TVGuide.com has a preview of IDW’s upcoming Ghost Whisperer comic. “The show has become darker, and there are evil forces everywhere, and that makes it perfect for us,” IDW editor in chief Chris Ryall told TV Guide.

The book comes out in March.

I’ve never been into Transformers, but this IDW Publishing promo is kind of funny.

IDW Publishing chief Chris Ryall shares a couple of pages from Angel: After the Fall 6-8:

ANGEL: AFTER THE FALL is doing something special with issues 6-8. We’re taking a break from the ongoing story–and oh, how this might upset some of you after you see the end of issue 5–to do the now three-part “First Night.” This is an array of short stories, all handled by different artists and each one finally revealing what these characters the night of the big, apocalyptic fight in the alley at the conclusion of Angel Season 5.

He posted an additional page here.

The artwork posted above is by John Byrne.

IDW Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Chris Ryall teases a yet-to-be-announced Transformers comic with some lovely promotional art by Nick Roche.

The Daily Cross Hatch interviews Fishtown creator Kevin Colden … currently Fishtown can be found on Act-i-vate, but soon it’ll be published by IDW:

We initially discussed setting up this interview at the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund party, back in December, with the caveat that we wouldn’t set it up until you got a certain piece of important news.

Yeah. I thought it wasn’t going to happen. And then I was contacted shortly afterwards, and now it can actually be told. Fishtown is going to be published by IDW. It’s slated for a hardcover November release. It will be the complete story.

He also talks about how he gave up a Xeric Grant he received for the book because he wanted to keep publishing it online:

… I would have had to have stopped immediately. My reason for not accepting the grant was, if I keep it online until these 23 pages are done, I can sell out the entire print run, but if I take it offline and just print it up anyway, I’ll probably be out however many thousands of dollars it takes to print it.

It was ultimately a fact of, I was reaching thousands of people on weekly basis that I would have had to have cut off. And I wouldn’t have had any basis for promotion. The Web serialization is an amazing promotional tool. We’ve seen evidence recently, actually. The best selling graphic novel of last year was Diary of a Wimpy Kid, which is more of an illustrated book, but is still the best selling graphic novel of last year, and it was still available entirely online before that. So was Shooting War, Dan Goldman and Anthony Lappe’s book. A large portion of that was online, and that’s doing gangbusters. So, it was just really a marketing decision. Eventually I was going to find a publisher for this, one way or another. And Lo and behold, I did.

TrekWeb.com has five pages up from IDW’s upcoming Star Trek New Frontier series, featuring art by Stephen Thompson. Peter David is writing the book.

A couple of weeks ago Tom Bondurant shared his thoughts on ten DC Comics-related comics/events coming up in 2008. I liked the idea, so I threw it out to the rest of the Blog@ team to see if they wanted to tackle 2008-oriented “top ten” lists related to other areas in the comics world, i.e. manga, alt-comix, Marvel, etc.

You’ll see these lists pop up on the blog over the next week or so. We know they aren’t exhaustive and just represent what we’re looking forward to, so we invite you to let us know what you’re looking forward to. For today, I present Chris Mautner’s list of ten reprint collections to look forward to in 2008. While some of the lists were put together by more than one person, this one is all Chris:

1. Humbug and Trump collections (Fantagraphics). Perhaps it’s cheating to put these two projects together, but I tend to group them together in my mind. I’ve heard so much about Harvey Kurtzman’s ambitious, cancelled before their time magazine projects that I’m overjoyed (and honestly, a little shocked) to realize they’ll both be coming out this year in handsome packages.

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A few days ago BoingBoing reported on a five-year-old boy who was detained by security at the Sea-Tac Airport in Seattle because his name was on their “no fly” list. You can find the news report here if you’re interested.

Ted Adams, the publisher of IDW, responded to BoingBoing’s post with a story about his five-year-old son being on the same list because of his name:

My son, also five, is on that same list and it’s a nightmare. Every time we fly with him, we can’t use the computer terminals to check in and the attendant has to call some never named government agency to make sure he’s not a terrorist. Some attendants joke it off but some are insanely serious about it. His seat always goes unassigned (even if it was assigned when the reservation is made) which always causes problems.

–Billy Campbell told MTV.com he would have been up for a sequel to the 1991 comic adaptation The Rocketeer … in fact, he’d still be up for it:

“I was talking to [writer] Dave Stevens just the night before last. We always talked about having a sequel,” Campbell confessed. “[Unfortunately] the movie didn’t make as much money as Disney had hoped and that coupled with the acrimonious relationship that the director [Joe Johnston] and the studio had contributed to them not even considering it.”

–IESB.com has an interview up with G.I. Joe producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura. In addition to talking about the Joes, he also gives an update on the second Transformers movie:

We’re nowhere because of the strike, we won’t know until we come back. We have a very fine outline and we know exactly where we want go with the movie but until this writers strike comes back, we’ll find out exactly where we are. Michael is completely on top of every detail. He’s designed a lot of great stuff already. He’s got a lot of great sequences imagined but you know, he needs some writers to work with before he’s ready to go, so I would say June 2nd is an unofficial start, it’s the target date we’d like to go for but, you know, we’ve got to get some writers to help us.

IESB also says that the Justice League movie has been delayed because of the strike.

–According to Movie Marketing Madness, Paramount has lined up several promotional partners for this summer’s Iron Man, including Audi, Burger King and 7-Eleven. As rumored, a new Iron Man spot will air during the Super Bowl.

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Snaked author Clifford Meth has joined the blogosphere, with the rather authoritatively titled Everyone’s Wrong and I’m Right. Among the features are interviews with folks like Harlan Ellison and Marv Wolfman:

Meth: You spent time in the hot seat at Marvel, as an EiC. How have things changed since the bullpen days, politically and practically?

Wolfman: I actually don’t know since I haven’t done it for awhile. I loved being EiC at Marvel (and later senior editor at DC and at Disney Adventures magazine) when it was a creative post. We were able to do comics we wanted to read. Comics that tried to preserve what was great about the company while pushing it forward at the same time. We were also attempting to “grow up” our stories as the age of our readers got older as well. Unfortunately, at that time Marvel was sold to a company called Cadence, and I have to say that company wasn’t quite the best. My job slowly became far too business and much less creative, and Cadence kept trying to find ways to make things cheaper and worse. I was in my mid-20s at the time and really didn’t know how to fight them, wasn’t good at politics, and awful at business. I’d like to think I’d be a lot better now.

With many television series running out of new episodes because of the writers strike, TV Squad points jonesing viewers to comic books based on popular shows:

More and more Hollywood heavy hitters are moonlighting in the comics industry, most notably Joss Whedon (Buffy, Angel, Firefly/Serenity) and J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5, Jeremiah). Even when Babylon 5 was still on the air, Straczynski used comic books to tell what is considered ‘canonical’ side stories to his epic.

But it was Whedon who, earlier this year, set the bar far higher by officially launching ‘Season Eight’ of his popular Buffy the Vampire Slayer series as a comic book, penning the first “episode” himself. Nobody’s really been sure what to make of this new project; we here at TV Squad even polled you, our readers, to see if you wanted us to continue reviewing this strange hybrid of television show and comic book. I mean, it is the official continuation of Buffy’s story, but is it TV? Does it belong here? The lines have been blurred, and there’s more coming out every day. With a limitless special effects budget in comics, and much lower costs associated, it’s no wonder more and more creators are looking at Whedon’s model and considering the possibilities.

The rundown includes 24, Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who, Heroes, The Simpsons and Star Trek, among others.

Sometimes the end of something is only the beginning of the story. Take the end of the world, for instance …

If you’d like to take a look at what the end of the world might look like, then check out the IDW section of Previews this month for Therefore Repent! The graphic novel by writer Jim Munroe and artist Salgood Sam is set in Chicago after the Rapture, i.e. the Biblical event that finds the righteous floating up to Heaven, leaving the rest of humanity behind. It’s also a relationship story, as a couple contends not only with the end of the world, but also the end of their relationship.

I chatted over email with Salgood Sam about the book, religion and his real name, among other topics.

JK Parkin:: Let’s start off by talking about Therefore Repent! What’s it about?

Salgood Sam: THE END OF THE WORLD!

No, really. I’m serious.

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Salgood Sam, the artist of the upcoming IDW book Therefore Repent!, dropped us a note about a pricing mistake in the latest Previews, which features the book:

It’s in this November Previews, published by IDW in the U.S.
Diamond # NOV073660
Very important info; There was an error in the initial listing, the cover price will be $14.99 U.S., Cheep! not $24.99!

That’s a big difference so I really wanted to make sure to let as many shops know as possible.

I pre-ordered the book a few days ago based on the 60-page preview that’s up on ComicSpace. It’s written by novelist Jim Munroe and is about a post-Rapture world.

Over at the Daily Cross Hatch, Brian Heater has the first of three Q&A’s with BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow on his comic work with IDW and Creative Commons licenses:

How did the project with IDW come about?

They wrote to me. I literally got an e-mail out of the blue one day, saying, ‘we’re IDW, we make comics, we like your stories, and would like to make some comics out of them.’ I checked out some IDW comics, and they looked like good stuff. The only question in my mind was the whole Creative Commons thing. I kind of assumed that, comics being a quasi-traditional medium, relative to book publishing, that I’d have some trouble selling them on that. Turns out I didn’t.

My agent said, “Creative Commons—you guys okay with that?” expecting to get a, ‘go away, hippie, and never darken our door again.’ Instead, they said, “oh yeah, we’re totally cool with it, but we’re not sure if we’re going to be able to sell that to comic book store owners, so how would you feel if we just did that with the trade, at the end of the run?” And that sounded great. That was the entire thing. It’s like the world’s least interesting story, in that it was just kind of an agreement.

When the book is collected into a trade, Doctorow says it’ll be made available online as high-res PDFs.

According to this week’s edition of Publisher’s Weekly Comics Week, Pantheon Books will be very busy a year from now as they will be publishing a new edition (finally)  of Art Spiegelman’s Breakdowns and a new book from David Mazzucchelli:

Frank said the new edition [of Breakdowns] will consist of 24 new pages (including some sections published in the New Yorker as well as the Virginia Quarterly Review) including an eight-page prose essay by Spiegelman surveying his work and early life during the heyday of the underground comix movement. “It’s an autobiographic look at how he became a comics artist and the forces that shaped him,” said Frank.

But the new book by David Mazzucchelli may even be more eagerly anticipated than Spiegelman’s new work. Pantheon is publishing Asterios Polyp, Mazzucchelli’s long awaited graphic novel. A highly regarded comics professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York, Mazzucchelli is the author of such critically acclaimed works as the comics adaptation of Paul Auster’s novel City of Glass and worked with Frank Miller on the critically acclaimed superhero graphic novel Batman: Year One. Mazzucchelli has been working on the book for more than 10 years, and he has generally declined to say much of anything about it.

The story also says Pantheon will be publishing a collection of Batman-related manga and a collection of work by David Heatley, which likely means I’ll have the chance to re-read that story about his dad for the 500 millionth time.

Also in this week’s newsletter: Brian Wood talks about Northlanders; Steve Niles talks about his upcoming Gotham series for DC; Mark Evanier talks about his new Jack Kirby biography; there’s a profile of IDW’s new Kazuo Umezu book Reptilia; and a look at a new online manga service.

The Inquirer of Manila, Philippines, talks with artist-writer Ben Templesmith about 30 Days of Night, his influences, and the appeal of vampires:

“Vampires, in the horror genre, are considered the Star Trek of the horror genre, if you know what I mean. They’ve been around forever; people keep doing new and strange takes on them and they’ve evolved into these really fanciful and lamenting emo-goth type things. It’s great for some things but it’s less about being a vampire than about vampire politics. We just wanted to do something that was more old-school. We tried to make them scary, more animalistic and more primal again. Sort of like the old Nosferatu, more sinister.”

IDW, Fantagraphics, Drawn and Quarterly and Checker Publishing are teaming up this month to produce an 11″ by 17″ promotional sampler, featuring a variety of classic strips like Gasoline Alley, Krazy Kat, Little Nemo in Slumberland and Terry and the Pirates. Plus, even more never before published Peanuts strips!

The sampler should be winging its way to your comic shop this week, but if you can’t wait, you can download an online version here.

Craig Yoe has a brief interview with former Eclipse Comics publisher and IDW comic strip compiler Dean Mullaney, whose overseeing such series as the Terry and the Pirates and upcoming Little Orphan Annie collections:

4. What one strip reprint that would probably be a complete financial disaster would you like to do if money weren’t any kind of issue?

I don’t think there’s anything you couldn’t get at least close to break even on, if you presented it well. In terms of “non-commercial” strips, probably the biggest bug up my ass is to do “White Boy” by Garrett Price. I’m only missing a handful to have a complete collection. Don’t be surprised if you see it announced in the next few months.

A White Boy collection would be about fifty different kids of awesome.

Tom broke the news yesterday that IDW plans to collect and publish Noel Sickles’ hugely influential comic strip Scorchy Smith next summer. Dean Mullaney’s announcement can be found here:

On the subject of future projects, since we’ve already sent the solicitation info to our book distributor, I can announce that in June 2008, I will release an oversized, 11″ x 11″ hardcover: SCORCHY SMITH AND THE ART OF NOEL SICKLES through IDW. It will contain the complete Sickles Scorchy for the first time ever, plus about 60 pages of Sickles’s magazine and other illustrations.

IDW is already publishing collections of Dick Tracy and Terry and the Pirates, and plans on releasing Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie in February.

It’s been a weird week for comics. You’ve got Mark Millar’s fantasies being reported as possibilities, and when reality intrudes, fans start complaining that DC – who weren’t even involved – are creating injustices across Hollywood (Personally, if Mark’s got enough spare time to write a movie, maybe he can pick up a pencil and help One More Day reach some kind of conclusion before the end of this year. Remember when this was announced as a weekly series? Those were the days of optimism and happy readers…), and DC announcing the first 10 contestants for a year-long Zudacomics.com contract while also announcing one of the original Batman writers, Jerry Robinson, as their latest creative consultant. Are they looking to the future or the past…?

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