This is another one of those weeks when we’re heading back over territory we’ve seen before – I’ve got three follow-up volumes today, all from Yen Press, of somewhat different manga series. So let’s take the zombies first, shall we?

Zombie-Loan, Vol. 3
By Peach-Pit
Yen Press, June 2008, $10.99

This volume starts off very confusingly, with the attractive blonde and brunette guys running somewhere at top speed while the mousy girl with glasses and the other, not-so-mousy girl are having dinner with a group of people who are creepier and creepier the more we see them.

If one has just read the first two volumes, one presumably remembers who all of these people are. For me, it had been two months since I saw Vol. 2, and I’ve read a lot of other things in between. So it took me quite a while to figure out who any of these people were, and I’m not entirely sure I did work out precisely what was going on.

But, to recap from the last time: three teenagers are “zombies” and have to work for “Ferryman,” the head of the Z Loan office, to work off their so-you’re-not-quite-dead loans. More explanation is given for the supernatural workings of this world later on in this volume, but I could only understand part of it, and even that didn’t make much sense.

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Most of the talk about upcoming superhero movies has been dominated by Marvel, which announced a slate of projects after Iron Man raked in the cash.

Meanwhile, DC has fairly floundered (Dark Knight excluded), as Justice League, Wonder Woman and Superman movies haven’t been able to gain traction. One project that’s been largely under the radar seems to be gaining steam, though.

The Geek Files has a nice roundup of info on a forthcoming Green Lantern film, which sounds as if it’s on the fast track to reality. The project is in the hands of TV producer and writer Greg Berlanti.

Berlanti, aged 35, was a writer and producer on Dawson’s Creek and its spin-off Young Americans, creator of Everwood, writer and director of the movie Broken Hearts Club, and is executive producer of Brothers and Sisters and Dirty Sexy Money.

In an interview with Out magazine, Berlanti (right) said: "Whatever free time I have left is pretty much thinking about Green Lantern. That’s all I’ve got time for mentally right now."

Casting is still quite a ways off, but that didn’t stop Geek Files from compiling a list of "fans’ choices" that include Nathan Fillion, David Boreanaz, Josh Duhamel, Jim Caviezal and Ben Browder.

Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1920, Jack Kamen studied at the Art Students League and the Grand Central Art School and actually got his start in sculpture—his first professional job was on the Texas Centenniel.

His illustration career was just beginning when he was called up to the Army in 1942. After World War II, Kamen began drawing comics for Fiction House and Iger Associates, then started working for EC Comics in 1950. He quickly became one of their most prolific artists, particularly on their horror lines though he also worked on crime/suspense and weird science/fantasy books.

Kamen left comics in 1954 and did advertising art and supplemental illustrations for a wide variety of other clients—when Stephen King and George Romero created the horror anthology film Creepshow, an homage to EC’s horror comics, they tapped Kamen to do the artwork. He also illustrated the cover of the graphic novel adaptation.

Joshua Hechinger still hasn’t reached drinking age (that comes in July), but he’s already crafted a true comics gem in Grave Doug Freshley, a mash-up of comedy, horror and Spaghetti Western.

Cowboy and tough guy Doug Freshley takes a bullet to the head at the story’s start, but that’s not enough to stop him from a zombified revenge mission in the five-issue series from Archaia Studios Press. Hechinger recently spoke with me about where that idea came from, his love of Westerns and his upcoming projects.

COMICMIX: First, I’m curious about your choice to do a Western. Is that a genre you’ve long held an interest in? How did the idea of the book come about?

JOSH HECHINGER: I didn’t really care about Westerns one way or another for a while, actually. And then in high school, a friend of mine lent me The Good, The Bad and The Ugly… Pow, that was it. Instant Western fan.

As for Doug, well, a few weeks after watching The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, I was doodling in class instead of paying attention. And I doodled this zombie cowboy and a kinda Huck Finn-y kid. I didn’t really do anything more with it, but it sort of hung around in the back of my head until Marv [artist mpMann] came calling.

CMix: How much comics writing had you done previously?

JH: Well, this is my first real book. But I’d been writing comics nobody else saw since eighth grade or so, and I wrote something like 400 pages of various scripts in a year and change of college. I was doing three to five pages a session, twice a day. Although to be fair, most of it was kinda completely crap.

But anyway, by the time I started Doug, I at least knew how to sit down and just pound out pages. The pages probably weren’t crackling with genius, but I find it easier to clean up something than to nail it on the first draft anyway. The important thing was that I wasn’t sitting down and getting psyched-out by a blank page.

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