On his new-ish blog Talking with Tim, Tim O’Shea interviews Jeff Lemire about his Essex County trilogy and, um, noses:

O’Shea: This may be a strange question, but I have to ask: Do you really enjoy drawing noses? I have never seen an artist render characters with such spectacular noses.

Lemire: I actually get that a lot. Put it this way, every single panel that I ever have drawn that has a face in it, the first thing I draw is the nose and go from there. I think a lot of people see the eyes as the center of the face, or the most characteristic feature, but I see the nose as giving the whole face its personality.

The third volume of the trilogy is due in October.

Brendan Wright has an extensive Q&A up with Top Shelf’s Brett Warnock that covers a lot of ground, including the third League of Extraordinary Gentlemen book:

WO: So what else are you going to have from him after Lost Girls? You’ve got League III, right?

BW: With League, I suspect that, in a best case scenario, I don’t think the first issue’s going to come out until later this year or in 2009. And that’s gonna come out as three mid-size volumes with a thin spine, like the old deluxe format books DC used to do a lot of. That’s gonna be the format for League III.

WO: Is it eventually gonna be done as one book, as a League III hardcover?

BW: Oh, of course.

WO: Is that going to follow the format of the DC ones?

BW: Oh, yeah. Oh, 100% We’ll do a standard size hardcover, I’m sure. And then hopefully if we can get scripts and stuff like that from Alan we’ll do the Absolute. I mean, as a fan, I want to see League III sitting on my on my bookshelf in the Absolute format next to League I and II. And I’m sure we’ll hire Todd Klein, who did all the design for all the ABC line, to do the packaging and stuff like that. The only difference I want the consumer to see is, here’s the Wildstorm logo vs. the Top Shelf logo. Otherwise I want those to look identical.

Continuing our 2008-oriented top ten lists, here are the top ten “middle-brow” comics we’re looking forward to this year. I can’t decide if I love or hate the term “middle-brow,” but it’s the closest thing I can think of to describe indie adventure comics right now.

1. RASL (Cartoon Books): Jeff Smith has already set the bar pretty high for himself with his epic Bone and the delightful Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil. But after seeing the preview of RASL from San Diego , I don’t think we have anything to worry about. My only dilemma now is deciding if I’m buying the regular-sized comic or waiting for the oversized collections. — JK Parkin

2. Tiempos Finales 2 (Sam Hiti): The first volume of Tiempos Finales was an amazing, luxurious bit of storytelling. It also left some unanswered questions that I’ve been dying to learn the answers to. Sam Hiti’s announcement that he was continuing the story this year was the best piece of news I heard in 2007. — Michael May

(more…)

In this week’s Publisher’s Weekly Comics Week, Laurel Maury looks at Top Shelf’s plans for 2008, including their plan to produce a movie based on The Surrogates:

2008 will be a year of new ventures for Top Shelf. For one thing, the company’s coproducing a movie. Co-owner Chris Staros reports that Disney has given a green light to Mandeville Productions to make a movie of The Surrogates, which Top Shelf published in 2006; Top Shelf Productions is listed as one of the producers. Bruce Willis is set to play the lead, Harvey Greer, the detective set on using his own body instead of a robotic “surrogate.” The graphic novel’s author, Robert Venditti (who has a prequel to The Surrogates due out in 2009), is a consultant for the film.

Also on the plate is a new series of kids books from James Kochalka and the next eagerly anticipated chapter in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen saga.

Also in this week’s PWCW: Chris Arrant looks at Nickelodeon Magazine; Will Moss looks at some upcoming Conan projects; Laura Hudson talks to Jamie Delano about his upcoming Avatar series; and Kai-Ming Cha examines Wiley’s upcoming Shakespeare adaptations.

There’s still more news from the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting, where Jeff Lemire’s Essex County, Vol. 1: Tales From the Farm has received an Alex Award from the Young Adult Library Services Association honoring adult books with specific teen appeal.

On his blog, Lemire says this is the first time a graphic novel has won the award.

Shuffleboil chats with Jeff Lemire about the first two books in his Essex County trilogy, Tales from the Farm and Ghost Stories:

SB: Are the human stories, relationships, circumstances based on any real versions of the same? Or is any of this autobiographical?

JL: Most of it is fiction, but certain character traits and parts of my own family history sort of worked themselves into the narrative as well. For example, Lou from “Ghost Stories” is an amalgam of different people from my life. He looks like my grandfather did late in life, and the nursing home/deaf scenes were based on the last days of my great uncle. But, all of the hockey stuff, and the brother relationship was fiction.

The Daily Cross Hatch has part one of an interview up with Alex Robinson, creator of Box Office Poison, Lower Regions and the upcoming Too Cool to Be Forgotten:

The fascination with superhero comics seems to be something of a reoccurring theme with independent cartoonists. Everyone grew up reading Kirby, Ditko, et. al. Does the idea of doing a superhero book, at this point in the game appeal to you?

It does in the sense that some people from Marvel and DC have been saying, “hey, you should pitch us some stories.” When Box Office Poison first came out and there was some buzz around, they asked me to pitch them so stories, but I just couldn’t think of any that interested me. I like them in theory, but all of the stories that I came up with were just me regurgitating stories that John Byrne and Chris Claremont came up with, 25 years ago. I guess with fantasy comics, because I don’t know too many of them, it’s kind of a wider field. It’s kind of a cliché, but there’s more fresh material for more in this well-covered ground.

Although Robinson doesn’t talk about Too Cool to Be Forgotten in this part of the interview (I assume that’ll come up in part two), it did give me the opportunity to use the really cool Matt Kindt-designed cover that Robinson shared on his LiveJournal last month.

Shuffleboil sits Fox Bunny Funny creator Andy Hartzell down for a chat:

SB: Initially, I read “Fox Bunny Funny” because it didn’t have any words and I thought, well, I can read this quickly.

AH: That’s an opposite reaction from a lot of people. People I know have hesitated to read it because it has no words. I think that has intimidated some people. They feel like without words, they won’t really know what’s going on, it’ll be hard to follow, and they hesitate for that reason. I get both reactions.

SB: That’s funny, considering it’s a visual medium. With comics, I get annoyed with too much narration, too many thought bubbles.

AH: Most of my work does have dialog, but I do tend to stay away from narrative blocks and it’s not like a real decision that I made. I think more in dramatic terms as opposed to depiction and description, I like the acting to tell the story. You wind up laying books out a little differently when you include narration you tend to lay out stories so that each panel is its own little illustrated page. If you leave out the narration, the panel to panel transitions become more important and the acting has to carry it a little more and that interests me.

Tokypop and DC Comics lead the final nominations for the Young Adult Library Services Association’s annual list of Great Graphic Novels For Teens with 23 nods each.

DC’s nominations include titles from its CMX, Minx and Vertigo imprints.

Tokyopop and DC are followed by Del Rey with 11 nominations, Viz Media with 10, Go! Comi with eight, and First Second and Marvel with seven each.

YALSA is part of the American Library Association.

The full list of nominees can be found here.

(Link via David Welsh)

Bruce Willis will star in The Surrogates, Disney’s big-screen adaptation of the Top Shelf Productions sci-fi series by Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele.

Variety reports that production is set to begin in February. Jonathan Mostow (Terminator 3) will direct from a script by Michael Ferris and John Brancato (Terminator 3, Catwoman).

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 movie is expected to be released through Touchstone.

The New York Daily News has a Q&A up with Jeffrey Brown, creator of The Incredible Change-Bots, Clumsy and the Rom artwork in my previous post:

Are you going to be doing any more Incredible Change-Bots in the future?

JB: I don’t know. I put so much into that book, I poured all my ideas that I had for the time being into it, so I think it’s something that I might revisit at some point, but I don’t know when. The same with Bighead which came out I think 4 years ago, so I’m gonna do a few more Bighead stories. Somewhere down the road there might be some Change-Bots, it’s just I’ve got a whole line up of projects that I want to do. Once I get through those, I might have some more ideas with what to do with the Change-Bots. I did intentionally make it an obvious sequel with an open ending.

The Washington Post Express has posted more videos from this weekend’s SPX, including interviews with Fantagraphics’ Gary Groth, Top Shelf’s Chris Staros, Laika creator Nick Abadzis, and Oni’s Randal Jarrell:

Related: Reports from Liz Baillie, The Daily Cross Hatch, Jeff Lemire, Dave Kellett

Occasional Superheroine chats with Jeff Lemire, creator of the Essex County graphic novels, the second of which is out now:

OS: “Tales From The Farm” seems to be a book about defining the real “heroes” in one’s life. What is your definition or example of a hero?

JL: Anyone who does what they love, and does it for their own sake, and not by anyone else’s agenda. Weather it be a musician, comic artist, athlete, doctor, plumber, farmer …whatever.

OS: Would you ever try your hand at drawing a mainstream superhero comic, given the opportunity? If so, which character would you like to draw?

JL: I would absolutely love to draw and write a mainstream comic for Marvel or DC. I would love to take a crack at Hellblazer, The Unknown Soldier, Green Lantern, Captain America. As I said, I love all the old silver and bronze age DC stuff.