Three reasons to check out Kerry Callen’s blog:

1. Gasp when you learn the truth about Superman.
2. Marvel at the Amalgam hero Bat Devil.
3. Swoon (swoon?) over preview pages from the upcoming second edition of Halo & Sprocket, due this summer from SLG. If you missed the original mini-series, you can download it from Eyemelt.

Contraband

Written by Thomas J. Behe
Illustrated by Phil Elliott
SLG; $12.95

Contraband isn’t an easy read. It’s part crime story, part hard science fiction, neither of which are painless genres for me. Crime stories usually feature characters I have to kind of struggle to like, while hard sf, frankly, makes my eyes glaze over. I’m just not that into technology to automatically take to stories where the use of tech is their main point.

Oh, I’m all for tech that makes life easier for me, but I’m not an early adapter by any means. I’m not a gambling man and I’d rather let someone else pay the big bucks to test new technology and help get the bugs worked out. So a crime story about state-of-the-art cell phones and people who are abusing video capturing and sharing technology is automatically going to be challenging for me. Especially when it’s full of hyper-contemporary acronyms and buzzwords. But even putting aside that it was written for a subculture I’m not part of, Contraband is still a tough assignment. (more…)

– Hero Initiative’s Jim McLauchlin shares some button designs for their FOOG, Too project.

– Congrats to Neil Kleid!

– The New Yorker reports on the recent Friars Club celebration for Drew Friedman’s book, More Old Jewish Comedians. They also review David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Club.

– E&P reports that editorial cartoonist Matt Bors will be doing a biweekly comic for the ACLU.

– Newspapers are looking around for temporary replacements now that Doonesbury is on hiatus.

– Sam Gross says that swastikas can be funny.

– Bees!

– Double O Section is giving away copies of Left on Mission.

– Isotope has a report and pictures from this past weekend’s event with artist Tim Sale and Whitney Matheson. Matt Maxwell also talks about the event briefly in a longer column on hitting the California highways to promote his new comic.

– Make your own Wonder Woman sweater.

Compiled by Chris Mautner and JK Parkin.

Cartoonist Aaron Alexovich (Serenity Rose, Kimmie66, Confessions of a Blabbermouth) is serializing a new adventure of Serenity Rose on his website. SLG Publishing will collect the comic, titled Goodbye Crestfallen, once it’s completed.

You can begin reading here.

I’m very excited to announce that Jennifer de Guzman is bringing her monthly column “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” to Blog@Newsarama. Jennifer used to write for Comic World News before they closed up shop, and also writes the column Life in Comics for Publisher’s Weekly. And of course, when she’s not writing columns, she’s editing comics for SLG.

Helping her out each month will be her husband, artist Brian Belew, so expect something fun and different when her column debuts … and watch for it soon!

Midnight Sun
Written and Illustrated by Ben Towle
SLG Publishing
$14.95

Midnight Sun is two parts drama; one part adventure story. Ostensibly, it’s about the real-life disappearance of the airship Italia shortly after its successful arrival at the North Pole, but it goes deeper than that. Ben Towle has fictionalized most of the crew, condensed events, and freely speculated to fill in holes, but the gist of the incident is intact. In May 1928, the Italia sent a message home saying that it had reached its destination; then went abruptly silent. A massive, multi-national rescue operation ensued and eventually ended almost two months later. I’ll leave it for you to discover how successful it was.

Most survival dramas focus on the attempts of the survivors to stay alive. And most survival dramas are boring as hell. Ice, wind, freezing, frostbite, hunger, do we eat the dead or don’t we? Seen it all a billion times. Towle does something different though.

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Weaponizer has a fun Q&A up with Zombies Calling creator Faith Erin Hicks:

W/ Zombies Calling eventually got published by Slave Labor Graphics. How did this come about did you approach them, or did they approach you? Do you think it has expanded your audience?

F/ I approached them. Or rather, I mailed them. I sent them a Zombies Calling pitch package and a long while afterwards, they contacted me about publishing it. I think they really liked my cover letter and story summary, which I find pretty hilarious. Not that I blame them: the art in the pitch comic I sent was nothing to write home about. I don’t know about expanded audiences… D101 was really popular for a while, and I would say it was more popular than ZC is, but then, D101 is free. Most of the people that I’ve met / talked to online that have read Zombies Calling have mentioned liking Demonology 101 too, but I’ve also gotten emails from folks who had no idea of my online work, and discovered it after reading Zombies Calling. Which is awesome!

Be sure to check out her online comics, Demonology 101 and Ice.

Mostly taken on day two …

Chumble Spuzz creator Ethan Nicolle shows off the Chumble Spuzz poster he was giving away to folks who bought the book at the SLG booth. If you haven’t check out the book, you can find the individual issues on Eyemelt.com. It’s the story of two guys, Gunther and Klem, who win a pig at the state fair that’s possessed by Satan. So they head to Hell to kill the devil and save the pig. I read it a couple of weeks ago, and it’s very funny stuff; it also features a wonderful introduction by Doug TenNapel on religion and comics.

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Responding to a review by Johanna Draper Carlson, Ben Towle explains why the recent Midnight Sun collection from SLG is a different shape and size than most comics and graphic novels:

Most comic books (for reasons dating back to how large sheets of newsprint could be folded and trimmed most efficiently) have a page shape that’s roughly 2:3. Comic books are printed at about 9 inches tall by 6 inches wide, and therefore most cartoonists working slightly larger than final printed size will work on a 10 x 15 inch page area.

While I understand the convenience factor for retailers, who have displays designed specifically to accommodate this shape and size of book, I’ve frankly always bristled a bit at this adherence to these strict page parameters. At the very least, the idea that one should work on a 10 x 15 inch (as opposed to some other 2:3 ratio size) page is somewhat arbitrary, being based on a reduced bristol board size imposed by comic book publishers trying to save money on paper back in the day when artist would be issued bristol board by the publisher he or she worked for.

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The holidays may be long over, but Tom Spurgeon is still conducting interviews. His latest one is with Rex Libris creator James Turner:

SPURGEON: You have the rare distinction these days of publishing in comic book form these Rex Libris issues before collecting them. Is it important to you that your work is serialized before collection? Does putting work out there that way help you at all creatively, say to make course corrections from something you see or something that’s pointed out to you?

TURNER: I think I can do more course corrections if it’s put out first as a graphic novel. Putting it out issue by issue sets things in place. I wouldn’t go back in and restructure/remove/alter major elements in the trade collection, for example. I think readers would feel cheated by that.

In fact, I refrained from doing any changes at all in the Rex trade. For some weird reason I had the idea that I should just let it stand with all it’s warts as my initial point of “artistic departure,” so I, and others, can see how my work evolved (and hopefully improved) as it went on. I must have been on drugs or something.

Fantasy publisher Tor has dabbled in the graphic novel market before, but according to this article by Calvin Reid, they’re delving into the manga pool big time by joining forces with Seven Seas:

Tor will provide capital for acquiring new manga and prose licenses and take over Seven Seas distribution to the book trade. Tor will also take over and distribute Seven Seas’ backlist of about 20 titles. And while the deal will bring a broad range of licensed and original manga publishing to the science fiction house, Kleckner and DeAngelis emphasized that the Tor/Seven Seas imprint will also publish illustrated children’s prose books in addition to introducing new formats, such as Japanese light novels, prose novel series in a smaller trim size that feature manga-style illustrations throughout. And DeAngelis emphasized that light novels will be published in their original format and most will be based on manga licenses.

Manga fans should also take not of Kai Ming Cha and Ed Chavez’s interview with Genshiken manga-ka Kio Shimoku:

PWCW: How significant is otaku culture, or modern visual culture (gendai shikaku bunka) today?

KS: You’re asking me a difficult question from the start. This is actually a topic I’d rather not think about. For me, otaku culture, as I think you can re-phrase “modern visual culture,” is a purely personal pleasure. This isn’t something that you can really share with anyone; the experience belongs only to yourself. Unlike sex, you don’t even need to think of the other person or communicate, and I actually feel that one should be ashamed to actively push a set of titles that in a way offer the viewer a facile kind of gratification.

Also in this week’s Publishers Weekly Comic Week: a feature on Ed Burns and Jimmy Palmiotti’s upcoming series Dock Walloper; a look at the upcoming Haunted Mansion collection; a profile of retail outlet Big Monkey Comics; and the monthly best-seller list.

–Congrats to former Wizard Online writer/The Great Curve contributor Brian Warmoth, who recently joined Devil’s Due Publishing as marketing manager.

–Al Columbia has made a music video.

–Johanna Draper Carlson reports that the next issue of Comics Foundry will be out in March. And in full color!

–Todd Hignite talks about a Robert Crumb exhibit he helped put together.

–PC World highlights five webcomics that will “make you ditch your newspaper.”

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–Grady Klein tells you how to survive writing a graphic novel.

–Sean Phillips shares a painted cover he’s working on for Criminal.

–Dan Dare is coming to CD in May.

–Congrats to Midnight Sun’s Ben Towle, who welcomed a new member to the family on the last day of 2007.

–Apropos of the Ted Rall’s recent article, check out this NY Times review of the Chris Ware-edited Best American Comics 2007:

It would be wrong to expect comics to provide the highly constructed, didactic narratives that are supplied in abundance by other art forms, like, say, television. But reading through this book, you see how autobiography becomes a trap, a limit on creativity. Readers have their own existential torpor to sort through; they don’t necessarily need someone else’s.

–Mike Manley has a new comic strip, the Creepertins, in the Delaware County Times starting this month.

Compiled by Chris Mautner, Kevin Melrose and JK Parkin.

Toronto’s BlogTO talks with Zombies Calling creator Faith Erin Hicks about the walking dead as metaphor, the evolution of her book, and her graphic novel gift-giving recommendations.

Catching up on Tom Spurgeon’s weeklong series of interviews we first have an extensive chat with Will Pfeifer:

SPURGEON: Now that you have a little bit of space between you and the series, what do you think the basis was for so many people to have a negative reaction to Amazons Attack!?

PFEIFER: Was there a negative reaction? [laughter]

I think at its most basic, people have an idea about whatever superhero or character they love and have their ideal version of that character somewhere in their head. When you go against that version, some people are going to react very strongly. Amazons Attack! is right there in the title. They kill that guy and his kid on the very first page. People were really upset about that. But it was supposed to be shocking. It was supposed to be upsetting. It wasn’t supposed to be a triumphant moment for the Amazons. People who have been reading Wonder Woman for however long they’ve been reading Wonder Woman — and some of them have been reading for a long time — they didn’t like the fact that the Amazons were attacking and were evil. They also didn’t like the fact that in Amazons Attack! that there wasn’t enough Wonder Woman, and that Wonder Woman wasn’t driving the plot along. The reason for that is that there’s another book called Wonder Woman [Spurgeon laughs] where all that was happening.

Then there’s this chat with Paris artist Simon Gane:

SPURGEON: I hope you don’t mind me asking, but how much of your professional life is devoted to comics? Do you have other professional obligations? I’m just trying to get a sense of what you do.

GANE: I do take on some graphic design and illustration work but thankfully 90 percent of my professional life is currently devoted to comics, although that’s only since penciling a Vertigo title. Previous to that I was a freelance illustrator, designer and laborer and it was during that time I drew Paris. It was always the last thing I should have been doing because I had bills to pay, of course, but I loved drawing it too much. I guess comics are a compulsion rather than a career.

Finally, we have an interview with Jason Thompson, author of the excellent Manga: The Complete Guide:

SPURGEON: How did you approach the general section and what made you decide on that length as opposed to dropping it altogether or running something 10 times as long?

THOMPSON: The length of the reviews was my preference based on reviewing manga for Animerica and PULP. My first editor did ask me to trim the text, so I went through it and cut some sentences on the first proof. At one point I was worried that the articles might get dropped for space reasons, or that some of the more obscure manga (the old Antarctic and Studio Ironcat stuff, the Japanese bilingual editions) might get dropped, so I made sure to do all those reviews first so there was no chance they’d get cut. But in the end none of the reviews or articles were removed, and Dallas was happy with the length, so it all worked out. The only section that got trimmed down from my original plans was the artist index — I wanted to have bios of many more artists.

Is there anything cuter than an ancient demon intent on destroying Earth who possesses the body of a fluffy lil’ kitten? I assure you, there’s not.

Understanding this, SLG Publishing has announced the February release of Ubu Bubu, by Jamie Smart (Bear). You can read a preview here.

You may remember that last month editor-in-chief Jennifer de Guzman said SLG isn’t “very interested in series right now.” So, what gives?

“Now, why is Jamie’s work being serialized when we’re not looking to do series right now?” she writes. “Well, for one the format suits his work. And, for another, his fans seem to like to read his work that way. Bear did well until its last issue as a series, while many of our other series seemed to suffer under the “wait for the trade” preference of their readers. And Jamie’s new series is a finite one — four issues.”

Yesterday I blogged about Marvel and DC telling the torrent site Z-Cult FM to take down their material, as well as a message allegedly from SLG Publishing, giving Z-Cult permission to list SLG’s material on the site. It was that second item that really snowballed over the weekend.

Johanna Draper Carlson of Comics Worth Reading contacted SLG Publishing Dan Vado, and he said nobody at SLG wrote the letter. He also left a comment about it on the Z-Cult site.

Z-Cult pulled the thread down and contacted Dan. Someone from Z-Cult then posted a comment here on Blog@ saying they had heard from Dan; it turns out the person who sent the message to Z-Cult was a freelancer who has worked for SLG and had been in contact with Z-Cult before on SLG’s behalf.

That brings us to an email Dan sent me, after I forwarded Z-Cult’s comment to him to verify it was accurate. As it turns out, Dan did give the freelancer permission to contact the site on his behalf some time back to arrange a banner ad exchange:

Looks like I owe a couple of people some apologies on this. Let me break this down for everyone.

1) In regards to the statement on Zcult attributed to SLG. I did not write it. However…

2) Someone whom I have done a lot of business with over the years DID write it. This person had asked me some time back if I would be willing to allow some torrenting of our material in exchange for ad banners on those same sites. This was a few months back and something I thought had already been done. In my mind this was supposed to be a low key promotional opportunity to see if people using those torrent sites could be persuaded to buy legal downloads and not a grand statement on the overall rightness or wrongness of torrent sites.

3) The fact that this took a long time to get done wound up being bad timing as I was now being painted as being pro-torrent, anti DC and Marvel. Those companies have the right to do whatever they like with their property, including threatening legal action. That I might find some promotional use for these download sites doesn’t change that. The timing of the statement was very poor and caught me off guard while I was on vacation and made it look like our decision was a reaction to the Marvel/DC thing and not an initiative we took on our own.

4) I made some pretty harsh comments about the quality of comics journalism. While nobody covering comics is ever going to win a pulitzer, in this case I have to take responsibility for being out of line.

So, with a load of egg on my face I would like to sincerely apologize to Serj at Zcult, to Landry Walker who has been nothing but a tireless and hard-working friend and colleague, and to everyone whom I may have offended in general.

Last week Marvel’s Dan Buckley told Comic Book Resources that Marvel would be “reviewing and evaluating ‘illegal’ downloading activities on a case by case basis.” The next day, the site TorrentFreak reported that Marvel and DC sent letters to the BitTorrent site Z-Cult FM, giving the site a deadline for taking down their comics:

Popular comic book tracker Z-Cult FM was threatened by Marvel and DC Comics, as site admin ‘Serj’ explained: “We got legal letters from both Marvel and DC Comics who have been working together to send us these legal threats. We are currently dealing with the legal issues and they have given us 3 days before they are forced to take anymore action.”

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When I saw this, I instantly thought of James Turner’s Rex Libris: The Charleston, W.Va., Gazette profiles state archive director Fred Armstrong, whom it dubs “Library Crimefighter”:

One day about 20 years ago, librarians at the state Archive had their eye on a suspicious-looking visitor who was known to have a criminal record. After he left, one of the staff members flew urgently back to the boss’s office.

“He just took off with the book!”

Archive Director Fred Armstrong charged down the hallway, out the doors and down the front steps, taking each group of steps in a single, long-legged leap.

The thief had turned left toward a parking lot, in the vicinity of the current site of the Veterans Memorial.

Fred ran to the man and said something to the effect of “I need you to come back inside. That book belongs to the collection.”

The book, which would’ve cost $200 to replace, was safely recovered.

You can sample Rex Libris at the SLG Publishing website.

SLG’s Jennifer de Guzman shares some of the things that “push at my particular cranky-causing buttons” when it comes to submissions::

1. Twenty-something loser guys who have lame jobs and lamer love lives, unless there is something more to them. (Daddy issues don’t count.) Seriously, this kind of guy makes up a good chunk of the protagonists in submissions. Is it a lack of diversity in artists that is causing a lack of diversity in characters? Perhaps. But I think it might just be artists’ narrowness of scope. That’s a bigger issue than I really want to get into now, though.

2. Comparisons of your work with TV shows or movies in the cover letter. I have heard the “Big Two” encourage this kind of self-loathing, but I say love the media you’re using, dammit.

She also notes that they aren’t looking to publish monthly series anymore and ends on a positive note, saying “I’m often impressed with people’s creativity, even if their project is not something we decide to publish.”