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Planet Paradise by Jesse Lonergan

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This is not a sequel to Hedra . There’s no way it could be set in the same universe. But they’re from the same creator, from the same year, in the same genre, with a similar feel and with SFnal technology that works roughly the same way.

So maybe it’s a companion piece, or another element in an era in Jesse Lonergan’s career. I liked both books a lot, so I’m hoping something like the latter: I’d be happy to see him do SF books like this for a while, if he and the market agree.

(Although…they’re both from four years ago, and I suspect the market has not agreed, since the comics market has been deeply disagreeable for close to a decade now.)

But let me get more specific about Planet Paradise , a roughly hundred-page standalone SF graphic novel. It’s the story of a vacation that goes wrong.

Eunice and Peter live in some medium-future multi-system society, seemingly a pretty rich and healthy and happy one. They’re off for a vacation on Rydra-17, billed as “the Paradise Planet.” The book opens with them individually settling into their hibernation pods, which will then be slotted into bays in the ship.

This isn’t a fast-FTL universe; it takes more than eleven days in transit to go from wherever-we-started to Rydra-17. The two crewmembers of this unnamed ship are the only ones awake for the journey.

There’s a cliché that says a story is about what happens when something goes wrong: that’s the case here. There’s some kind of malfunction. The ship ends up crash-landing on some unknown world. One of the crewmembers is killed; the pods are scattered across the landscape and some of them have failed or broken, killing their inhabitants.

Eunice’s pod is intact, but it pops open. We don’t know why. But there she is: unexpectedly on an alien world, in the middle of a disaster scene, the only human on the surface.

Well, not quite the only one. The captain of the ship, Wanda, also survived: she’s got a broken leg and is deep in the wreckage. Wanda yells for help, and Eunice saves her. So then the two of them can work to save the rest and call for rescue.

It’s not that simple: Wanda is demanding and injured and obnoxious and treats Eunice as just the hands to do the things she wants done. Eunice is overwhelmed and untrained and unsure. And there are unexpected large carnivores on this planet.

They do manage to find a distress beacon and set it up. An emergency service agent arrives a few days later – again, travel between planets in this universe is at least several days. That does not go exactly as planned, either.

But Eunice and Wanda do get off this planet. Eunice does finally get to Rydra-17, and her vacation with Peter. But, as we see in the last scene, her experience has changed her – unexpectedly, making her more confident and able in another dangerous situation.

Lonergan’s panels here aren’t quite as visually inventive as the wordless Hedra, but he plays with size and sequence and format a lot – there are some excellent big vertical panels near the beginning to emphasize the solidity of the ship and the old-fashioned lying-back take-off position, among other fun sequences – and his art is dynamic, great at both quiet storytelling and the more energetic action moments.

He also makes his world lived-in and specific; his characters consume soap-opera-ish media and grumble to each other about corporate budget cuts. This seems to be a pretty nice universe, all-in-all, but it’s not perfect, and the imperfections led to this story – we can imagine those same budget cuts caused a little slacking off of maintenance that caused the original malfunction.

This is not a big story: it has a small cast, a short time-frame, and a modest scope. But it’s strongly focused, has a great relatable main character in Eunice, looks lovely, and does everything it needs to do smartly, quickly, and with great style. It is a neat SF graphic novel, totally enjoyable and self-contained, and I would be happy if the world had many more books like that.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Little Josephine: Memory in Pieces by Valérie Villieu and Raphaël Sarfati

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The book is not nearly as puckish as the cover suggests. Anyone looking for a Little Nemo-inspired imaginative adventure should look elsewhere; this is a memoir by a French visiting nurse about one particular patient of hers, an old woman with an unspecified dementia-related condition.

And this is all true, as far as I can see. This all happened, to the real Valérie Villieu, and she’s telling that story to us, with the aid of artist Raphaël Sarfati. It was a little while ago – Little Josephine: Memory in Pieces  covers a few years in the mid-Aughts, with the 2007 French presidential election somewhere in the middle – and the French edition came out in 2012, to be eventually translated by Nanette McGuiness for this 2020 English-language edition from Humanoids.

Josephine was a woman in her mid-eighties, living alone in a small Paris apartment, as she had for nearly sixty years. She’d recently been found wandering disoriented in the street, and, after a brief hospitalization, was back in her apartment with daily visits from caregivers and an official legal conservatorship to manage her affairs. Villieu was working as a visiting nurse, with a roster of patients like Josephine, who she would see several times a week, to evaluate and support, administering medications and keeping track of their conditions. Villieu seems to have been part of a nursing team; she uses “we” somewhat regularly to talk about the work done, and occasionally shows what I think is a colleague also visiting Josephine.

But it’s mostly Villieu’s personal experience: how she met this woman, how they interacted, what happened over those years, how Josephine affected Valérie.

A lot of the book is the day-to-day: complaining about the often-lackadaisical work of the caregivers, battling to get the conservator to actually do something and not just complain about how many cases he was handling, and slowly gaining Josephine’s trust. Villieu writes at length about the work she does, and how she interacted with Josephine, and what Josephine was like as a person – this is a graphic novel with extensive captions, a very narrated story.

Villieu cared for Josephine for years – and I mean “cared” in both the professional and the personal sense. And she makes their relationship real here, without sugarcoating it. Josephine had a serious, unreversable, progressive mental illness, that confused her and made her forget thousands of things, that changed her moods and made her combative at times. Dementia is one of those horrible diseases we don’t like to think about – for ourselves or for ones we care for – since it turns the sufferer into a different person, bit by bit stripping away important pieces of who they were and replacing those with a pseudo-childish shell, smaller and diminished and occasionally realizing that.

(I may be biased: a very close family member is going through something similar right now, so this is more real to me than another health problem would be.)

Josephine was still a quirky, interesting person: dementia had stolen a lot from her, but a lot of her was still there, the woman who had lived in that Paris apartment for decades and still had stories of the ’50s and ’60s to tell when she could remember them.

That’s who Villieu wants to celebrate: the woman she met, behind the disease, the woman she supported and helped for a few years, giving her some more happy life at a point when she could easily have been shoved into an institution and left to decline quickly. Little Josephine is a more serious, deeper book than the cover would make a reader expect, but it’s well worth the journey.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Eartha by Cathy Malkasian

Cathy Malkasian’s 2017 graphic novel Eartha is a metaphor for social media. It’s more than that, too, but that’s the log-line: it is centrally an argument against fake “connectivity” and the addiction to bad news.

(Whether the problem it metaphorizes is even our current problem in 2024 I’ll leave as an argument the reader can have; I’m a bit dubious myself.)

Our main character is a very large woman – twice as tall as everyone around her, and notably more solidly built as well – among the gnomish happy rustics of the sleepy town of Echo Fjord. She’s the usual soft-hearted giant: we first see her saving people from a flood of water caused by her own mother’s flightiness. Most of the folks of Echo Fjord either grow crops or help to corral and progress the dreams of the faraway City Across the Sea, but Eartha has what seems to be a unique role: she’s so much taller and stronger that she’s the one to carry all the heavy things, and we keep seeing her pick up and carry the older people, as if they are babies and she is the adult.

The dreams of the city people is an important, complicated system – evocative without being quite as directly metaphorical as the didactic social media metaphor (which I’ll get to in a moment). The people of the City Across the Sea have busy, complicated lives, so their dreams separate from them quickly. Those dreams manifest in Echo Fjord, generally popping out of the soil as purple-hued people – who look mostly like their dreamers – focused on a monomania and with a brilliant beacon of light shining straight up from the top of their heads. The Echo Fjordians attach “shadows” to the dreams to keep them from flying away, and watch them as they act out their psychodramas – usually a few times – before they inevitably go through the Dream Departures area and dissipate while crossing a broad, sunny field.

The Echo Fjordians have been guiding these dreams for a thousand years – before that, they were major trading partners with the City, but they broke off contact because it was unseemly to profit from knowing their trading partners’ innermost secrets. So this is a major activity of these people, but it’s not an industry: it’s amusing and entertaining and central to their lives in the way that a church or tradition could be, but it doesn’t bring them money or anything positive other than psychologically.

And the dreams are waning. It’s been a week since there were any, and then we see a bare few of them.

Eartha, of course, is more worried than most people about the change, and goes around talking to various Echo Fjordians to figure out what to do. The aged keeper of the Archives, Old Lloyd, tricks her into taking a journey to the City to find out what happened – Eartha is uniquely right for this job, not just for the physical reasons we can see, but due to other things Old Lloyd knows that become clear later.

So she takes a small rowboat, and sets off. Somehow – this is a fable, basically, so a lot of things are “somehow” – she arrives at the City, to find it in turmoil. The average people of the city are selling everything they own, bit by bit, to a group of men in plaid jackets called the Bouncers, in return for biscuits with four-word “news” reports printed on them. The biscuit messages are all negative – HYSTERICAL JACKASS STABS RECLUSE; that kind of thing – and the point of the exercise is to be connected to the truth of the world, which is negative, and to gain that knowledge by giving up material things.

Of course, it’s all a scam, but it takes a long time for the naïve, confused Eartha to realize that. The bouncers are led by a man named Primus, a nasty twisted authoritarian obsessed with women’s breasts. Eartha runs into him, wanders through the city, is led by a talking cat who knows more than it’s willing to tell Eartha, and eventually learns the truth.

The biscuit business started out normally, but it picked up steam when they started printing messages on the biscuits. The messages are not actually true – they’re just generated randomly – but they seem true because they’re negative, and that led to the feedback loop that ended with the Bouncers controlling the whole city and close to owning everything.

There is a resistance movement – which sends rubbings of gravestone life-summaries down gutter downspouts, and is more effective in breaking the hold of the biscuits on metropolitans’ minds than you would expect – and Eartha joins it, in her confused, easily-led way. It turns out that many of the major characters – mostly ones I haven’t mentioned – are related to each other, and we learn their stories.

Eartha is a didactic story with a message to deliver, so of course it has to end well, to bring Eartha back home and underline its message. (Rural is better than urban, lives are each unique and special, murderous authoritarians should be stopped – that kind of thing.) Old Lloyd shows up again, to deliver large pieces of that message.

Eartha looks lovely – its people are quirky and odd-looking, with lived-in faces, so maybe “lovely” isn’t quite the right word – and it’s full of ideas, impressively constructed and intensely imagined. I had a vague sense that it was a long argument against something that has already shifted substantially since the book was published, but that’s not the book’s fault.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness by Bryan Lee O’Malley

This is the one where things become both more and less complicated. On balance, probably less overall, by the end, which is unusual for the mid-point of a series.

For any Gen Z readers coming to Scott Pilgrim for the first time (or, I guess, older people who managed to miss it): this is a six-book graphic novel series by Bryan Lee O’Malley, in a manga-inspired format and video game-inspired world, about a twenty-something slacker from Toronto and his friends, mostly about how he meets a new girlfriend and has to defeat her seven evil exes, but also partly about his band and some related stuff. The six books all came out in the back half of the Aughts, so I guess they’re core Millennial culture, if you want to generation-type them, but Scott himself is such a stereotypical slacker that this Gen X guy found him and his world instantly recognizable.

Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness  is the third book; the first two were Precious Little Life  and Vs. the World . Current editions have color by Nathan Fairbairn; original publication was in black and white.

This one is the all-exes-all-the-time volume: Scott’s new girlfriend Ramona Flowers (the quirky, cool American with a mysterious past) had a previous boyfriend, Todd Ingram, who is the bassist in the hot new band The Clash at Demonhead. And Scott’s ex-girlfriend, Envy Adams, is the leader of that band. So there’s bad blood all around with TCaD – even more so because Envy’s band is more slick, successful, and success-oriented.

TCaD is in Toronto; they’re playing some shows, and Scott’s band Sex Bob-omb is opening for them. Which is just as awkward – for Scott in particular – as it sounds.

So there’s a lot of scenes here of Scott uncomfortable around Envy – she basically kicked him and Steven Stills out of the band the three of them founded, back in high school, and Scott is not known for being comfortable with conflict and ambition and stress in the first place. And there’s a fair bit of flashback, to show those older relationships – Ramona with Todd, Scott with Envy, and even Envy with Todd, since they’re together now. (Well, relatively together – Todd is a cheater there as well as on a level that will affect his fighting abilities later in the book.)

On the positive side, Scott’s most recent ex, the teenager Knives Chau, is less obsessed with him here and more with Envy. She’s maybe growing up a bit, and, as of this point, seems to be over Scott and settling into a new relationship with Young Neil.

And, of course, there are some fights. Scott is at first utterly incapable of fighting Todd – who has superpowers because he’s a vegan, in one of the best-known and most amusing minor plot points of the series – and there are other small and large battles throughout, including the quick bit where Knives gets the highlights punched out of her hair.

The whole Scott Pilgrim saga has a wonderful control of tone and an infectious joy in its own fictional structures – there’s a lovely sequence early in this book that runs through nearly the whole cast, during the first tense meeting with Envy and her band, with captions to say what everyone wants at that moment. There’s a lot of similar moments, where O’Malley is playing with the comics form and with his video-game references, both to make jokes and to quirkily underline serious moments. (When Scott tries to run to access a “save point,” we can feel his flop sweat and panic.)

In some ways, this book is the core of the whole series – sure, it’s not all resolved here, and you can see O’Malley setting some of the hooks for the back half – but this is where the Scott-Envy-Ramona-Todd broken quadrangle happens, and that’s one of the major foci of the whole story.

But, of course, even after getting past Todd here, Scott knows: there are four evil exes yet to fight.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Animated Kahhori Jumps to Print in November

New York, NY— August 19, 2024 — Marvel Comics’ annual celebration of Native American Heritage Month will be extra special this year with KAHHORI: RESHAPER OF WORLDS #1. This new one-shot will introduce KAHHORI, the breakout hero from the second season of Marvel Animation’s anthology Disney+ series What If…?.

This new installment in the Marvel’s Voices line will be written and drawn by an array of exciting talent, including Kahhori’s co-creator and What If…? writer Ryan Little. The character’s debut adventures will also be written by Indigenous creators Arihhonni “Honni” David and Kelly Lynne D’Angelo in their Marvel Comics debuts and feature art by acclaimed Marvel artists David Cutler, Jim Terry, and more! 

The Mohawk warrior Kahhori fell into Sky World and our hearts from her first appearance fighting invaders to her home. She’s already helped save all of reality from a demented Doctor Strange and secured peace in her own world… So what NOW? Award-winning storyteller Ryan Little launches Kahhori into the 616! Chasing a threat out of Sky World, she lands in the fiery streets of Hell’s Kitchen! But culture shock will be the least of her problems as her strange adversary tears through NYC. Featuring exciting guest stars and the comic debuts of some extraordinary creators, Marvel’s Voices brings you an extra-special anthology celebrating Indigenous heritage and one of the most exciting characters to emerge from the MCU!

KAHHORI: RESHAPER OF WORLDS #1
Written by RYAN LITTLE, ARIHHONNI “HONNI” DAVID, KELLY LYNNE D’ANGELO & MORE
Art by DAVID CUTLET, JIM TERRY & MORE
Cover by AFUA RICHARDSON

On Sale 11/6

Minnie Mouse Channels her Inner Captain Marvel Come November

New York, NY— August 20, 2024 — Over the last year, the Marvel mythos has been infused with Disney magic in new What If…? one-shots that put Mickey Mouse and the gang into landmark Marvel comic sagas! Following Donald Duck’s remarkable adventures as Wolverine and Thor, Minnie steps up to take on the mantle of one of Marvel’s most iconic female superheroes this November in MARVEL & DISNEY: WHAT IF…? MINNIE BECAME CAPTAIN MARVEL #1!

Crafted by a team of accomplished Disney comic creators—writers Steve Behling and Luca Barbieri along with artist Giada Perissinotto—MARVEL & DISNEY: WHAT IF…? MINNIE BECAME CAPTAIN MARVEL will put a unique spin on Carol Danvers’ superhero origins, as told in 1977’s Ms. Marvel #1-4 by industry legends Gerry Conway, John Buscema, Chris Claremont, Joe Sinnott, Jim Mooney and David Anthony Kraft. See Minnie tackle the mystery of her mysterious new cosmic powers and take first flight as Ms. Marvel in this thrilling saga featuring Peg Leg Pete as the villainous Scorpion, which includes appearances by classic Disney stars like Scrooge McDuck and more!

WHAT IS THE SECRET PAST OF MINNIE MOUSE? Our story finds The Chronicle newspaper reporter Minnie Mouse tasked with an exposé on a new hero on the scene in Duckburg, CAPTAIN MARVEL! But Peg Leg Pete – Scorpion complicates her plans by attacking the Chronicle building! To make matters worse, John D. Rockerduck and the Beagle Boys attack Scrooge McDuck’s money bin, and when Captain Marvel shows up to stop them, Minnie discovers an incredible secret about her past! What is Minnie’s connection to Duckburg’s sensational new hero, Captain Marvel?

“Steve, Luca, and Giada perfectly capture the spirit of Carol Danvers’ origin, a real nostalgic treat with a Disney twist. Guaranteed to be the most fun comic of the month!” Editor Mark Paniccia said. 

Check out the covers, including variants by superstar artists Peach Momoko, Elena Casagrande, and Phil Noto, and preorder MARVEL & DISNEY: WHAT IF…? MINNIE BECAME CAPTAIN MARVEL #1 at your local comic shop today.

MARVEL & DISNEY: WHAT IF…? MINNIE BECAME CAPTAIN MARVEL #1
Written by STEVE BEHLING & LUCA BARBIERI
Art and Cover by GIADA PERISSINOTTO
Variant Cover by ELENA CASAGRANDE
Variant Cover by PEACH MOMOKO
Variant Cover by PHIL NOTO
Virgin Variant Cover by PHIL NOTO

On Sale 11/20

Pearl by Sherri L. Smith and Christine Norrie

This may be me being cynical, I’m sorry to say. And that’s not anything a nice, brand-new YA graphic novel needs. But I am struck by the way that memoir has so taken over YA comics that everything else bends to that format – even a book like this, which is entirely fictional.

Pearl  is the story of Amy, a Japanese-American girl growing up in Hawaii in 1941. The book doesn’t say exactly how old she is, but I’m going to guess around twelve – old enough to take a long trip by herself, young enough to still be a kid, just the right age for a book like this. And Pearl reads as if Amy was a real person, telling us her story – I was initially surprised when we got a “1941” caption, since I thought it would be a modern-day story about discovering her heritage. (Sometimes not reading the publicity material is a bad idea!)

Amy narrates the book, first telling the story of her great-grandmother, a late 19th century pearl-diver from Okinawa who gives the book its title and provides some parallax to Amy’s story, and then quickly brings her family story up to her time. Now, I read this as an uncorrected proof, and it was obvious in a few places that panels were missing or FPO – some other pages seemed to not have the final color/tone in place. So anything else I write about here might also have changed: what I saw was an early, not-quite-finished version.

So if I say that Amy’s narration is mostly short and factual, evocative rather than digging into her emotions, know that might have changed a bit. Probably not radically – I don’t expect Pearl‘s text doubled or tripled in size – but especially at major moments, it might be a little more personal in the final version than the one I read.

Writer Sherri L. Smith puts us in Amy’s shoes without exactly putting us in her head – we follow her throughout, but see her mostly from outside, as things happen to her. Pearl is largely the story of things that happen to Amy – major, world-historical events – that she has no control over and is just swept along by. I might have been hoping for somewhat more choice on Amy’s part, which isn’t entirely realistic for her age and time and place.

Comics are at least half pictures, though, and artist Christine Norrie’s art is excellent at storytelling, with a particularly good eye for body language and the telling image. (I don’t know how she worked with Smith on this book, so the visual storytelling could easily have been partially or mostly from Smith, if she did thumbnails or a panel-by-panel script.) So we don’t get lots of words about how Amy feels and what she does, but we do see that, and can quickly tell.

I don’t want to get into all the details – it’s a quick read, the kind of comic where the pictures carry a lot of the weight – but Amy goes on what’s supposed to be a few-months trip to visit her family in Japan, in the fall of 1941. And her family lives near Hiroshima. The young audience that Pearl is mostly aimed at won’t necessarily know the significance of “fall of 1941” and “Hiroshima,” but I think anyone reading this post will.

Amy spends the war in Japan. We see it from her point of view – limited, contingent, precise. She’s put to work, goes through travails, learns about what’s happening to her parents back in the USA. Smith and Norrie aren’t quite telling the whole story of the Pacific War here, but they are trying to get through all of the high points that would realistically relate to a Japanese-American girl in Japan.

The art is always evocative, closely focused on Amy and what she sees. There’s a sequence of pages, near the end, with real power and heft, and other stretches of beauty and energy, such as the opening with Amy’s ancestor diving for pearls. It is a lovely book, thoughtful and visually appealing, with a somewhat minimalist text appropriate for the audience. It’s not quite what I thought it would be, but that’s entirely on me not paying enough attention up front.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

REVIEW: The Mythmakers

The Mythmakers
By John Hendrix
Abrams Fanfare/224 pages/$24.99

In 1976, SUNY-Binghamton offered a comparative literature course focusing on C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Unfortunately, I was a freshman, and it was a senior seminar, so I ignored it (my clever wife ignored that prerequisite and took it as a freshman anyway). Thanks to this graphic novel, I finally feel like I took the course.

Tolkien’s influence these days looms largest over Western literature with his reinvention of High Fantasy and worldbuilding that has been imitated but never surpassed ever since. Lewis’s work is deemed more Young Adult these days, and his religious works, other than The Screwtape Letters, have dropped out of the mainstream. The film adaptations of his Narnia novels have paled in comparison to the Peter Jackson-directed Lord of the Rings trilogy. (Although Greta Gerwig’s Netflix take on Narnia may be cause for hope.)

Hancock mixes prose and graphic storytelling to trace the backgrounds and lives of Lewis and Tolkien until they met at Oxford. Both had their share of personal travails and challenges growing into adulthood and both used literature as a balm. It’s no surprise, then, that they would meet and bond over their passion for Norse Mythology.

With a Lion and a Wizard acting as avatars, we are walked through their lives, loves, and letters, watching the famed Inklings form then fracture during the 1940s. By then, Lewis had written his best-selling space trilogy and become a nationally recognized voice on the radio. Tolkien had the surprise smash success of The Hobbit to sustain him while he stalled in writing a sequel.

Hendrix shows how they admired and supported one another, even after their careers and lives diverged and the friendship waned. Even late in life, Lewis loved and supported Tolkien from afar, being the one to nominate him for the Novel Prize in Literature.

Hendrix provides tons of context for what the state of imaginative literature was like at the time, but he wisely takes the deeper dives and places them as appendixes, letting readers choose to flip to the back for more or carry on. Reading it either way is fine, but it works best by reading it all. His artwork is pleasing and well-suited to the subject matter.

The review copy provided was in black and white, but one glance at the color sample suggests this will be a well-received volume. Anyone who appreciates one or both authors will do well to add this to their library. And for teachers like me, this is an excellent distillation of the power of myth and its influence through the centuries.

40th Anniversary Celebrated with 4K Nightmare on Elm Street Release

Burbank, Calif., August 15, 2024—To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the supernatural slasher film A Nightmare on Elm Street from New Line Cinema and renowned horror director Wes Craven, the 1984 film will be available for purchase Digitally in 4K Ultra HD on October 1 and on 4K UHD Blu-ray Disc on October 15.

A Nightmare on Elm Street, which spawned a franchise and introduced audiences to iconic horror villain Freddy Krueger, will be available to purchase on Ultra HD Blu-ray Disc online and in-store at major retailers and available for purchase Digitally from Amazon Prime Video, AppleTV, Google Play, Fandango at Home and more.

The 4K UHD remaster of A Nightmare on Elm Street includes both the 1984 theatrical version and an uncut version that includes eight seconds of additional unrated footage.

Wes Craven (Scream) directed the film from his own screenplay. It stars John Saxon, Ronee Blakely, Heather Langenkamp, Amanda Wyss, Nick Corri, Johnny Depp, and Robert Englund and is produced by Robert Shaye.

About the Film
Can your nightmares be fatal? In this classic of the horror film genre that launched a movie franchise, a hideously scarred man who was murdered by a lynch mob returns years later in the terrifying nightmares of his killer’s teenage children… and the dreaming teenagers are starting to die in their sleep.

A Nightmare on Elm Street Digital release and Ultra HD Blu-ray disc contain the following previously released special features:

  • Ready Freddy Focus Points
  • Commentary with Wes Craven, Robert Englund, Heather Langenkamp, Ronnie Blakely, Robert Shaye, and Sara Risher.
  • Commentary with Wes Craven, Heather Langenkamp, John Saxon, and Jacques Haitkin.
  • Alternate endings
  • The House that Freddy Built: The Legacy of New Line Horror
  • Never Sleep Again: A Nightmare on Elm Street
  • Night Terrors: The Origins of Wes Craven’s Nightmares

BASICS

A Nightmare on Elm Street
Ultra HD Blu-ray Languages: English, Spanish, Parisian French
Ultra HD Blu-ray Subtitles: English SDH, Spanish, Parisian French
Theatrical and Uncut Version Run Time: 91 minutes
Theatrical Version Rating: R for strong bloody horror violence and gore, language, drug use and some sexuality/nudity.
Uncut Version Rating: Unrated
Digital Street Date: October 1, 2024
Physical Street Date: October 15, 2024

Hellverine Gains Solo Title

New York, NY— August 14, 2024 — Because you demanded it—HELLVERINE rides again! This December, the breakout character will headline his first-ever ongoing series by writer and Hellverine co-creator Benjamin Percy and blazing hot artist Raffaele Ienco (Star Wars: Darth Vader).

Following HELLVERINE’s debut in last year’s Ghost Rider/Wolverine: Weapons of Vengeance crossover, hellfire was passed from father to son as Logan’s son Akhiro, formerly known as Daken, took over the mantle in a 4-issue HELLVERINE limited series. That saga concluded today, and now, Percy will take this hellish journey to even darker depths as Akihiro embraces his transformation and dives claws first into Marvel’s superheroic landscape, as well as its demonic underworld. 

It’s hellfire-fueled, claw-slashing action in the Mighty Marvel Manner as HELLVERINE blazes a new path across the Marvel Universe! The Demon Bagra-ghul possessed Wolverine, turning him into a killing machine…but Logan is no stranger to caging the beast within his soul, and the demon learned his heroic ways. Now it’s resurrected Akihiro, and the two must learn to live as one—the HELLVERINE! But they can’t do it alone–enter Doctor Strange!

On Hellverine’s success and future, Percy shared, “I was writing Wolverine, and I was writing Ghost Rider. Of course, I was going to bring them together. The Weapons of Vengeance storyline was a monstrous hit, in part because Geoff Shaw and I introduced the Hellverine, a version of Logan with a flaming skull and flaming claws. The fan enthusiasm was such that a Marvel Legends toy was announced, and a spin-off limited series got greenlit. I had so much fun expanding the mythos of the demon Bagra-Ghul and finding a way to not only bring Akihiro back from his savage death in Sabretooth War but to explore some fresh possibilities for a complicated character I’ve always loved. And now? There’s more mayhem and occultism, and hellfire on the horizon. I’m grateful to readers and retailers for their support because a Hellverine ongoing is coming your way. I’m joining forces with powerhouse artist Raffaele Ienco, and we’ve got huge, horrifying plans for the Hellverine and his role in the 616.”

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