Author: Van Jensen

IDW Publishing is best known for its gory horror comics and sci fi adaptations. Which made this morning’s news that the company had purchased an up-and-coming comics studio known for its all-ages fare seem a bit strange.

In a press release, IDW President Ted Adams and Blue Dream publisher Scott Christian Sava announced the new arrangement.

"I know Scott had offers from many publishers and I’m thrilled that he chose IDW as the home for Blue Dream Studios," Adams said. "I love the books he’s created, and I look forward to helping him reach an even bigger audience."

Blue Dream is likely best known for The Dreamland Chronicles, Sava’s online fantasy comic that’s become a fan favorite, drawing some 4 million readers and earning awards. The story is all computer illustrated, and has also been released in book form.

Though only recently entered into the comics world, Blue Dream has had a fair amount of success, with Disney acquiring the rights to the Pet Robots series and MTV buying the rights to another, Hyperactive. The deal with IDW is most likely seen as an opportunity for Blue Dream books to expand into the print market, where IDW already has a distributor.

According to the release, IDW sees the move as a chance to expand into the all-ages market. Apparently, Steve Niles doesn’t go over too well with the preschool crowd.

Jeff Vandermeer, the fantasy author and comic critic at Bookslut, caught up with all his fellow judges from the 2007 Eisner Awards and compiled a list of everyone’s favorite comics from 2007 (which are eligible for the 2008 Eisners).

Their choices are all listed right here. The panel consisted of Vandermeer, comics critic Chris Reilly, librarian Robin Brenner, Isotope Comics owner James Sime and the USA Today’s Whitney Matheson.

The most consistent choices are The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam, Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Eight, The Trial of Colonel Sweeto, The Arrival and my personal favorite, Super Spy.

I don’t know what it says about me that my best of 2007 most closely mirrors that of Sime, the self-styled "Comic Pimp."

The judges for the 2008 Eisner Awards, which will be held July 25 at the San Diego Comic Con, have been named. To see that list or to nominate a book, go here.

Wired.com’s blog recently posted this entry on the Online Museum of Black Superheroes, a Web site that compiles a fairly comprehensive list of black superheroes (as well as non-superhero characters).

The museum, which you can find right here, also contains a lengthy collection of articles on black characters in comics. The articles come from a variety of sources (from the Washington Post to Comic Book Resources) and while they don’t represent an end-all-be-all dissertation on black superheroes, they do offer a wealth of interesting discussion.

Simply reading through the character lists (they’re divided by publisher) offers plenty of opportunities for analysis. For instance, you can separate the characters by when they were introduced and look for trends. One thing I noticed was that while there were disproportionately more male characters than female ones, the division didn’t seem to be any more lopsided than the gender divide among white characters.

The site also documents some of the blatant racism evident in comics with characters such as Whitewash Jones (he appeared in the 1940s war comic Young Allies), and the unintentionally offensive, such as Marvel’s creation of Man Ape (he was a Black Panther villain).

There’s something of a learning curve that comes with reading RASL, the new comic book series by Jeff Smith. After so many years of all-ages books like Bone and Shazam: The Monster Society of Evil, it’s a bit jarring to see Smith’s cartooning style appear in a book that’s so different from everything he’s done before.

The first issue begins with the protagonist (RASL is his "hacker tag," Smith told me in an interview) wandering through the desert, beaten and bloodied. While the immaculate linework may be reminiscent of Fone Bone, nothing else is. RASL is a dimension-hopping art thief (not to mention a fan of booze and cigars), and the issue quickly introduces him before laying out a string of hooks to catch readers’ interest.

There’s a great sequence where RASL thinks he’s returned to his home dimension only to look at a jukebox and see the album Blonde on Blonde credited to "Robert Zimmerman." "Dylan isn’t Dylan. Damn. I’m in the wrong place," RASL narrates as a shady figure lurks.

Smith also uses a much more complex narrative structure than in past books, revealing his antihero and a twisty back story through multiple time periods and dimensions. Such a structure can be unsettling for readers, but Smith handles it well. There’s a smooth cadence to his writing that bolsters the maturity of the material.

It’s still far too early to grade this series, but at the very least, it’s fun to see Smith continuing to develop as a creator and challenge himself even after he’s had a full and successful career.

Van Jensen is a former crime reporter turned comic book journalist. Every Wednesday, he braves Atlanta traffic to visit Oxford Comics, where he reads a whole mess of books for his weekly reviews. Van’s blog can be found at graphicfiction.wordpress.com.

Publishers who would like their books to be reviewed at ComicMix should contact ComicMix through the usual channels or email Van Jensen directly at van (dot) jensen (at) gmail (dot) com.

The New York Times has picked up on the debut of The Search, a comic book we reported on earlier this month being used in German classrooms to engage young students on the horrors of the Holocaust. In today’s story from Berlin, a reporter visits one classroom and sees how strong of interest the students are showing in the comic, even though it deals directly with the long forbidden topic of Nazis.

While some have castigated the comic (the story also references French President Nicolas Sarkozy earning criticism for wanting France’s youths to study the war’s victims), the article makes clear both how effective comic books can be in teaching children and how important the subject matter is.

The German children come across as not identifying with the Nazi history, but still interested in learning from it. There has been plenty of support for the book as well, as detailed in this story from the Web site Deutsche Welle. CNN has a video report on the book available here.

The Search was created by the Anne Frank Haus.