This week, the recently redesigned and relaunched Tor.com debuted its first online comic, Wesley Allsbrook’s The Leviathan. And it’s a pretty impressive premiere, to say the least.
More of Allbrook’s work can be found at: www.wesleyallsbrook.com.
It’s our weekly trip to the comic shop and we bring out the Big Guns to arm you with all sorts of important info on what to check out. For example:
Grab your shopping list and Press the Button!
And remember, you can always subscribe to ComicMix Radio podcasts via 
or RSS!
In today’s brand new episode of White Viper, by Erin Holroyd, Dick Giordano and Frank McLaughlin, our heroine learns to fight in the style of the snake. Particularly, the viper. Hmmm, I bet that’s going to be important. Also, the bad guys decide to ride into town again.
Credits: Erin Holroyd (Writer), Dick Giordano (Penciller), Frank McLaughlin (Inker), Lovern Kindzierski (Colorist), John Workman (Letterer), Mike Gold (Editor)
After the August issue of DC Comics’ MAD Magazine featured a spoof on consumer electronics retailer Circuit City titled "Sucker City," the retailer’s corporate office had the publication banned from stores, according to a recent report from Associated Press. The ban was lifted a short time later, however, and the store issued an apology to customers and MAD Magazine.
"We apologize for the knee-jerk reaction, and have issued a retraction order; the affected stores are being directed to put the magazines back on sale," spokesman Jim Babb said in an e-mail response. "The parody of our newspaper ad in the August MAD was very clever. Most of us at Circuit City share a rich sense of humor and irony … but there are occasional temporary lapses."
The spoof features advertisements for items like HDTVs and video games, including the Nintendo Wii "Guaranteed In Stock … if you’re friends with an employee who hid it in the back for you. Otherwise, ooh, sorry, all sold out."
What made this story especially interesting to me, though, was the sense of humor the retailer showed in its response:
"As a gesture of our apology and deep respect for the folks at MAD Magazine, we are creating a cross-departmental task force to study the importance of humor in the corporate workplace and expect the resulting Powerpoint presentation to top out at least 300 pages, chock full of charts, graphs and company action plans."
At least, I think that was a joke. It had to be a joke, right?
Check out the AP story for more on the Circuit City/MAD Magazine hub-bub, including the customary, humorous response from the MAD crew.
Here’s a story that might be more suited to PBS’s Antiques Roadshow than a comics audience, but it’s pretty cool nonetheless.
A man in Woodbury Heights, New Jersey picked up some old printing plates and then, years later, he checked them out and found some were of little-known Will Eisner cartoons.
This article in the South Jersey Courier-Journal retells the story.
In his studio, Getsinger stood by thin, metal comic strip printing plates stacked neatly in hundreds of rows. The collection’s value is unknown, but Getsinger believes the entire collection is worth more than $1 million with printing and publishing possibilities.
Getsinger has two almost-complete collections of Will Eisner’s first published comic strips, "Harry Karry" and "Uncle Otto."
"I found these "Harry Karry’ plates by a "Willis B. Rensie,’ which is Eisner spelled backward," Getsinger said. "I did some research and also learned that these "Life in the Roar’ comics by "Kane’ were early comics of "Batman’ creator Bob Kane.
"It’s like discovering the Holy Grail."
Getsinger has more than 80 plates of Kane and 85 plates of comic book legend and "The Spirit" creator Eisner, who died in 2005.
Actor Jamie Bamber has had a diverse and successful career, gaining noteriety playing Lt. Archie Kennedy in the Hornblower series of TV movies, working in HBO’s Band of Brothers and guest appearances on the series Cold Case and Ghost Whisperer. However, Bamber’s career rocketed into the spotlight when he took the role of Lee "Apollo" Adama in the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica television series — which is soon to broadcast its final season on the Sci-Fi Channel.
During the recent San Diego Comic-Con, I had a chance to speak to Bamber about his upcoming direct-to-DVD feature film Pulse 2: Afterlife and Battlestar Galactica. We discussed what made him interested in Pulse 2, how he feels about the end of Battlestar Galactica and what moments from the show were his favorites.
COMICMIX: Jamie, what can you tell us about Pulse 2: Afterlife?
JAMIE BAMBER: It’s like Kramer vs. Kramer in an armageddon backdrop, featuring a dad who is trying to put his life back together. He’s working on his relationships and putting them back together in the aftermath of an Internet-fueled apocolypse zombie scenario.
CMix: What made you take on this film?
JB: I had time. I liked the character and I could relate to what he’s going through. I can understand and empathize with a dad and his fear for his child in a dangerous world.
CMix: Having been on such a strong ensemble show like BSG, playing the lead in a film must have been appealing…
JB: I liked the idea of fronting a movie on the quiet, which as an actor is quite a useful thing to do without it being everywhere. This is also a straight-to-DVD project, which also appealed to me.
CMix: You’ve finished shooting on Battlestar now, right? (more…)
When a graphic novel is billed as a cross between Men in Black and Jurassic Park, it’s no surprise to see a studio come running, dollar signs in their eyes.
Such is Disney with Monster Attack Network, according to a story in the Hollywood Reporter.
The book is published by AIT/Planet Lar and originally came out in 2007.
The adventure tale, written by Marc Bernardin and Adam Freeman with art by Nima Sorat, is set on the picture-perfect Pacific island of Lapuatu, which is populated by giant monsters. There, a team of adventurers deal with rampages and related crises and clean up messes afterwards. The team faces its biggest challenge when a shady industrialist shows up.
Dabel Bros. Publishing recently announced plans to adapt bestselling author Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Dark-Hunter novels as manga-style comics, targeting a 2009 release for the adaptations of the first two books in the series, Night Pleasures and Night Embrace.
Joshua Hale Fialkov (Elk’s Run, Cyblade) will script the adaptations, with Claudia Campos providing the art.
From the Sherrilyn Kenyon’s official website:
In the world of the Dark-Hunters nothing is ever as it seems. Life and death both take on a whole knew meaning as this immortal cadre of warriors fight to protect mankind from those creatures and demons who would prey on us.
(via ICv2)
Earlier this year, retailer David Pirkola was seriously injured during a robbery of his comic shop in Kentwood, Mich. He’s still recovering, and now Boom! Studios and Jeffrey Brown are launching a benefit auction.
Brown is a customer and friend of Pirkola, and he partnered with Boom and iFanboy.com to do a tribute page of the Warhammer 40,000 comic, which you can see at right.
The auction is now running, and you can find it right here.
Brown is best known for his book The Incredible Change-Bots. Here’s his thoughts from a press release:
"I became a father a year and a half ago, so it’s been a while since I’ve had the time to field my Ultramarines force or let my epic scale ork gargants rampage across the battlefield," said Brown. "I keep up with the comics, novels, and White Dwarf magazine, but spend more time playing with buses and trucks now. It was a great experience to work on this page and get back to the game that I love, and it was even better knowing I could help David by doing it."
You saw the story, posted here on our own beloved website a couple of days ago: comic book movies have earned over a billion United States dollars this summer, despite an iffy economy that may or may not have something to do with those loveable funsters who frolick near the Potomac.
(I’m writing this Sunday evening. A hundred and sixty nine days. Tickticktick… And please excuse the digression.)
So the aspirations of those folk we mentioned last week – to be respectable and accepted and part of the mainstream – has been realized, though only a few of them are still around to enjoy whatever perks this brings.
Check it out. A billion-with-a-B-dollars! Oh sure, we comics guys have not had to hide our shame for quite a while now. There are the postage stamps and gigs at places like the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian and classes taught at major universities and whole sections of bookstores devoted to comics material and if you donate the graphic novels you won’t read again to your local library, they’ll probably be accepted, maybe even with a smile. But in our world, and in most others that I know about, material goods are the emblems of what the citizenry considers success. And that bil will buy a lot of material goods.
Someone – I have no idea who – observed that one of the ways to discern a society’s values is to look at its architecture: in the middle ages, in Europe, the cathedral was the biggest building in the burg. Now? Well, about a mile from where I’m sitting is the biggest, and some would say ugliest, structure in Rockland County and it ain’t a church, amigos, it’s a shopping mall.
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
Stephen Colbert, we have your writer for “The Chronicles of Amber”!
January 20, 2023
The Law Is A Ass #460: Those “For Life” Sentences Are Nonsense
February 24, 2022
