Category: News

The long-awaited graphic novel Hammer Of The Gods: Mortal Enemy
by Mike (Powers) Oeming and Mark Wheatley will be debuting at this week’s Baltimore Comic-Con. All three will be available at the Insight Studios booth, #1911.

Furthermore, the remaining 70 copies of the Lone Justice ashcan edition will also be available. Serialized here on ComicMix, Lone Justice will begin its ten-part run from IDW/ComicMix in December.

The Baltimore Comic-Con will be this Saturday and Sunday at the mammoth Baltimore Convention Center along the waterfront.

“We’ve received tremendous fan feedback from the online incarnation of Lone Justice: Crash, and I really enjoy the immediacy of it,” Wheatley said. “This ashcan is the first time any of this material will see print, and that brings an excitement all its own.” TInnell will also be at the Comic-Con, joining Oeming and Wheatley at the Insight Comics booth.

Lone Justice: Crash! is the second time Wheatley and Tinnell have teamed up for a ComicMix serialization. Their first effort, EZ Street, the tale of two creative brothers, was nominated for a Harvey Award. It also contained a comic-within-a-comic aspect, as it featured Lone Justice as one creation of its central characters. Despite the obvious connection between the tales, however, both graphic novels can be enjoyed entirely independently from the other.

Being a superhero isn’t just dangerous work, it’s also very expensive. Imagine a recession-era Batman without Bruce Wayne’s fortune or Iron Man without Tony’s Stark’s billions. Their respective crime-fighting enterprises would be very different – or perhaps all together grind to a halt – if their money was to simply disappear. Just like many Americans in the past year, that’s exactly what has happened to Lone Justice, the pulp-style action-adventure hero created by Wheatley (Breathtaker, Mars) and writer Robert Tinnell (Feast of the Seven Fishes, Sight Unseen). Our hero experienced the devastating financial loss of the Great Depression, but he didn’t lose his drive to keep fighting crime…regardless of the consequences.

“Given our title, Lone Justice: Crash!, it was difficult to resist calling this the Lone Justice: Crashcan, but life is confusing enough as it is,” Wheatley laughed. “So, c’mon by the booth and pick up of the Lone Justice: Crash! Ashcan!”

After a small hiatus, the geek talk series is back with a vengeance!

This week, hosts Alan Kistler and Carrie Wright talk with Halloween director Rob Zombie, Battlestar Galactica and Blade Runner actor Edward James Olmos and novelist David Mack, talking about remakes, reboots and sequels:

And if you want to see what else is in store for the series, check our cool trailer!

Every week, “Crazy Sexy Geeks: The Series” will discuss topics such as super-hero fashion, the best time travel stories, movie monsters, mythology in comics, gay characters in media, and what makes a good adaptation. You can find new episodes right here and on the YouTube channel “CrazySexyGeeksSeries.”

In a move guaranteed to accelerate the adoption of the PDF review copy, the Federal Trade Commission revised their “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials” (click here to download),
urging bloggers who review products, from a book or DVD to a video game
system, to disclose if they received the product for free when giving
an endorsement. According to the Washington Post, breaking these new guidelines could generate up to $11,000 in fines. (There are no penalties directly associated with violating the rules. But the FTC could seek a cease-and-desist order. If you ignore that, the fines start coming in.) These new guidelines will be put into
effect on December 1, 2009.

Bureau of Consumer Protection representative Richard Cleland was interviewed about the guidelines to clarify for blogging reviewers. In a statement that shows that he doesn’t understand how the book reviewing process works, Cleland said
that newspaper book reviewers are exempt because “the newspaper
receives the book and it allows the reviewer to review it, it’s still
the property of the newspaper.” Cleland saw no problem with a blogger receiving
a book, provided there wasn’t a linked advertisement to buy the book
and that the blogger did not keep the book after he had finished
reviewing it. Keeping the book would, from Cleland’s standpoint, count
as “compensation” and require a disclosure– but there would be no such disclosure required if the blogger took the item and sold it for cash or store credit? Huh? (Are they trying to put the Strand out of business?)

This may accelerate another trend I came across recently: I understand that at least one major website has cut their book reviews back from twice a week to twice a month– and this was before the announcement of these guidelines, so maybe it will just be easier to cut reviews altogether. But apparently, it’ll be fine for them to keep promoting their own product relentlessly, and will presumably do so.

Here’s a tip that you may rarely need, but when you do, hoooo boy.

Let’s say you’ve been flatting a page for coloring, or you’ve sent it out to be flatted. The page comes back, and it looks decent– except when you go to select an area, you discover that the page was created with antialiasing on, which makes it impossible to make a decent selection for further rendering. How do you get the page un-antialiased, without redoing the entire page?

Here’s how.

First, you’re going to need to the BPelt Flatten plugin for Photoshop. (You may find it and Multifill useful for other flatting jobs as well.)

1. Duplicate the color layer.
2. Apply Filter -> Stylize -> Find Edges
3. Apply Image -> Adjustments -> Threshold at 255.
4. Set layer to multiply and merge down.
5. Apply Filter -> bPelt -> Flatten.

That’s it. You’ll get an un-antialiased image. Zooming in, you’ll go from this:

to this:

Picture a world where people gather and interact in joy and
harmony, where groups of gaily-clad youths break into spontaneous song and
dance at regular intervals, where spontaneous conga lines of diverse peoples
stretch for blocks and wind through the market stalls, where merchants sell and
people buy with easy affability and business is brisk, where people debate the
topics of the day with great thoughtfulness and passion and the powers-that-be
listen to the people-at-large. The Twilight Zone? Are you some sort of philosopher,
or something? Well…no and yes. I just spent a weekend at my first New York
Anime Festival at the Javitz Center in Manhattan and I found myself
intermittently amused, bemused, overwhelmed, and overjoyed.

Think about it. Everyone has watched an animated something
in their lifetime, no matter how old. From Looney Tunes to Disney to
Hanna-Barbera to Pixar, we’ve experienced this media and it has been used for
everything from pure entertainment to social commentary. Much of what was seen
in America during the ‘60s and ‘70s was actually from Japan – Speed
Racer, Kimba the White Lion, Astro Boy, Gigantor, Tobor the 8^th Man
– some of which are now known to a new generation only via CGI-heavy
feature films. Yet this is far from past-tense kiddie land. With the global
economy, the on-line connecting of the worlds, and all the ways we
cross-pollinate each other’s cultures, just as Americans seem to be everywhere,
so are the Japanese and the growing connections between East and West, from
McDonald’s to manga.

My professional friends, The Anime Chicks, brought me into
the anime fold only about three years ago with Rose of Versailles and The
Legend of Basara, and a wise one passed along to me the original Full Metal Alchemist (also see subbed on
hulu and other sites the new Full Metal
Alchemist: Brotherhood, now up to ep 26 in Japan, which follows the manga
more closely as anime and manga had diverged with the common delays between the
two medias), which is sometimes too great for words and, as I’ve happily
discovered, it’s consistently named in the top 5 anime ever in many fan and
professional polls. This encouraged me to explore more: Death Note, Trinity Blood
and, God help me, the never-ending Bleach,
all enabled by my colleagues, our very own Scooby Gang. This lead to Saturday all-nighters on Cartoon Network with Moribito, Ghost in the Shell: 2^nd
Gig, Code Geass: LeLouche of the
Rebellion, Blood+, Big O (2^nd season), and Cowboy BeBop. (more…)