Yen Press launched a new manga magazine last month called Yen+ (or maybe Yen Plus), to compete directly with those twin 800-pound gorillas of manga in America, Shonen Jump and Shojo Beat. I now have the first three issues here in my hands, so let’s take a look at Yen+ and see what’s in it.

Yen+, August to October 2008 issues
By various
Yen Press, Aug-Oct 2008, $8.99 ea.

All three issues have the same eleven serials in them, so it would be silly of me to review each issue separately and come back again and again to the same stories. (I’m not saying that I never do anything silly – just that I’m not choosing to do so this time.) So I’ll talk about Yen+ in general first, then cover the serials, and finish up with particular points in the separate issues.

The first thing a savvy reader notices about Yen+ is that it has two front covers, and a quick glance inside shows that it’s not just the covers – the whole magazine is divided in half. Japanese manga start at the “back” and run right-to-left for two hundred and some-odd pages, while Korean manwha and Western-originated comics go the opposite way for about the same number of pages. The Korean/Western side is the “front,” with the table of contents, editor’s letter, masthead, and the other usual “front-of-the-book” materials. But the two sides are close in length – the Japanese side has five serials (with generally longer page counts), and the Korean side six (plus the editorial matter). So Yen+, if I may be impertinent for a moment, is perfectly happy swinging both ways…

Yen+, if I may continue to torture a metaphor, doesn’t aim at one sex or the other, unlike the Japanese magazines that are its model – or like Shonen Jump and Shojo Beat in the US. (So it’s bisexual as well as swinging both ways – no wonder it comes in its own plastic bag!) The editor’s letter in the first issue explains that – since the audience for manga, and for manga magazines, in the US is not huge yet, trying to please both boys and girls will, they hope, allow them to reach an audience large enough to survive. (The other possibility is that it will fall between two stools, with too much mushy stuff for the boys and too many severed heads for the girls.) (more…)

Clear Blue Water, the syndicated comic strip from Karen Montague-Reyes will switch from newspaper syndication via Universal Press Syndicate to a web-only model as of September 28.

The strip began in 2004 and features the semi-autobiographical adventures of Eve Merriweather-Torres and her husband, Manny.  The chatty strip has covered every top usually shunned by most strips – sex, religion, and politics. The family of seven includes their son Seth who is autistic which has been the subject of numerous strips

The strip never caught on and Montague-Reyes told Editor & Publisher, the switch "was not my decision, but there is something to be said for having a difficult and inevitable decision made for you."

Clear Blue Water will migrate at month’s end to the still-being-built www.KarenMontagueReyes.com site is currently under construction. "I love cartooning — and my strip, for me, was never about the money. Hopefully, my fans will stay tuned."

One of the podcasts I listen to on a regular basis is The Giant Bombcast, the podcast of the Giant Bomb videogame website. Because I’m a hybrid comic and game fan, I paid special attention when they discussed the final lineup for the upcoming Mortal Kombat Versus DC Universe fighting videogame.

(If you haven’t heard: Baraka, Batman, Catwoman, Darkseid, Deathstroke, Flash, Green Lantern, Jax, Joker, Kano, Kitana, Lex Luthor, Liu Kang, Raiden, Scorpion, Shang Tsung, Shao Khan, Shazam, Sonya, Sub Zero, Superman, Wonderwoman.)

But I almost swerved off the road when they said that there was a rumor that comic writer and inker Jimmy Palmiotti, who is helping to write the story of the game, might make a cameo. Fighting in the style of MK classic character Johnny Cage.

If true, I fully expect Jimmy to pull off Johnny’s crotch punch move.

Listen for yourself at the 1:17:18 mark.

But I got the story from the man himself.

[Laughs] It was a joke that Ed Boon made. Now I wonder if they have to add it? [Laughs]

Way back in April, we were excited when we learned that Sam & Max, the wickedly funny PC adventure game based on the long-time indie comic and Eisner winning webcomic, was making its way to home gaming systems. The point n’ click nature of the game made it a perfect fit for the Nintendo Wii controller.

Telltale Games has been pretty mum on the subject since. Maybe because they were busy launching their newest episodic game based on the Strongbad web cartoon.

But now they’ve announced that the Sam & Max Season One will be coming to the Nintendo Wii on October 7^th. Not only that, but if you preorder the title from Gamestop, you’ll receive an exclusive CD with more bonus content then an anamorphic dog detective can shake a psychotic rabbit thing at: behind-the-scenes featurettes, trailers, artwork, music, and desktop wallpapers. The game will retail in North America for $29.99.

See the official trailer below.

So this week we shall see the season premiere of Smallville. This is not only the eighth season of the series that depicts a young Clark Kent learning the lessons that will make him Superman, it is also likely the last — unless the CW decides at the last minute to change their minds.

Matt "Two-Fisted" Raub is going to regale you folks with a review of the season premiere soon enough. It is my job to recap what has brought us to this point. I’ll summarize what’s happened in the show’s major storyline so far, not bothering to go into detail of individual episodes or sub-plots that are never mentioned again. If you only want to be caught up on the latest season, just scroll down until you see the words "Seventh Season" in bold. Also, this isn’t wikipedia, so I’m going to be explaining things in the way that I think makes it easiest to understand, not just listing events in exact chronological order.

THE STORY SO FAR . . .

The series begins with business mogul Lionel Luthor (John Glover) arriving in Smallville, Kansas with his young son Lex. A meteor shower suddenly hits, causing hundreds of strange, glowing, green rocks to hail from the sky and create devastation across the town and its surrounding farms. Lex receives close contact with one of the meteor rocks and loses his hair as a result. Young Lana Lang loses her parents in the chaos. Meanwhile, elsewhere in Smallville, Jonathan Kent (John Schneider) and his wife Martha (Annette O’Toole, who portrayed Lana Lang in Superman III) find a rocketship in their field that has arrived along with the meteors. And inside, there is a baby.

Fast forward several years and we are introduced to teenage Clark Kent (Tom Welling), the adopted son of Martha and Jonathan. Clark is a good kid with a kind heart. He is best friends with Pete Ross (Sam Jones III) and Chloe Sullivan (Allison Mack), who has a deep-seated crush on him. He is also head over heels for his friend, cheerleader Lana Lang (Kristin Kreuk). Clark is interested in astronomy and often has his head in the clouds. He also has great speed, strength and resiliency to injury. Now a freshman in high school, Clark wonders about why he has these abilities and his father finally reveals to him that he was found in a rocketship that came with the meteors and thus is possibly an alien. Clark wonders about who he is and why he was sent away.

As Clark begins high school, Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum, voice of the Flash from Justice League), now an adult, arrives in Smallville to take over his father’s LuthorCorp plant there. It’s supposed to be a test of responsibility and he hates it. Soon after his arrival, Luthor suffers a car accident and his life is saved by Clark Kent. The near-death experience makes Luthor decide that he must stop listening to his father and pursue his own destiny. He also declares that he and Clark are now friends, since Clark saved his life. Clark is glad to have a friend and is overwhelmed by Lex’s money and power and insistence on helping to make Clark’s life easier. Jonathan Kent is concerned that his son is spending so much time with Lex, especially when the Luthor boy continually espouses a belief that one should side-step rules of politeness and moral boundaries to get what you want sometimes.

As the seasons pass, Jonathan and Martha do their best to help Clark cope with his increasing abilities and his identity issues. The Kent boy discovers that the glowing green meteor rocks that are scattered in different parts of Smallville are somehow lethal to him and that their radiation has caused mutation in certain other people. As Smallville begins to be plagued by mutated super-villains (called "meteor freaks"), Clark secretly works to stop them and as the years pass on he discovers his powers increasing, gaining super-human hearing, telescopic/microscopic vision, heat-vision and X-ray vision. He even has dreams that he can fly. When solar flares later cause his powers to go haywire, Clark realizes that his superhuman abilities stem from his body’s absorbtion and processing of solar radiation. (more…)