Speaking of licensed comics: Chris Ryall, publisher and editor-in-chief of IDW Publishing, unveils an ad that should make Doctor Who fans happy.

At Den of Geek, James Hunt casts an eye over the field of licensed comics, and decides that, well, most of them aren’t very good:

One of the first things you can be guaranteed to read when someone brings an existing property to comics is a statement along the lines of “Well, of course, since we have no budget restrictions, we can do anything we want, as long as it can be drawn!” A fair enough statement, yes, but on closer inspection, what does it really mean?

In the case of IDW’s comic-based “Season Six” of Angel, it means taking Los Angeles to hell and having Angel fight a ludicrous number of massively-proportioned demons every issue – something that makes the series almost impossible to take seriously. After all, the Angel show we remember featured a small number of demons, almost always human-like in appearance. It was absolutely a budget restriction, but one that kept the show grounded in believability, as much as a show about a vampire detective could be.

With this new freedom to depict demons of all shapes and sized, the reality constructed over five years of the TV show has been utterly discarded in favour of bigger, better things… that don’t remotely match what the viewers of Angel remember. The solution to this one is simple – let the TV show that you’re adapting inform the look of the comic, and stick religiously to that. Any time you’re thinking “wow, we could never have done this on TV!” that’s a sign that you shouldn’t be doing it.

In addition to “no budget syndrome,” Hunt considers the absence of actors, and “canonocity.”

Ben Templesmith (30 Days of Night, Fell), who recently moved from Perth, Australia, to San Diego, Calif., has signed an exclusive contract with San Diego-based IDW Publishing.

The agreement won’t affect his work with Warren Ellis on Fell, from Image Comics.

Templesmith’s deal with IDW calls for him to create art books and new series, such as The Art of Wormwood and Welcome to Hoxford, both of which debut in August.

“I’m incredibly lucky to have been given the opportunity to continuously work at IDW over the years now and basically have them be the launch pad for anything I’ve ever wanted to do in comics,” Templesmith said in the press release, “so I just saw this as a natural progression and a great chance to be more involved from the ground floor up. Also, the cubicle walls in the office are high enough that people still won’t be able to see that I rarely wear any pants while I work.”

The full release appears after the break:

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As Rich Johnston pointed out earlier this week, former Wildstorm editor Scott Dunbier started a new job this week:

It’s just past midnight here in San Diego, April 1st, 2008. In the morning I’ll be starting as Special Projects Editor at IDW. A very appropriate day to begin a new job, don’t you think? It feels almost like when I came out to WildStorm in April of 1995, but I’m even more excited… and nervous as Hell.

Going to post this and then off to bed, I’ve got a big day ahead of me tomorrow. But I wanted to share something with you before I sleep, a present from my good friend Gene Ha. It showed up quite unexpectedly last week in my e-mail (followed soon after by a package with the original art). Something to commemorate the end of one life and the start of another, the note said. Gene calls it Scott Free. I like the sound of that.

I was going to start off this post by saying something about how we’re too highbrow here at Blog@ to participate in any April Fool’s Day antics, but I don’t think anyone would buy it. The real reason why we didn’t announce the blog was defecting to Wizard or moving to the domain amazingheroes.com or something along those lines is because Matt Brady is out on vacation today, and if we can’t mess with his head, then what’s the point?

A lot of folks are having some fun today, so let’s get into today’s fake news …

–Oni Press announces that they’ll be publishing Superman:

“This really is a dream come true,” exclaims James Lucas Jones. “We hope to tell great stories that can be read and enjoyed independently of any other form of convoluted continuity. The character and story come first… no Civil Wars… no Crisis… no Secret Invasions… just good stories that any kid can pick up and enjoy.”

No word on the creative team, except that it won’t be Mike Grell … he’s drawing Superman for ComicMix.

–Fabio Moon announces he’s completely changing his drawing style.

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The Daily Page in Madison, Wisconsin talks to Mike Baron about the return of Madison’s own superhero, the Badger:

What makes Madison a good venue for Badger stories?
Madison is, ah, an eccentric village with many eccentric denizens. Wisconsin in general has a wealth of lore: Paul Bunyan, the hodag, Ed Gein, the giant muskie — oh honey, don’t let me commence!

What’s your connection to Madison?
Born in Madison. Graduated from West High School — only my senior year — I grew up in South Dakota. Graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in political science. And a fat lot of good it’s done me. Moved to Boston after graduation, moved back in ’77, lived in Madison through 2003, and will probably return there.

– After sharing several cover possibilities for The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman reveals the final Dave McKean artwork.

– Congratulations to blogger Matthew J. Brady and his wife on the birth of their daughter.

– Doonesbury creator Gary Trudeau is going on a 12-week break.

– Our thoughts go out to Alternative Comics publisher Jeff Mason, who is suffering from Crohn’s disease and currently recovering from surgery to combat it. Here’s hoping he gets better soon.

– For Charlie Brown, it will never end.

–Marvel.com has launched a new gaming blog.

– IDW celebrates Fallen Angel‘s 25th issue.

– Kim Deitch and Jim Woodring are at the Fantagraphics store in Seattle this weekend.

Compiled by JK Parkin and Chris Mautner.

New comic art by Bernie Wrightson is always a good reason to smile … IDW’s Chris Ryall shares a trailer for the Wrightson-drawn, Steve Niles-written Dead, She Said miniseries:

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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