Author: Andrew Wheeler

Comics News & Links: San Diego Sunset Edition

  • Uncategorized
  • July 30, 2007

costumes-7478920Brave souls still reporting from Comic-Con:

The New York Times gazes down its nose at Comic-Con, and says tsk-tsk quietly under its breath.

Comic Book Bin lists nine new projects announced by Minx at Comic-Con, including a sequel to Clubbing and work from Brian Wood, Alisa Kwitney, and Steve Rolston.

Comic Book Resources, similarly, has a story about Oni Press’s upcoming projects.

The Beat liveblogged the Eisner Awards ceremony…the first three or four hours of it, anyway.

Greg Hatcher of Comics Should Be Good traveled cross country instead of going to Comic-Con — and found comics along the way.

(more…)

benders-9425765

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: The Saga of the Bloody Benders

benders-9425765It’s been twenty years since Geary’s original A Treasury of Victorian Murder was published – and who would have thought, then, that a slim book of arch graphic short stories about little-known murders in Victorian England would be the beginning of the comics Geary would spend most of the decades to come creating? The first of the smaller-format, single-case volumes, Jack the Ripper, followed in 1995, with a new book every other year through 2005’s The Murder of Abraham Lincoln. Then 2006 saw The Case of Madeleine Smith, and this year yet another new Geary murder case.

Except for the first volume, each “Treasury of Victorian Murder” is a small book – about 5½ “ x 8¼” with roughly eighty pages of comics – about a particular, somewhat famous murder case from 19th century England or the USA. He’s covered the deaths of two Presidents – Lincoln and Garfield – and the cases "H.H. Holmes," Lizzie Borden, and Jack the Ripper. The remaining two books – about Mary Rogers and Madeleine Smith – are about famous sensational cases, crimes of passion.

The Bender “family” – there’s some doubt as to whether they were actually related, as they claimed to be – of Labette County, Kansas are not quite as famous as most of those cases (though I hadn’t heard of Madeleine Smith before, either). But they were certainly actively murderous and impressively mysterious, so their story gives Geary quite a bit to dig into. The Benders arrived in that raw, rural area of Kansas in 1870, very soon after the Civil War and not much longer after Kansas became a state in 1861. They set up a single-room (divided by a hanging canvas) inn and grocery on the major trail through the area, and settled into the community – considered eccentric, certainly, but basically accepted.

(more…)

eyre-2938818

People Reading Books

  • News
  • July 29, 2007

eyre-2938818The Seattle Times reviews Jasper Fforde’s “Thursday Next” series.

Slate looks at Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

The Agony Column reviews Alan Campbell’s Lye Street, a novella-as-a-book prequel to Scar Night.

Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist reviews Jeff Somers’s The Electric Church.

Blogcritics has what I think is their sixth review for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Honestly, I can’t keep track any more.

Book Fetish reviews a three-author linked erotic romance anthology called Hell on Heels. (Oh my God, the Twayne Triplets are back…and this time they’re porn!)

Bookgasm reviews Warren Hammond’s KOP.

Bookgasm also reviews A Dog About Town, a murder mystery told from the POV of a thinking dog, which is fantasy enough for my book.

The Henry Herald of Georgia reviews Kull: Exile of Atlantis by Robert E. Howard.

American Chronicle reviews Harry Potter and the…Half-Blood Prince. (ha HA! Fooled you!)

(more…)

bagge-2994866

Interviews and Interrogations

  • Uncategorized
  • July 29, 2007

bagge-2994866The Washington Post profiles Hate! cartoonist Peter Bagge, focusing on his current work for the magazine Reason.

Comic Book Resources infiltrated a Comic-Con panel with Matt Wagner talking about 25 years of Grendel – and they report back what they learned.

Wizard interviews Mouse Guard creator David Petersen.

Heidi MacDonald video-interviews Scott McCloud, creator of Making Comics (and, of course, Zot!).

The Orange County Register talks to Kevin J. Anderson about Slan Hunter, the novel he completed from A.E. Van Vogt’s outline and incomplete draft.

Forbes quotes from a USA Today interview with J.K. Rowling, in which she mentions that she’s already working on two non-fantasy projects – one for children and one for adults.

(more…)

Link-o-Rama

  • News
  • July 28, 2007

fighting-1106608Times Online looks back at the British ‘80s craze for Fighting Fantasy.

The Millions has a looooong post (no, really, it’s long) about Harry Potter from a children’s librarian’s perspective.

Queen guitarist Brian May has gone back to school — to finish his doctorate in astrophysics. That’s a smart move – you always want to have a day-job to fall back on, if the music thing doesn’t work out.

John Scalzi has discovered a typewriter that sends e-mail.

Lou Anders explains patiently that SF is not dead. (Me, I’d have just pointed out that anyone who goes to a Nebula Awards Weekend in New York City – horribly expensive New York City, not to mention nightlife-dead Way the Hell Downtown NYC – and expects the demographic not to be “middle-aged to old” is deluding himself about the interests and finances of young SF-reading people.)

And you’ve heard about NASA’s drunk astronauts by now, yes?

(more…)

News from Comic-Con and Other Distant Shores

  • Uncategorized
  • July 28, 2007

comic-con-2121615People reporting from Comic-Con:

Everyone’s reporting on DC’s new license to publish comics based on the TV show Heroes; the longest piece I’ve seen so far is from The Beat. (What does it all mean? Don’t ask me…I’m just Link-Boy.)

New York Magazine has a sixteen-page excerpt from the beginning of Osamu Tezuka’s Apollo’s Song. (And let’s not forget the ComicMix review of Apollo’s Song.)

All the ‘60s Batman sound effects you could ever want. [via When Gravity Fails]

NPR has a story about this year’s Eisner judges and their decision process.

The Beat reports that Mark Waid has been named Editor-in-Chief of Boom! Studios.

The Beat also explains the whole Dark Horse-MySpace thing – which I think means that they’re totally BFFs.

(more…)

Be Vewwy Vewwy Quiet. We’re Hunting Fanboys.

  • News
  • July 26, 2007

fanboy-7593577

USA Today stalks the elusive Fanboy.

Locus Online lists new paperback editions of SF/Fantasy books that they saw in June.

Matthew Cheney thinks about the latest eruption of the what-is-SF-and-what-isn’t discussion.

A highly scientific investigation into the age-old struggle between pirates and ninjas. [via Chris Roberson]

tSF Diplomat  thinks hard about online book reviewing and book-blogging.

Biology in Science Fiction rounds up recent interesting news stories about bioscience.

Mundane SF hates astrophysics.

(more…)

Spanning the Globe with Comics

  • News
  • July 26, 2007

Comic Book Resources talks to Timothy Truman and new artist Tomas Giorello about the new direction, and new series, for Dark Horse’s Conan comics.

Comic Book Resources also chatted with the creative team of the new Booster Gold series.

Even if you’re not at Comic-Con, you can see it via the official flickr set.

Mike Sterling’s Progressive Ruin pokes through the new Previews catalog for monthly signs of impending Armageddon.

Comics Reporter reviews The Architect by Mike Baron and Andie Tong.

Chris’s Invincible Super-Blog has some fun with a 1969 Batgirl story.

(more…)

slaughter-1360269

Comics! Getcher Comics!

  • Uncategorized
  • July 25, 2007

slaughter-1360269

GalleyCat reports that Karin Slaughter, a popular thriller writer from the UK, and Oni Press are teaming up to create Slaughterhouse Graphic Novels, which will adapt prose fiction into comics form. The idea is to emulate Stephen King’s Dark Tower, and not Isaac Asimov’s I-Bots, I think…

(By the way, Slaughter is our covergirl for this installment.)

Chris Roberson looks at two different projects bringing back public domain superheroes.

Comics Fodder wants to see the return of footnotes to superhero comics – you know, the little boxes that said things like “The Fabulous Sheep-Man, last seen in ish #3,141 – Parsimonious Pete.” I think that reviewer needs to look up the phrase “continuity porn,” because he’s soaking in it.

Your cognitive dissonance headline of the day: “Euro Books transforms ‘Agatha Christie’ into graphic novels in India”, which is for an article about, yes, a company making all of Agatha Christie’s books into graphic novels in English for the huge Christie-loving Indian market.

Exclaim!, a Canadian music publication, looks at DC’s new Minx imprint.

Brian Cronin, at Comics Should Be Good, makes fun of every single one of Marvel’s October covers.

First Second announced today (in a press-release e-mail, so I don’t have a link) that they’ll be collecting Paul Pope’s cool THB series in 2009 as a color, four-volume, 1200-page set under the title Total THB. But, before that, they’ll have a new Pope series for young readers, Battling Boy, published in two simultaneous volumes in 2008.

(more…)

black-4850554

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: The Black Diamond Detective Agency

black-4850554

The Black Diamond Detective Agency is a bit of an anomaly for Eddie Campbell – it’s a book he wrote and illustrated alone that nevertheless is not concerned with stories or storytelling in any way. Campbell’s probably best-known for illustrating From Hell from Alan Moore’s famously copious scripts, but most of his work has been writing and drawing his own stories, sometimes with help from a loose band of local Australian cartoonists.

His two long-running sequences are both deeply about story: Bacchus consists of the tales of the few remaining Greek gods in the modern world, and contains many tales-within-tales, retold stories, and other storytelling conceits. The “Alec MacGarry” stories are even more entwined with stories, since they’re Campbell’s thinly-veiled autobiography about his own life as a comics creator, and are, at their heart, about the process of creating art and stories.

So it’s a bit odd to find that Black Diamond is a conventional detective story – a murder mystery, to be precise – set at the turn of the 20th century in the American Midwest. (That last is also surprising since Campbell is a Scot long resident in Australia – middle America isn’t his part of the world at all.) The story begins with a mysterious man in Lebanon, Missouri witnessing the explosion of a train during a demonstration and then helping to pull the wounded from the wreckage. He’s soon arrested and questioned, since the boxes of nitro used to blow up the train have his name on them.

It gets more complicated from there, but the focus is on that man of several names and on the investigation run by the Black Diamond Agency (which stands in for the real-life Pinkertons) of the explosion and related events. And, showing its origin as a screenplay, there’s a Big Secret at the end, which will be familiar to many – we’ve seen a story much like this many times before.

(more…)

Categories

Archives

Everything you need to make great comics!

comicmix-pro-300x69-2

Nucleus X

Bookshop Zaks