return, from CBR:

We are so stoked on these new stories — I wish I could tell you what we’re working on now. It’s major geekery. The first story deals with the sudden appearance of a sinister moon over Ylum. The second and third stories deal with an infestation. The story after that gets real crazy. Heads will explode. Figuratively! Maybe literally.

I’m glad to see the character back; I was worried that the seeming collapse of Rude’s self-publishing venture three years ago had accidentally buried Nexus and everything around him, especially when the relaunch of First Comics didn’t include an appearance by the character. Good to know that Dark Horse has stepped in, and nice to see another strong strip due for a DHP appearance, too.

ICv2 has a three-part interview with Dark Horse Comics CEO Mike Richardson up (Parts one, two, three), looking back at 2011 (which he calls a “quiet” year for the publisher, with news of the layoffs midway through the year being “so overblown”) and forward to 2012, including this little tidbit:

I would say that we’re probably closer [to the publication of 300 sequel Xerses] than we were a year ago.  I talked to Frank (Miller) not long ago and he’s enthused and there are some of his other creator owned projects with us that he’s going to return to, hopefully, in the very near future.

Does this mean more Sin City…? We know that the next movie is (finally) a go, after all…

Remember when it was discovered bootlegged Marvel comics weren’t coming from the stores, but instead exploiting an IT hole in the printing chain? Looks like it might not have been Marvel that had that problem; Bleeding Cool is reporting that Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season Nine #9 was bootlegged online yesterday… on the same day that #8 hit stores.

What’s particularly weird about this isn’t just that the IT security hole exists for multiple publishers, but that someone is trying to spread the idea that at least one physical copy of this issue was accidentally released a month early, in Germany of all places. Ignoring the question of “Why Germany,” I’m more curious about whether or not there even are physical copies of Buffy #9 in existence just yet, even in Dark Horse’s offices…

For the design fans amongst you, Brian Wood explains the creation of the cover for his new series with Kristian Donaldson, The Massive, over at io9:

Sketch #1 took the day, and it was my favorite as well. So we passed it along to Kristian for him to make his own and take it to final. It presented a few problems that I could see: it was really crucial to separate the two halves of the cover, so that earth presented as the earth, and not some other planet looming in the sky. Or the foreground coming off like the moon. Or the earth not reading as a planet but some kind of giant rubber ball hanging in the sky.

I also didn’t want a realistically colored earth, with crayola-blue and green. I always favor limited palettes and non-representational color. Were it up to me, I would have kept it black and white.

It’s a really nice insight into Wood (and Donaldson)’s design process, as well as a chance to see some lovely work-in-progress sketches; I’m really looking forward to The Massive – which debuts today in Dark Horse Presents #8 – and this post works as a great tease for the kind of visuals to expect, if not for the story itself.

Over at CBR, Dark Horse’s Mike Richardson ‘fesses up and admits that, yes, Dark Horse’s digital comics are slightly cheaper than their print versions:

You are, in fact, pricing some digital comics lower than print: The digital versions of your $3.50 comics are priced at $2.99 on the day of release.

Yes. It didn’t dawn on us — the Apple store will only take [prices that end in] 99 cents, so some of the books got priced at $2.99, because the $3.99 price makes me flinch a little bit. If you take $3.50 and move it to $3.99, it’s not a very good experience. Some of the retailers are asking us please put them at the 3.99.

Will you?

It’s not our policy. I don’t like to charge more online than I do [for print copies].

Are people switching to digital to save that 51 cents?

It doesn’t seem to be happening. Print sales are steady and digital sales are growing.

Here’s my by-now-traditional question on these “Here’s what’s happening with our digital publishing plan!” interviews: Almost every single time, without fail, we see interviewees say “print sales are steady and digital sales are growing” or something similar; at what point is someone going to come out and say “We don’t think there’s as big a connection between the print and digital audiences are everyone expected, so we’re going to experiment and lower the digital price on certain books to see what happens?” Surely it’s only a matter of time, right…?

Brian Wood addresses the controversy over Dark Horse digital pricing:

Over the last few days Dark Horse was compelled to clarify what their digital plan was, in terms of pricing, correcting the perception that their comics would be sold digitally at $1.99, much less than the print versions.  I have access to the CBIA, a retailers forum, and the pushback was intense, and included overt threats of drastically lowered orders and even total boycotts of the line.  Did I mention everyone is bleeding?  I get the frustration… No sane creator, or publisher, wants to see comic shops hurt.  We all have emotional connections to them, to the idea of them, and we count owners and employees as personal friends.  We aren’t looking for digital to steal customers away from shops, but rather to be an additive thing, to be an additional source of income.  To simply switch a current print consumer to a digital consumer does not solve any problems!  It benefits no one at all.  It will not save us.

He mentions the idea that digital pricing is being kept artificially high out of fear of upsetting print retailers, saying that “the price that fair-minded readers WANT to buy digital comics at is starkly different from what’s they are currently set at,” which I think is entirely true.

I’m saddened by the idea – not put forward by Wood, I hasten to add, but by others online – that Dark Horse changed an initial plan to sell digitally at $1.99 in response to retailer upset; at the time of the official (misunderstood) announcement, I was excited to see what seemed to be Dark Horse following Archie’s lead in terms of day-and-date pricing and move into what feels like a somewhat delayed but ultimately inevitable future. Maybe one day…

Hey, do you like to get excited about cool things that you won’t be able to purchase for eight months? Well, you’ve come to the right blog post: Today Dark Horse announced firm plans for both the Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 hardcovers, and the first collection of the comic’s latest volume, the now three issues-old Buffy Season 9.

(more…)

The reasons to look forward to Comics: 2012 continue to arrive with the spectacular news that Evan Dorkin is producing the first new Dork strips in five years for future issues of Dark Horse Presents:

So, what I’m doing is twenty-four pages of comics to be spread over three issues of DHP, with each eight-page anchored by a new Milk and Cheese strip. The other features will include a new Murder Family episode; several pages of Fun gag strips, as well as the return of The Eltingville Comic Book, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and Role-Playing Club. If all goes according to plan I’ll also be doing a one-page Fisher-Price Theater adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 and a short Devil Puppet story.

I’ve said it elsewhere, but Dorkin is one of the most underrated cartoonists in the industry, and I’m over the moon to see that he’ll have more new work out there soon (Especially new Eltingville). Maybe this’ll lead to a brand new Dork series in its own right…? We can only hope.

…to be raised by this (utterly lovely) cover for the upcoming hardcover collection Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season Eight Vol. 1 - coming from Dark Horse in June, and collecting the first ten issues of the series – is, “Doesn’t Buffy apparently own a lot of clothes with her own logo on them?”

(In case you don’t remember, she also has a tank top that proudly displays her logo.)

More seriously: Good Lord, but Jo Chen just does phenomenal work, doesn’t she?

The animated adaptation of Eric Powell’s The Goon may not be anywhere near theaters yet but the creator tweeted yet another video of what it will look like when it eventually gets there. The video warns, “This is early rough test animation for the David Fincher / Blur Studios / Dark Horse Entertainment produced film THE GOON. Based on the Dark Horse Comic’s series by Eric Powell. THIS IS NOT INDICATIVE OF THE FINAL PRODUCT.” The action finally starts 30-seconds in.

Clancy Brown, who voiced Lex Luthor in several DC animated properties and Paul Giamatti voice The Goon and Franky respectively and are planned to take on the full-length roles whenever the film actually happens. As the videos preamble states, this is test footage and while it looks great, isn’t nearly as polished as Blur’s proof of concept trailer. The film, originally announced in 2008, is apparently still looking for funding. With stuff like this floating around I’m surprised it’s taking so long. Director Fincher has said it’s difficult because it’s “adult animation.” Powell lamented that he wished he sold as many comics as this video got views and also said, “Even though there’s probably no way in hell to raise 50 million, I might start a Goon film Kickstarter just for shits & giggles.”

We’ve talked a lot about Star Wars: The Old Republic, BioWare’s upcoming MMORPG, including talking about its tie-ins in novel and comic book form.

Today on the official site of the game, senior writer Alexander Freed, who has also written two arcs of the SWTOR comic for Dark Horse, has an extensive post about writing tie-ins, writing licenses, and just writing in general. Some of his writing rules definitely reach outside of just game comics, especially this one:

Assume Nothing

In addition to having connections to the game, a The Old Republic tie-in also needs to stand on its own. Not every reader is going to be intimately familiar with the game’s background and characters (especially before the game has come out!). For that matter, some may only have a broad familiarity with the Star Wars movies–perhaps they’ve only ever seen the original trilogy and don’t know Jar Jar Binks from Mara Jade.

So how do you write for an audience of casual fans along with the hardcore? You assume no foreknowledge on the part of the reader and you introduce everything he or she needs to know–and you make sure that you have characters and situations that resonate regardless of how they interact with the game.

Does a reader of The Lost Suns need to know that Theron Shan’s mother is a Jedi? Absolutely, and seeing Satele Shan in action during her youth (as we do in both the “Return” cinematic and The Lost Suns issue one) helps establish Theron’s identity and the setting as a whole.

Does a reader of Blood of the Empire need to know that Exal Kressh is the latest child of a Sith bloodline going back to Ludo Kressh (a character established in Tales of the Jedi comic series)? Absolutely not! Knowledgeable fans will spot the reference and infer its impact on Exal’s character, but it’s an extra–not an integral part of the plot.

There is one exception to the rule, however, and that is to always assume that your audience is smart. Give readers a strong story with characters they care about, and they’ll figure out what matters. There is no need to spoon-feed people. Simply make sure everything they need is there and they will put it all together.

Tons more from Freed at the link here as part of SWTOR.com’s weekly Friday updates. And just in case you don’t feel like exploring once you click over, here’s the awesome new Smuggler class progression video for you, too, right after the jump.

(more…)

Dark Horse Comics, who recently launched their digital catalog, are holding a tremendous giveaway at San Diego Comic-Con this week for a few lucky fans.

Each day at the convention, Thursday-Sunday, Dark Horse will be giving one lucky winner $500 in digital comics from Dark Horse Digital. At their booth, #2615, from 9:30 a.m. to 10 a.m., raffle tickets will be handed out to fans who will have presumably been lining up as early as possible for their chance to win.  At 10 a.m. sharp, one lucky ticket will be drawn and that fan will walk away $500 richer in digital comics.

Dark Horse titles like The Goon, Solomon Kane, B.P.R.D. and Hellboy are all currently available as well as countless others in single issues or bundles. Digital Store purchases can be read on your laptop, desktop, mobile browser, and Dark Horse Bookshelf app, available on iTunes. Good luck Dark Horse fans!