Quick Hits | Danica Novgorodoff receives the Yoto Kate Greenaway medal

Plus: ‘Duckman’ creator Everett Peck passes away, and news on ‘The Dark Knight Returns,’ Grant Morrison and more.

Awards | Danica Novgorodoff has received the Yoto Kate Greenaway medal — “the UK’s longest running and best-loved book awards for children and young people” — for her graphic novel adaptation of Jason Reynolds’ novel Long Way Down. According to the press release, it’s the first time since 1973 that a graphic novel has received the prize. The book features hundreds of “stunning” watercolors depicting the decision that 15-year-old Will must make when his brother is shot.

Long Way Down is a book that asks us to empathise with a character who is planning to harm another person, and endanger his own life, out of grief and revenge,” Novgorodoff said in a statement. “He’s in a complicated, difficult situation, and he needs to make a very hard decision. Through the illustrations, I wanted to show this emotional torment, to make his internal feelings come alive on the page. The book doesn’t preach, but it asks readers, ‘What do you feel, and what would you do?'”

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Matt Kindt jumps into the controversial world of NFTs with a new ‘Mind MGMT’ story

The one-of-a-kind story will go to the highest bidder of an NFT auction.

Creator Matt Kindt is exploring the world of non-fungible tokens with Mind MGMT: The Artifact, a full-length comic that’s currently up for auction on the NFT auction website OpenSea.

Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, have been making headlines recently; they’re a type of code that acts sort of as a unique certificate of authenticity for a digital piece of art, tied to bitcoin and block chain technologies. The Verge, Bankrate and NPR have Q&A’s up on what NFTs are and how they’re being used right now in the art world.

“I wanted to create an original Mind MGMT comic book narrative that would explore the nature of belief and the value of ideas and their intangible nature as a way of exploring the idea of NFTs,” said Kindt. “The best way to explore this idea was for the actual story – the Mind MGMT narrative – to become what it is about. This story is written as a Mind MGMT espionage narrative – an agent sent on a mission to retrieve a priceless artifact. There are secret codes, monk-ninjas. LOTS of monk-ninjas and a teenage immortal intent on stealing this priceless artifact. It is both a real apple…and a drawing of an apple.”

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Comics Lowdown | Waid/Meyer lawsuit settled

Plus: Court rules Dr. Seuss/Star Trek mash-up book not protected by fair use, ‘Batman’ #1 auction and more!

Legal: Comics creator Richard Meyer has dropped his lawsuit against Mark Waid, according to Waid’s legal defense GoFundMe page. The suit began in 2018 after Meyer announced that Antarctic Press would publish his comic Jawbreaker. The publisher reversed that decision after a phone call from Waid, however, and Meyer successfully crowdfunded the comic instead. He also sued Waid for “tortious interference with contract and defamation.”

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Comics Lowdown | Alan Moore script on eBay

Plus: New graphic novels by the Mayor of Montreal and rapper Rico Nasty

Auction Watch: An unpublished Alan Moore script is being auctioned off on eBay. The 35-page script was written circa 1997 for a Wildstorm one-shot, Gen13 Annual: The Coming of the Collector!, which was never completed or published.

Scott Dunbier, who is auctioning off the script, acquired it when he was an editor at Wildstorm. Proceeds from the auction, which has Moore’s blessing, will benefit inker Bob Wiacek, who is suffering from vision problems that prevent him from working.

You can also donate directly to Wiacek via this GoFundMe project.

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Creators 4 Comics is raising money to benefit the Book Industry Charitable Foundation

Creators have begun to host Twitter auctions that you can find via the hashtag #Creators4Comics.

Several comic book creators have banned together and created the initiative Creators 4 Comics, in an effort to raise money to benefit the Book Industry Charitable Foundation (binc), which supports both independent bookstores and comic shops.

“#Creators4Comics is a group of comic creators who are coming together to help save comic book retailers and independent bookstores by holding online Twitter auctions to directly benefit the Book Industry Charitable Foundation (BINC). BINC is taking applications now and they will start providing direct aid to stores at the end of April,” their site reads. The effort was started by Kami Garcia, Brian Michael Bendis, Gwenda Bond, Sam Humphries and Phil Jimenez.

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Comics Lowdown: New charity helps retailers

Also: Manga dominates the BookScan chart, Crumb originals bring in big bucks, Cecil Casetellucci talks ‘Soupy.’

Retailers Help Their Own: A group of comic shop owners has started an organization, Helping Comics Retailers with Issues (a.k.a. HCR Issues) to, well, do just what the name says: They will help pay down the debt to Diamond of comic shops that have run into rough waters. Secretary and co-founder Dr. Christina Blanch, owner of Aw Yeah! Comics in Muncie, Indiana, says that plans were in the works for a while, but Hurricane Harvey sped things up.

Back to School Again: ICv2 has the BookScan top 20 graphic novels chart for August, and vol. 9 of the superhero-school manga My Hero Academia takes the top spot. In fact, Viz has ten of the top 20 titles, with four volumes of My Hero Academia (1, 2, 8, 9), two volumes of Tokyo Ghoul (the first and the last), and assorted other titles. Add in vol. 22 of Attack on Titan and Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Manga of Tidying Up, and you’ve got a chart dominated by manga. On the other hand, there are no Marvel titles at all and the only DC books on the chart are Watchmen and The Killing Joke. BookScan covers bookstores and other retail channels such as Amazon, so their charts are often very different from Diamond’s, which only cover comic shops.

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Comics Lowdown: Frank Miller sued for $1M by ex-business manager

Plus: Wonder Woman fights human trafficking, Jody Houser, Ben Hatke, and lots of SDCC news reporting

Frank Miller’s former business manager of 28 years has filed a lawsuit against the writer-director for over $1 million in damages for breach of contract.  Mark Lichtman claims he is entitled to 10 percent of Miller’s entertainment earnings of over $15 million from projects like Sin City300 and The Spirit, and was a key part of developing Miller’s career.

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Comics Lowdown: ‘Charley’s War’ original art soars at auction

Plus: Dilraj Mann’s cover for ‘Island’ #15 examined, Mike Richardson, Gilbert Hernandez, ‘The Mundane Kid’ and more.

Auction Action: A piece of original art by Joe Colquhoun from the British comic Charley’s War fetched an unexpected price of £1,320 at auction, soaring past the pre-sale estimate of £250-300. A lot of three consecutive pages, plus a cover layout, went for £2,450, triple the pre-sale estimate. Some other original art as well as vintage comics also did better than expected at the Compalcomics auction. Charley’s War, a World War I action comic written by Pat Mills, is enjoying something of a revival; Titan is publishing a collected edition, and some of the original art is currently on display at the Tank Museum in Bovington, UK.

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Comics Lowdown: ‘Bingo Love’ creator offers advice on creating diverse comics

Plus news and updates on Jules Feiffer, MegaCon’s ‘Love is Love’ auction, Sophie Labelle and more.

Tee Franklin knows something that seems to eluded all of the Marvel honchos: How to make money on a comic by and about people of color. Franklin’s Bingo Love Comic, the story of a long-simmering romance between two black women, blasted past its Kickstarter goal of $20,000 in just five days and ended up with over $57,000 worth of pledges. This all happened just a few weeks after Marvel vice president David Gabriel told ICv2 “What we heard was that people didn’t want any more diversity …They didn’t want female characters. That’s what we heard, whether we believe that or not.” Although he backpedaled a bit, Gabriel’s comments raised a ruckus, but Franklin has some advice for him and the rest of the Marvel team: Draw inspiration from the women around you, hire people of color for your creative teams and advertise in channels that actually reach your prospective audience.

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