Nate Bellegarde

shitloads more lovely art
at his sketchblog

Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips’ CRIMINAL is still my favourite crime comic, and it’s back in June for a new series. Look at this:

You can find a short preview of the new series at this link here. They’re going into interesting metatextual territory for the first time in this series, and I’m fascinated to see how it turns out.  It’s out in June, but final store orders for the series are this week, so you might want to drop in on, email or call your local comics retailer to tell them you’ll want a copy.

Philip Bond

Jen Wang

Annie Wu is basically the genius that the rest of the world hasn’t discovered yet.  She’s just gotten a webstore up.  It might only be for a month.  It’s stuffed with prints, posters, cards, tshirts and original art.  I would lay odds that this is the last time you’ll see any of her stuff this cheap.  And, honestly, it’s worth clicking through just to ogle that linework.

Ben Templesmith

detail from the cover to the third
WORMWOOD: GENTLEMAN CORPSE
hardcover collection

Will Kirkby

Jemma Salume

original post / livejournal

Gorgeous concept art by Simon Roy, creator of the graphic novel JAN’S ATOMIC HEART.

I would have linked you to the storefront for that book, but it’s listed as “temporarily unavailable.”  Tell you what – here’s the link anyway.  And here is a huge PDF preview of it.  I went to the publisher’s site to find out what the deal was with the book not being available.  And the publisher is shutting down.

I would suggest that anyone wanting to be in business with Simon Roy should check out his website.

By far the saddest thing about the closure of DC’s FIRST WAVE line, I think, is that I no longer get to see the evolution of artist Moritat on a regular basis.  I imagine the next thing he does will be phenomenal.

I’ve got to say, there’s still nothing quite like journalist and critic Gary Groth picking up his hammer and his plank of wood with the nail sticking out of it again and just beating the shit out of someone.

That TRANSMETROPOLITAN charity art book is apparently still rolling along, because Pete Venters just showed me this clip from his piece for it:

Related articles

• I Do Not Believe In Reports Of The Sun (warrenellis.com)
• Stop The Week (warrenellis.com)
• Mystery Conversion (warrenellis.com)
• Having Someone’s Disease In You: Not Always Fun (warrenellis.com)

Remember the brilliant “punk Justice League” image Annie Wu did for one of my messageboard art challenges?  She’s done the image up as a postcard set for a lousy five Yanqui dollars.  Go get.

Fonografiks is busy re-imagining popular comics as second-hand paperbacks from the Sixties and Seventies.  Wonderful stuff at the link.  Also, these two obscure works:

So every few weeks I do a game on my message board where I set up the conditions for doing a visual revamp on an old character or title from books and comics and let artists go at it for one week. This week I said this:

You are an artist/designer. You have to put together the cover for a comic called THE FANTASTIC FOUR. It is issue 1 of this book.

You have been told that the comic is about four people who steal a spaceship, fly into space, get heavily irradiated by cosmic rays, and return to earth weirdly altered by their experience.

And that’s it. The bastards haven’t told you one more damn thing than that. Not a clue. They might all be women. It might be about the Indian space programme twenty years from now. For all you know this is a JG Ballard story, for christ’s sake…

It’s up to you what kind of company you’re at. What kind of comics you make. How you translate that description of The Fantastic Four. What era you’re in. Who you are, even. Go nuts with it.

A couple of examples of what’s happened so far.

Chris G’s brain caught on fire.

And Paul Sizer went uberSizer.

And, um, Chip Zdarsky, aka Canadian National Post cartoonist Steve Murray, went… there.

It runs until Sunday. Go and look at all the other wonderful takes in the thread, and join in if you feel like it.

People are telling me that Mark Waid is taking over the writing of the venerable Marvel title DAREDEVIL, and are assuming that Mark will be writing it in a mainline superhero-comic way, with lots of brightly-lit Silver Age swashbuckling and normal straight spandex-fiend tropes.

And I’d just like to note that Mark Waid is a very intelligent man, despite his taste in shirts, and so NO of course he won’t. The last time an approach like that was tried on DAREDEVIL, the book crashed so badly that the Marvel powers-that-be just handed it over with a what-the-fuck shrug to the production pod of two ambitious artists-turned-editors named Jimmy Palmiotti and Joe Quesada. Which led to things like Kevin Smith writing comics, and then the career of Brian Michael Bendis, and the ascension of Joe Quesada to Marvel EIC and then Chief Creative Officer And Olympean Presence or whatever the hell his title is now.

The time before that? Way back in the dim and distant past? The book was so crocked that they tried out a new guy called Frank Miller.

So, no, comics fans, don’t start railing about how Mark’s going to do a happy bouncy daylight Daredevil who hugs other superheroes and shit. Mark has some really terrible shirts, but he’s really not that stupid. If Mark knows anything, he knows his comics history.

Jesse Bausch and Meg Gandy’s GODSEND: really strong art on this webcomic.

New comics are released in most places on Wednesday. Just a brief one this week.

New NORTHLANDERS, #37, with art by Simon Gane. The above art is actually from #38, but what the hell, same artist, same story. I don’t know why more of you don’t seek out NORTHLANDERS books. Who doesn’t love Vikings?

The second issue of CASANOVA: GULA is out on the 9th, continuing the relettered and recoloured presentation of the wonderful Fraction/Moon/Ba series. CASANOVA is basically the best sf comic in the world right now. I’ve read the script for the first issue of the new series, which follows on the heels of the four issues of GULA, and it’s mental.

Also, glory be, the 30th issue of Antony Johnston’s WASTELAND, which I love. Hell, I wrote a foreword for the recent bigass collected edition. If you like big sprawling weird post-apoc worldbuilding — and that’s a lot of you — then this is a comic you should have looked at years ago. There’s an extensive preview of #30 here. This issue comes, as ever, with a lovely Templesmith cover.

Related articles

• Art Addicts In Space (warrenellis.com)
• comicsweek 2feb11 (warrenellis.com)

New comics are released on Wednesday 2 Feb in most places. Here’s a few things I’d draw your attention to:

VIETNAMERICA has gotten some good reviews: a memoir in graphic novel form of the author’s attempts to make sense of the lives of his family, who fled Viet Nam for America during the fall of Saigon. There’s a preview on Scribd: often crude, always atmospheric and evocative, sometimes kaleidoscopic to the point of psychedelia in its construction and formal invention.

CROSSED: FAMILY VALUES #7 concludes Dave Lapham’s spinoff from Garth’s original CROSSED book. It’s been grotesque. Quite deliberately. It wasn’t the constant sledgehammer of doom that CROSSED was, but it does manage to outsleaze the parent book.

DAOMU #1 translates a popular Chinese comic for the Anglophone market. Very goofy-looking, but with some nice digital art, if you can get past the big plastic sound effects.

WITCHFINDER – LOST AND GONE FOREVER #1 (of 5): “In the hellish frontiers of the American Wild West, nineteenth-century occult investigator Edward Grey hunts down a fiendish member of the Heliopic Brotherhood of Ra. What he finds is a town harboring bloodthirsty criminals and terrible supernatural horrors!” Why do you care? Because it’s co-written by Mike (HELLBOY) Mignola and illustrated by classic American comics artist John Severin. And John Severin is fucking brilliant. Also? “Heliopic Brotherhood of Ra.”

DAYTRIPPER gets a collection. I don’t know what to say about Ba and Moon’s book that wouldn’t spoil it for a new reader. All I’m going to say is that it’s a wonderful, low-key, warm read; an inventive, often troubling device for exploring a man’s life and relationships in full. I’ll be honest, and say that it didn’t always work for me… but also that it left me with a pain in my chest. That is a recommendation.

Nice linework in Sarah Oleksyk’s IVY. Fancy a quiet little story about an artistic girl trying to escape her cold and spare Maine life? You can judge for yourself, because the first chapter’s online for free.

PANDORA EYES: haven’t read it, but it’s illustrated by the legendary “good girl” artist Milo Manara, whose ability to draw beautiful women has overshadowed his other skills. Which is probably as much his fault as anyone else’s. But I’d flip through this book, in which he collaborates with a writer, to see how he does here. And if you’re not aware of Manara’s stuff, you should experience his exquisite linework at least once.

Related articles

• Congrats, Heidi (warrenellis.com)
• GUEST INFORMANT: Paul Duffield (warrenellis.com)

Gorgeous cover. Coming soon, apparently.

Related articles

• Into The Skid (warrenellis.com)