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April 21, 2010


Bundled, Tossed, Untied And Stacked

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By Tom Spurgeon:

* here's an interesting item: IDW is selling a special edition of its Bloom County Complete Library Vol. 1 through its web site only. There's a fine line that publishers have to traverse in terms of offering up limited-item offers like this and satisfying the needs and desires of its direct market retailers.

* Zack Soto's flickr stream reveals the cover to a fourth, imminent issue of the post-alternative comics anthology Studygroup 12. That's good news. I know from poking around the web that Theo Ellsworth and Tom Neely are in there, at the very least.

* this is the first time I've seen samples from the long-rumored Bob Weber Jr./Jay Stephens newspaper page team-up Oh Brother.

* in a week of publishing dominated by C2E2 panel announcements, the cartoonist Hope Larson in much more quiet and straight-forward announced she's currently adapting Madeleine L'Engle's childrens' classic A Wrinkle In Time into comics form. That is a nice match of cartoonist and project. I and I'm sure many others look forward to the result.

image* missed it: Sparkplug debuted two new comics at the MoCCA Festival 10 days ago: Reich #7 by Elijah Brubaker and Eschew #2 by Robert Sergel.

* the much-loved Spit And A Half catalog, a focal point for 1990s mini-comics consumption, is on-line with a new version of its old, classic self. Ordering comics from a cartoonist like John Porcellino is one of the great things you get to do in comics than you really don't see from other art forms.

* the artist John Cassaday will be doing covers for Superman. Sounds good to me; he's been an effective cover artist generally.

* there was a bunch of publishing-related news emanating from the shores of Lake Michigan during last weekend's inaugural C2E2, including I'm sure some mentioned in their own items here where I just didn't make the connection. The X-Men comics are doing a bunch of new #1s for no reason that anyone I know can ascertain. I wish comics would drop these baroque, limited-gain numbering strategies and concentrate on the timely, regular deliver of first-class material in easy-to-parse titles. Oni is doing a one-shot Yo Gabba Gabba! hardcover. Boom! picked up the license to make comics based on that Tim Burton Alice In Wonderland movie that inexplicably made like 500 Kazillion dollars. IDW announced they'll be doing comics related to the Dungeons and Dragon license. That sounds like a fine pairing, although my hope that all the covers are done by Erol Otus and there's a prominent role for the Jester class probably won't come off. Wildstorm announced a project from B. Clay Moore and Tony Harris that drew some stand-alone coverage. I guess the Dark Horse re-launch of various Dell properties is still on. Archaia has a new Hollywood-partnership line. Roy Thomas will be writing some Conan comics. And although I've already talked about it elsewhere, Matt Fraction moves his Casanova to Marvel's creator-friendly imprint Icon. That wasn't exactly a secret, but most of the project's details were. I look forward to seeing a new iteration of that comic, this time in full color.

* if the mainstream- and genre-comics focus of that last graph upsets your sensitive indie/alt tummy, you may be able to settle it with a look at forthcoming projects from Rosebud Archives.

* since the last time I took a peek at moderntales.com, it looks like Daniel Merlin Goodbrey has launched a new feature, 100 Planets. I'm always interested in whatever Daniel Merlin Goodbrey is up to.

* here's the cover image to the third volume in the successful Amulet series.

* missed it: Carl Moore is ending State Of The Union on May 1. The usual culprit -- just not enough traction for the feature in terms of clients to make it profitable for the cartoonist to continue.

image* Johnny Ryan ends his frequently awesome New Character Parade.

* Evan Dorkin talks about a forthcoming project with Jill Thompson: a crossover one-shot with their Beasts Of Burden characters and Mike Mignola's Hellboy.

* Del Rey has signed with an author I've never heard of for a series of graphic novels featuring a property with which I'm completely unfamiliar, which means it's probably a humongous hit.

* I almost missed this but a sequel to the recent alt-comics mainstays do Marvel characters Strange Tales is underway.

* at some point I'm going to figure out how to fold in a Kickstarter projects status thing into this feature, but that point is not upon us. In the meantime, Patrick Farley would like your support, just not a ton of it from any one person.

* finally, Roger Langridge will be writing a Thor comic for Marvel that sounds like one of those comic projects they do to increase the publishing base for a character about to see a movie come out. Despite the handsome art sample below, Langridge will be working with Chris Samnee, so that could be a fun, nice-looking book. The fact that the industry is now making room for Roger Langridge to have two monthly gigs corrects a long-standing structural failure in comics generally.

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