Category: News

Thursday morning at San Diego Comic Con, the marquee comics panel was Virgin Comics’  discussion featuring Stan Lee and Grant Morrison.

Before the discussion started, a brief video was screened showcasing Morrison’s MBX, a new motion capture cartoon that retells an ancient Indian Myth.

“I think today there’s an obsession with war,” Morrison said, as he explained that although MBX is a 10,000 year old Indian Myth, it will function as a lens through which to explore many of today’s pressing global issues.

The discussion was moderated by Sharad Devarajan, the CEO and publisher of Virgin Comics.

Morrison is known for being charismatic and engaging during discussions like this, but it was almost startling the degree to which Stan Lee’s presence overshadowed Morrison’s. Throughout  the panel Morrison gave due deference to the gravity of Lee’s body of work.

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Friday’s big event at Comic-Con was probably the Watchmen panel, which featured director Zack Snyder, Dave Gibbons and the main cast.

Snyder showed off a new, less-PG trailer, described at CBR:

The trailer opens with a shot of Rorschach, then cuts to a giant Dr Manhattan blasting apart Vietnamese soldiers. We then see Rorshach searching an apartment. His morphing mask gets a lot of play. We also see the Comedian’s armor, a plain-clothes Night Owl collapsing in sorrow. And a flashback of the heroes in better days.Ozymandias’s fortress rises from the desert, Night Owl and Silk Spectre kiss in front of a mushroom cloud, Time pieces feature heavily, we see the Owl Jet in flight, and the clip ends with the Comedian falling from a window, the bloodied Smiley falling after him.

During the Q&A, a familiar cowl-covered face showed up to ask Snyder’s favorite character from Watchmen:

“That’s a good question, Batman,” he [Snyder] said. “That’s not really a fair question, though”I like them all for different reasons.” Fans booed. “Everybody likes Rorshach best, so that rules him out.” Next up was Comedian, which he also skipped over. “The girls… awesome, but also a cop out,” he continued. “Maybe I’ll just stay with the girls; I like the girls best. Thank you, Batman.”

Among the many projects on Dark Horse Comics’ long list of San Diego Comic-Con announcements this year is an upcoming collection of the well-received Blanche stories created by well-known Gumby and Classics Illustrated artist Rick Geary.

Originally published in 1992 by Dark Horse, Geary’s Blanche Goes to New York first introduced readers to Blanche Womack, the character whose adventures would pair Geary’s already highly regarded and artistic talents with original stories of his own plotting. Only three Blanche stories saw print in the decade that followed, with the last — Blanche Goes to Paris — released in 2001 by Headless Shakespeare Press.

The hardcover collection of Blanche stories published by Dark Horse will feature an all-new introductory comic by Geary, as well as the previously published trio of Blanche Goes to New York, Blanche Goes to Hollywood and Blanche Goes to Paris. The project is currently scheduled for an early-2009 release.

I recently had the opportunity to ask Geary about Blanche, the series’ place in his greater body of work and what’s next for his favorite heroine.

COMICMIX: For readers who might not be familiar with Blanche, can you provide a little background on the character and her adventures?

RICK GEARY: Blanche is a young woman from a small town in Kansas who tours the world as a concert pianist during the early decades of the 20th century.

In the first story she goes to New York (in 1907, as a piano student in Greenwich Village), in the second to Hollywood (in 1915, as the musical director for a film studio) and the third to Paris (in 1921, as the director of an avant garde musical production).

In the stories, she deals with various intrigues and challenges, some of a supernatural origin, and interacts with historical figures like D.W. Griffith, Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway. The character of Blanche is based ever so loosely on my grandmother, who taught piano in her small Kansas town and, as a young woman, studied in New York. From these facts I let my imagination fabricate her outlandish adventures. (more…)