Author: Rick Marshall

Over at ISB, Chris Sims has remixed panels from old Archie strips to the tune of William Shatner’s Pulp’s "Common People" with disturbing and, as always, hilarious results.

(Oh, and that loud noise you just heard was the sound of millions of British rock fans’ heads simultaneously exploding after reading the previous line of text.)

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Ask any longtime comics fan what they give someone "on the outside" to turn them on to the comics world, and they usually have a stock answer ready. Some go the Watchmen route, others go with Art Spiegelman’s Maus or, quite possibly, something more akin to Craig Thompson’s Blankets. Lately, Brian K. Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man has been popping up quite often in these types of conversations.

Sometimes, though, your best bet in converting someone into a comics fan isn’t in proving the ability of comics to provide a window into serious emotional or political issues, or in giving them what amounts to a sneak peek at the next big comic-to-film adaptation. Sometimes, your best bet simply lies in showing someone that comics can still be fun — that a few panels of cartoon art can connect a reader with the more light-hearted moments in life without requiring any heavy, emotional investment.

That’s why Wes Molebash’s You’ll Have That has found its way into my list of first-time reader recommendations. The strip follows the life of a young, married couple as they work through the inherent trials and tribulations of starting a family, navigating a complicated social circle and learning their way around co-habitation. Molebash has been publishing YHT as a webcomic for more than four years now, and doing so on a five-days-a-week schedule for much of that time. The series is hosted by Viper Comics, who also publishes print collections of the series at regular intervals.

Recently, Molebash decided to try his hand with Zuda Comics, the new webcomics initiative by DC Comics. Creators submit sample strips to Zuda, and each month, editors select a set number to to host on the Zuda Comics site. Winners are chosen monthly based upon the strips’ popularity among readers, and the winning creators receive a year-long contract to continue their series. However, the program has been the focus of widespread criticism in the online world, especially among webcomic creators, due to the restrictions imposed by DC/Zuda on ownership of the strips and creators’ rights.

Molebash’s current submission to Zuda, The Litterbox Chronicles, about a pair of mischevious house cats, marks the first occasion in which an already well-established webcomic creator has participated in the Zuda competition. In this interview, he shares some thoughst on the Zuda experience thus far and discusses the future of You’ll Have That and the implications of the strip on his life.

COMICMIX: So, let’s get to it. You already have a very successful webcomic in You’ll Have That — so why go the Zuda route?

WES MOLEBASH: Well, the Zuda thing has been quite a hot topic with creators for a while…

CMix: … to put it lightly…

WM: I really struggled with the decision. I’ve been keeping my eye on Zuda ever since I first heard about DC doing this kind of thing, so I’ve read any article that I found on the Internet about it. I’ve read everyone’s opinion. And it seems like the majority of cartoonists seem to be against it. (more…)

From the adult-oriented Superf*ckers to the upcoming, kid-savvy Johnny Boo, James Kochalka isn’t one to shy away from testing the waters of a new audience or format in his comics work. Frequent ComicMix contributor Van Jensen spoke with Kochalka recently (as well as his son, Eli) for CBR News, and their conversation shed some light on the prolific cartoonist’s big plans for 2008, including the June release of Johnny Boo from Top Shelf Comics.

According to Kochalka, the simple, silly design of Johnny Boo‘s cast of characters is a prime example of his approach to a new story: He simply puts pencil to paper and eventually everything works itself out.

I start playing around with shapes until I get a collection of shapes that I feel can become a being on the page. If you get the right shapes together it just feels right. So that’s what I try to do. Doodle until the doodles come to life for me, then set them loose in a comic. If you’ve got some characters with some life to them, they start doing and saying what they want. That’s my favorite way to work. It’s a lot better than trying to force your characters along some kind of plot you have worked out in your mind ahead of time. The plot goes in much more surprising directions. I hope that also makes it more entertaining to read.

Read the full interview over on CBR.

Universal Pictures debuted a new trailer for Hellboy II: The Golden Army at this week’s ShoWest convention in Las Vegas. According to reports, the trailer included many of the new, strange creatures we’ve been hearing so much about, including the bizarre "Cathedral Head" and the massive cave troll, "Mr. Wink."

ComingSoon.net has the following synopsis of the trailer, as well as more information about the new trailers that debuted at the event:

The new trailer opens at the Blackwoods auction house where they’re putting the Royal Crown of Bethmoora up for auction when Luke Goss’ Prince Nuada shows up to reclaim it, and his henchman Mr. Wink crashes through a door with what looks like his metal fist dangling from a chain. It then cuts to the BPRD headquarters to reintroduce the concept of the BPRD being called upon to deal with supernatural occurrences, and Hellboy, Liz and Abe Sapien show up at the location which is completely trashed and empty, and Hellboy says something to Liz, like "There’s no one here, babe" and she retorts "Don’t call me babe!" which he responds, "I didn’t call you babe, I said ‘Hey!’" Hellboy makes a comment about it not looking good when thousands of Thooth Fairies, tiny winged creatures with sharp teeth fly out from the shadows of the walls attacking them. The rest of the trailer is very quick and goes by very fast, but we finally see Princess Nuala and get glimpses of a lot of the creatures of the Troll Market including Cathedral Head, and after we see one of the more hideous creature, it cuts to Hellboy yelling "I see you" and we see that the creature is disguised as an old bag lady (presumably this is the creature referred to as "Bag Lady" in the production office). We see more of Hellboy fighting against the Golden Army, the giant mechanical beetles that Prince Nuada brings to life, and more of his fight with Mr. Wink with the two of them smashing their stone fists together and Wink’s fist crumbling as he looks at the results and whines. The final scene is the street scene with the giant Elemental but this time Hellboy yells at the creature, "Now you’ve done it. You woke the baby!" and pulls out his Big Baby gun.

via (SHH)

Marko Djurdjevic first caught my eye with some of the amazing cover work he did for Marvel’s short-lived Blade series, and he’s continued to impress with his cover work on a wide variety of Marvel titles.

With Thor #7, Djurdjevic makes the leap to interior art for a two-issue run, and I’m looking forward to seeing how well he handles the transition. Den of Geek has a great interview with Djurdjevic about his process, his artistic inspiration and how he made the jump from covers to interior work:

So this is basically my first sequential artwork if you want if like that, my first full comic, but Marvel have been approaching me about doing this since like forever. Since I started out they asked me to do sequential artwork but we simply couldn’t find the right gig for me, for the first year so I kept doing my covers until Thor came up and I was like, you know, I’m gonna do this!

There were couple of good offers but you know, like this offer was especially good because there is just the two issues and it’s a good start out for me because basically I never did sequential artwork before. I didn’t want to jump on to a twelve issue ongoing series or whatever and realise halfway through them that I’m not the guy to do this. It’s better to start slow and find your way through than decide to jump on something different later on, so just two issues was the perfect start for me.

Oh, and the interview also includes evidence of what appear to be some worrying similarities between his habits and those of his favorite author.

(via Blog@)

Updating a pair of previous stories, developments in the rip-off scandal involving cartoonist Jess Fink and the Hot Topic clothing store seem to have moved in a satisfying direction for the artist, and the fundraising efforts for Rachel Nabors’ dental surgery are also on a positive trend.

From Fink’s website:

The person who wrote me back was the lady who originally bought the shirts from the rip off artist/designer "NewBreedGirl" she had some very nice, apologetic words to say and she told me Hot Topic would like to make amends by removing the shirt from their website, and no longer selling it in their stores.

She said:

"I would like to first and foremost, appologize for this situation. It is very important to us to support artists and their ventures and it just makes my stomach turn when something like this happens. We in NO way would have written this artwork if we had known it was someone else’s design. We work with many vendors that sell us "generic" artwork and we put our faith in those vendors to not sell us stolen or immulated artwork."

Also from what she said I have a feeling no one is going to be buying anything from "NewBreedGirl" for a long time.

Rachel Nabors also seems to be doing well:

It’s official. We’ve raised at least $5,000 toward my jaw surgery! Let’s see, that either covers the braces or half of the surgery (provided it doesn’t involve widening the roof of my mouth). Last I checked tonight, we were at $5,588.04 USD.

(via TheBeat)