• Ben Templesmith is working on a book about the Presidents of the United States … the actual presidents, not the 1990s novelty band of the same name. (My apologies to anyone who has “Lump” stuck in their head as a result of the previous sentence).

“A portrait each, plus some facts,” Templesmith says about the format of the book. “Especially about some of the lesser known ones. Damn some were sick/quirky/weird bastards.” Yep, those are our presidents, God bless’em.

• Tickets for the 2009 New York Comic Con are now available.

• Peter David has been banned from prisons. Which I guess sounds a lot better than it is.

• Dean Haspiel provided the cover art for novelist Tim Hall’s Full of It.

• You can read Paul Cornell’s entire short story “Catherine Drewe” here.

• Robert Kirkman vs. Brian Bendis, the video.

• And finally, Jeffrey Brown predicts the future.

“People keep warning me about this whole thing, but at this point I’m still not sure what to expect. I’m trying to imagine that very first convention I went to crossed with the first twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan … yet somehow I can’t quite picture it.” — Zombies Calling creator Faith Erin Hicks, who will attend her first San Diego Comic-Con next week.

Lots more to get through this time around, and I’ll probably divide it up into a few different posts today …

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First up, I need to add this to my “must buy” list …

Top Shelf will have copies of Essex County Vol.3: The Country Nurse, which Jeff Lemire will be on hand to sign.

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If you have any extra bears, Stan Sakai’s daughter is collecting them for the South Pasadena Fire and Police Departments:

Daughter Hannah is working on her Girl Scout Gold Award–collecting teddy bears to donate to the South Pasadena Fire and Police Departments. Bears are given to comfort children after traumatic experiences, such as home fires or domestic disturbance calls.

She has contacted churches and other organizations in the area. If you would like to help, and if you will be at the San Diego Con, bring a new teddy over to our booth–#4906. It is listed in the exhibitor’s guide under “Stan Sakai”.

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Entertainment Weekly talks with Alan Moore about the upcoming Watchmen movie, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century, his upcoming novel Jerusalem, and his love of The Wire and South Park:

Don’t you have the slightest curiosity about what Watchmen director Zack Snyder is doing with your work?
I would rather not know.

He’s supposed to be a very nice guy.
He may very well be, but the thing is that he’s also the person who made 300. I’ve not seen any recent comic book films, but I didn’t particularly like the book 300. I had a lot of problems with it, and everything I heard or saw about the film tended to increase [those problems] rather than reduce them: [that] it was racist, it was homophobic, and above all it was sublimely stupid. I know that that’s not what people going in to see a film like 300 are thinking about but…I wasn’t impressed with that…. I talked to [director] Terry Gilliam in the ’80s, and he asked me how I would make Watchmen into a film. I said, ”Well actually, Terry, if anybody asked me, I would have said, ‘I wouldn’t.”’ And I think that Terry [who aborted his attempted adaptation of the book] eventually came to agree with me. There are things that we did with Watchmen that could only work in a comic, and were indeed designed to show off things that other media can’t.

Related: Patrick Wilson (Nite Owl) says Watchmen’s ending stays true to the comic

– Jeffrey Brown talks to seibertron.com about the Incredible Change-Bots:

I’ll be working on some new Change-Bots stories for an issue of my “Sulk” comic book series with Top Shelf for sometime probably late next year. That issue will also probably print some of the drawings I did for the Change-Bots fan club - before the offer expired, I did around a hundred drawings for the club, each of which was like a stand-alone panel, so I’d like to print the best of those. And if the first vinyl figures of Balls and Microwave do well, Devil’s Due may do some of the other characters.

– Three Sparkplug Comic Books creators will host a signing at Quimby’s in Chicago this Thursday. Cartoonists Austin English, Jeremi Onsmith and John Hanciewicz will be signing copies of the 2nd issue of Sparkplug Comic Books’ Windy Corner, a hybrid of a comic and a magazine that features comics, comics criticism and interviews.

Quimby’s has quite a few upcoming events, including Eddie Campbell on July 28, so go check out their website for more info.

– The trials and tribulations behind the upcoming American Flagg collection.

– Todd Allen plays the numbers game.

– So who’s adapting Cornflake Girl?

– The Village Voice talks to Brian Wood about The New York Four.

– Thought Balloonist Charles Hatfield reports from the “Reading Pictures: The Language of Wordless Books” panel at the American Library Association’s annual conference.

Compiled by JK and Chris

The Comics Are for Kids Too! panel was made up of Art Baltazar and Franco from Tiny Titans, Peter David (mostly because of his work on Marvel Adventures Spider-Man), Josh Elder and Russel Lissau from The Batman Strikes, and Owly’s Andy Runton.

The Wizard moderator opened the panel with a question about what comics the panelists read as kids that inform their current work. It probably shouldn’t have been surprising that most of them came to comics from other media. Bugs Bunny cartoons, Adam West’s Batman, Star Wars, and Super Friends were a few examples. David in particular talked about watching the old Adventures of Superman TV show and how excited he got when the announcer mentioned that the characters were based on a Superman magazine he’d never heard of.

In addition to that though, a lot of them were introduced to comics by older relatives. Lissau’s grandparents (on both sides of his family) loved Batman and Superman when he was a kid and used to make up stories for him featuring those characters. Elder learned to read when his mom lost her voice and couldn’t finish a Transformers comic she was reading to him. He figured out the words himself just to complete the story. Similarly, Runton learned to read from his mom’s reading him the Sunday comics pages.

David said that he got into comics at the barber shop, which stocked plenty of Harvey Comics. He fondly remembered not understanding that when Casper was drawn with a dotted line, it meant that he was invisible. Thinking it was supposed to be interactive, David would just connect the dots.

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About a month ago I pointed out that Jeff Lemire was offering two Essex County mini-comics on his website; at the same time, I ordered them myself.

Now Top Shelf has put one of them, The Essex County Boxing Club, up on their website as part of their Top Shelf 2.0, the new incarnation of their online comics program.

While I liked The Essex County Boxing Club well enough (and it’s certainly worth the entry cost for reading it online), it was the other mini-comic, Eddie Elephant-Ears, that I just loved. You can still buy both of them on Jeff’s website.

The Forbidden Planet International blog has a really extensive and really excellent interview with Alan Moore about the lack of controversy around the pornographic Lost Girls, creator’s rights, his issues with DC and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century (pictured above and coming up from Top Shelf in 2009). And that’s just part one.

I was going to quote some of my favorite parts, such as sections that include quotes like “I had told DC never to send me anything again that wasn’t money” and “It’s as if we feel freed from the conventions of boys’ adventure comics, and so it’s a lot more atmospheric, it builds to a tremendously bloody climax, it’s a slow build. We’re thrilled with it. It’s got some songs in it, it’s a musical.” But if I start doing that, I’ll just end up quoting the whole thing, so just go read it for yourself.

Vulture has a preview up of Alex Robinson’s Too Cool to Be Forgotten, which Robinson says he’ll have for sale at this weekend’s MoCCA. As you can see on his LiveJournal, his cat gives it a good review.

Steve Niles’ Wake the Dead lands at Holding Pictures

Holding Pictures has acquired the rights to Steve Niles’ IDW Publishing miniseries Wake the Dead, a modern-day retelling of the Frankenstein stories.

Jay Russell (Tuck Everlasting, The Water Horse) will direct from a script by James V. Hart (August Rush, Bram Stoker’s Dracula). Visual effects will be provided by Peter Jackson’s Weta.

Released in 2003-2004, Wake the Dead originally was snatched up by Dimension Films, with Michael Dougherty (Superman Returns) set to adapt. However, it never made it out of the development stage.

“Me and Jay have been working for three or four years now to get this going,” Niles tells ShockTillYouDrop.com. “All through him doing The Water Horse. And we’ve just been steadily hammering away at it. He’s always had a consistent vision and he knows this is a modern re-telling of Frankenstein. It’s grim death. It’s about as far from My Dog Skip as you can get.”

Platinum and Valhalla team up for Final Orbit adaptation

Platinum Studios’ comic-book thriller Final Orbit won’t be released until early next year, but it’s already winding its way toward the big screen.

The company is teaming with Valhalla Motion Pictures for the adaptation, with Russell Gerwitz (Inside Man) writing the script. Valhalla chair Gale Anne Hurd and Platinum Studios chairman-CEO Scott Mitchell Rosenberg will produce.

In Final Orbit, a lottery provides winners with the chance to vacation aboard the newly completed International Space Station. The trip turns bad when the station is damaged, trapping the tourists on board with no astronauts around to help.

The Ticker

• The fire at Universal Studios didn’t stop the MTV Movie Awards. Transformers rode away with Best Movie, while Iron Man won Best Summer Movie So Far. No slight to Iron Man, but that’s the worst category ever. [Reuters]

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Tonoharu Part One by Lars Martinson, Pliant Press (but distributed by Top Shelf), 128 pages, $19.95.

Travel abroad is supposed to provide a life-changing, mind-broadening experience. It’s an notion that Lars Martinson craftily subverts in the first volume of his ongoing, Xeric-award winning “innocents abroad” story, Tonoharu. (more…)

It’s the indie comics publisher’s latest Webcomics venture, featuring work by folks like Sean Collins and Matt Wiegle, Steve Lafler, Lizz Lunney and more. For info about the debut, click here.

– The Independent has a profile on Jack Kirby.

– Check out the trailer for Dollhouse.

– Mort Walker’s International Museum of Cartoon Art now has a home at Ohio State University.

– Cameron Stewart shares more Seaguy character art.

–The Daily Cross Hatch interviews Gerard Way.

– Tom Spurgeon talks to the Aqua Leung guys.

– The first Scott Pilgrim page ever drawn.

– Forces of Good interviews Gerry Conway.

– Stan Sakai shares his Hulk cover for the Hero Initiative Hulk project.

– Craig Thompson likes to doodle.

Compiled by JK and Chris.

Publishers Weekly looks at Alex Robinson’s upcoming “middle aged guy travels back in time to his high school years” graphic novel Too Cool to be Forgotten:

“When I started out, I wanted to make Andy’s experience as close to my own as possible, since my incentive to do the story was almost like art therapy in that I was trying to figure out why high school looms so large in my mind and how I could try and deal with that,” Robinson said. “I think I realized that wouldn’t work pretty early on, and our lives wound up differing a lot. I think he became a lot more ‘normal’ than I was.

“I was a real loner in high school. I had a circle of friends, which Andy’s friends pretty much mimic, but I never went to parties or dated or anything,” Robinson continued. “I would spend a lot of my free time drawing comics, which must be some kind of lesson: I spent all of high school working on comics so that one day I would make it as a cartoonist and then do a comic about high school.”

Replacements named for Gough and Millar on Smallville

With the departure of creators Al Gough and Miles Millar from Smallville, co-executive producers Todd Slavkin, Darren Swimmer, Kelly Souders and Brian Peterson have been promoted and will serve as showrunners for the series’ eighth season.

“Al Gough and Miles Millar have been great partners and instrumental in the development and success of Smallville,” CW and Warner Bros. TV released in a joint statement. “Todd, Darren, Kelly, and Brian have been writing for the show for the past six seasons, and as producers for the last four years, they have played an integral role in the ongoing creative evolution of the series. As showrunners, they will continue to deliver the compelling storytelling that Smallville fans have come to expect and love.”

The Surrogates gets more cast members

Ving Rhames, Radha Mitchell and Rosamund Pike have joined Bruce Willis in Disney’s adaptation of The Surrogates, the Top Shelf Productions sci-fi series by Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele.

Jonathan Mostow (Terminator 3, U-571) is directing from a script by Terminator 3 screenwriters Michael Ferris and John Brancato. Ned Vaughn (Frost/Nixon) was previously cast in the thriller.

The Surrogates is set in 2054, when humans interact through robots who are idealized versions of themselves. In that “perfect world,” police detectives Harvey Greer and Pete Ford must stop a techno-terrorist who is determined to return society to a time when people actually lived their own lives.

The comic was released by Top Shelf in 2005-2006 as a five-issue miniseries, and then collected as a trade paperback.

The Ticker

• Casting information for Caprica, the Battlestar Galactica spinoff [ TV Squad ]

• Olivia Williams joins the cast of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse [ Variety ]

• George Lucas touts Clone Wars at Cartoon Network upfront [ Variety ]

• Johnny 5 is alive! Dimension Films is remaking Short Circuit [ Variety ]

Perhaps it’s merely the tantalizing near-arrival of spring, but it seems like we’ve seen a number of debut books by new cartoonists pop up out of the ground lately (if I may hammer the spring metaphor down ever further). Here’s a look at three of them:

That Salty Air
by Tim Seivert
Top Shelf
112 pages, $10

Salty Air practically screams “my first-ever graphic novel” from panel one, page one. Not that its execution is sloppy or awkward — his pen line radiates confidence and his pacing is assured — but more that the premise itself as well as the characterization is fundamentally wrongheaded. (more…)

Laura Hudson talks to Kochalka about his latest book for kids from Top Shelf, Johnny Boo:

PW Comics Week: Why did you choose a ghost as the main character for a children’s book?

James Kochalka: I always liked Casper the Friendly Ghost, but I could never figure out how to draw him. [Now] Casper is kind of a goody two-shoes, and Johnny Boo is kind of self-centered and egotistical. He thinks everything he does is special and wonderful. It’s probably a comment on the artist in me and my own ego. No matter how crappy a thing I do, I think it’s special.

PWCW: Did you vet Johnny Boo with your two kids?

JK: I finished the two Johnny Boo books before Oliver was born, but Eli is four and a half, and I did test out the Johnny Boo stories on him. I’d do a rough draft of the chapter during the day while he was at preschool, and for a bedtime story I’d read it to him. And then based on his reaction—if he didn’t laugh at a page, I’d go back and rewrite it.

Last week cartoonist Jeff Lemire posted a five-page Western comic. Now he’s providing a 22-page outtake — in two parts — from the forthcoming Essex County, Vol. 3: The Country Nurse.

Lemire writes that, “as Chris Staros and I started to edit the book, we realized it just didn’t fit into the story I was trying to tell with the third volume, and has since been cut from the book.”

Essex County, Vol. 3, is due from Top Shelf in October.

This one slipped under my radar … last week Art Scatter, a local art blog out of Portland, Ore., had a post by Barry Johnson comparing the non-fiction graphic novels of Joe Sacco, Craig Thompson and Guy Delisle:

This is still a disorienting experience. From the drawn world, the comics world, we don’t expect the activities of a journalist — the attempt to represent a slice of life as it was actually lived, to make sense of it, to draw conclusions from it. We are just starting to understand, thanks to comics journalists such as Sacco, that the combination of written and drawn representations can be more powerful than the greater abstraction of words alone, that they can convey more fully what the journalist/artist actually found. That they can literally sketch a real character like Soba at the same they “sketch” him.

One of the side benefits of reading the three books Johnson talks about — Sacco’s War’s End: Profiles From Bosnia 1995-96, Thompson’s Carnet de Voyage and Delisle’s Pyongyang: a Journey in North Korea, is that all three are also travel journals of sorts, taking the reader to places like Morocco and North Korea. “And the places aren’t just background, either, they emerge as independent subjects of their own,” Johnson writes. Much more at the link.