Tagged: comics

Mike Mignola Talks Hellboy and Beyond

  • News
  • January 24, 2008

Hellboy creator Mike Mignola explained his growing separation from the character in comics and on screen during this recent chat with Publisher’s Weekly.

The creator’s ever-changing role on the masthead of many of the stories taking place within the Hellboy universe has certainly become more noticeable over the years. With the big-screen sequel to 2004’s Hellboy feature film scheduled for a July 2008 release, as well as a pair of Hellboy animated films hitting shelves over the last few years, many have credited Mignola’s absence to the needs of caretaking for the character’s multimedia growth.

The real reason, according to Mignola, might be a simple case of wanting to move on to the next thing – in comics, that is.

“After 13 years of doing Hellboy, I love the character, I love doing the covers, I love writing the stories, but I’m kind of looking to do something a little different,” Mignola said.

The articles provides a detailed list of many of the Hellboy-centric comics and other projects you can expect to see in ’08 and beyond, including a definitive reference guide and a project Mignola will be working on that occurs within the Hellboy universe, but lacking Hellboy as a character. Fans of the first two Hellboy animated films will be disappointed, though. Mignola says he doesn’t plan to continue producing the straight-to-DVD features.

 

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The Great Divide, by Elayne Riggs

  • News
  • January 23, 2008

elayne-riggs-100-1215696As I’ve made clear in previous columns, I like reading. I have Bloglines subscriptions to almost 700 blogs, of which I probably read 400-500 pretty regularly. I tend to group my blog subscriptions into two major categories, culture and politics – what I call “news and views” – although lately I’ve been supplementing those with blogs speaking to other interests of mine, like food and grammar and LOLcats. And I’ve noticed the same problem with these blogs, particularly the political ones, which I came across in just about every hobby of mine through the years. By and large, the writers seem to believe their subject matter is the only one worth pontificating about, and any blogger who has “outside” interests is not worthy to be in their circle.

We live in an era of divide and conquer, where each faction is encouraged into its own little category, where the idea of a well-rounded individual is anathema to getting ahead, where specialization is the order of the day. Because of deadline pressures, many artists who make their living doing comic books have to choose between penciling and inking. My husband is fond of noting that in England, where he lived for the first 36 years of his life, there was no such artificial division of labour when he learnt his craft. Imagine his frustration when we were going over the rudiments of baseball and he found out about all the different subdivisions of pitchers and fielders! He still can’t understand how a professional ballplayer can’t field at just about any position, and why most pitchers can’t complete an entire game. To tell you the truth, the part of me that’s been a baseball fanatic since girlhood, and remembers lots of complete games, readily agrees.

But everything these days is compartmentalized to within an inch of its life. “General interest” and “Renaissance person” have become almost freakish notions these days. Why this is so in the days of “multitasking” is beyond me. We’re expected to juggle umpteen tasks simultaneously at work but we can’t choose more than one passion in our downtime? (more…)

Youngblood, Young Avengers, Young Legion

It might be a cold January day, but ComicMix Radio warms things up. Lost returns in a bit over a week, Iron Man premieres in just over 100 days and there is a spark of light at the end of the WGA Strike tunnel.

Plus:

  • It’s a pretty good week for new comics and DVDs, including Young Avengers, more Shooter Legion and Torchwood on DVD – we cover it all!
  • Youngblood sells out and gets a "variant within a variant"
  • More on the revival of Wild Cards

Press The Button and let us fill you in on that and a lot more!

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Red-Hot Hulk!

hulk-5431735Those of you brave enough to come out from under your beds after seeing Cloverfield might even bravely venture over to the keyboard to run down a couple of hot links we gathered for you this week:

 
Top Cow Productions pulled in over  2.5 million votes at the official home of Pilot Season here, all in an effort to determine the publishing plans of the line in 2008. Pilot Season released five self-contained pilot issues starring established characters without a current series, all done by established creative teams in 2007. Each issue set up a potential series much like a television pilot episode. In case you still want to cast a vote or two, the polls remain open until tomorrow,
 
The Hero/AtomicComics.com Hulk #1 (Red) that features an exclusive cover by Ed McGuinness, limited to only 5000 copies, can be purchased online here. This special edition of Hulk #1 runs $8 and will also be offered at the Phoenix Cactus Comicon January 26-27, and at a special pre-con party at Atomic Comics where Hulk writer Jeph Loeb and artist Ed McGuinness will be signing on January 25th. 
 
 
BOOM! Studios’ Northwind #1 will receive a second printing and the publisher has also released a trailer for the series as well. See the trailer here and get a free download of Northwind #1 here. By the way, the actual second print will have a slightly altered cover to distinguish itself from the first printing and will be available on January 23rd.
 
You can see those previews of Wildstorm’s Supernatural: Rising Son, here. Did you know that The CW has four more Supernatural episodes to go before the WGA strikes brings the series to a halt?
 
It will be business-as-usual this week on ComicMix Radio as we dig into the new comics and DVDs, and then emerge long enough to continue our quest to find out what some of the insiders in comics are reading these days – it all starts in about 48 hours right here!

Cartoonists Plan Protest of Racial Grouping in Newspapers

  • News
  • January 18, 2008

Candorville, by Darrin BellThe St. Petersburg Times reports that on Feb. 10, a group of notable black cartoonists will be running variations of the same joke in each of their comic strips in order to shed light on a perceived "lumping together" of cartoonists by ethnicity. With many newspapers looking to shake up their format by making changes to the comics section, many of the creators involved in the protest argue that their strips are only included at the expense of other strips created by people of color. This is due to an unwritten rule in the newspaper industry prohibiting more than a certain number of "ethnic" strips in a single issue, the creators claim.

According to The Times:

"…each of them will draw the same strip featuring their own characters – a joke about how readers and some newspaper editors see their work as interchangeable, simply because of the ethnicity of the characters they draw."

Creators named as participants in the protest include Darrin Bell (Candorville), Charlos Gary (Cafe con Leche and Working It Out), Cory Thomas (Watch Your Head), Stephen Bentley (Herb and Jamaal), Jerry Craft (Mama’s Boyz), Stephen Watkins (Housebroken), editorial cartoonist Tim Jackson and Keith Knight (K-Chronicles).

 

The Black Lamb meets the Steel Maiden

  • News
  • January 17, 2008

In today’s thrilling installment of The Black Lamb, Timothy Truman continues his tale of the vampire from space, The Black Lamb.  Good guys, bad guys, magicians, scientists, bounty hunters, double-agents — what more could you want in a full-color, free comic?

The Rare Hulk

A Hero’s Hero

Originally, ComicMix Radio planned to survey the usual round of comic book insiders as to who their favorite characters were: artist, writers, etc. But when we had the chance to pose the question to an actual costume wearing crusader, we leapt at the chance. Find out who The Defuser  – the winner of Who Wants To Be A Super Hero? – admires. Plus:
 
• Everyone took a look at Spidey’s Brand New Day and now it’s sold out!
• There’s a rare Hulk #1 variant – we’ll tell you how to get it
• Another sign of doomsday: High School Musical on the big screen!
 
Warning: Not Pressing The Button makes you an outsider and do you really want that?
 

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Writers’ Strike and Comic-Con: The really, truly important questions

  • News
  • January 17, 2008

The ‘Net is buzzing this week over the potential implications of the writers’ strike on this year’s Comic-Con in San Diego. Sure, there’s a lot of chatter about the effect the strike will have on Hollywood’s participation in the event,with some arguing that less Hollywood means more comics, and that more comics means… well, more comics. Over at The Beat, however, Heidi MacDonald assesses whether there are any answers  to the big questions, then takes a look at some of the other, equally important questions on the peripheral of the discussion.

"At this point it’s quite likely — but depressing — that the writer’s strike will last at least as long as the last one — six months. Networks are filling the space with reality programming, so we could just see more stars of Beauty and the Geek and How Clean is Your House on parade at Comic-Con (These shows have the strongest tie to the core demographic, in our opinion.) There are a number of movies in production that will still need to be flogged, as well, WATCHMEN for one,

So our prognosis? If the strike doesn’t end soon San Diego may be a little less manic, but not a whole lot less.

But that’s not even the really IMPORTANT question:

What does this mean for your chances of getting a hotel room?"

 

The Museum Vaults Review

  • News
  • January 17, 2008

The Museum Vaults is the second of four graphic novels created through an unlikely publishing partnership: noted American art-comics publisher NBM and France’s cultural powerhouse museum the Louvre. All four of the stories will be about the Louvre in some way; the first book, Nicholas De Crecy’s Glacial Period, was published early in 2007.

Museum Vaults’ author, Marc-Antoine Mathieu, has been a prolific French cartoonist for the past twenty years, though very little of his work has turned up on this side of the Atlantic. (I’ll admit I didn’t previously know his work myself.)

As Museum Vaults opens, a young expert, Monsieur Volumer, arrives at a museum whose original name has been forgotten. His job is to delve into the subbasements beneath this museum to study, evaluate, and index the collections – to fully understand the museum. (more…)

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