Image Comics will release a big helping of ‘Octopus Pie’

The publisher will collect Meredith Gran’s entire webcomic into a five-volume box set this fall.

Meredith Gran’s Octopus Pie ended in 2017 after a 10-year run, and now Image Comics will collect the entirety of the strip in Octopus Pie: The Complete Series Box Set.

“I’m so glad to finally present these books as a set,” said Gran. “Like the series itself, each printed volume—born from chaos—has now found beauty and cohesion.”

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Matt Groening’s ‘Disenchantment’ comes to comics

An ‘Untold Tales” volume will collect previously created by as-yet-unreleased material based on the Netflix show.

Disenchantment, the animated Netflix series from Matt Groening that’s run for four seasons (with a fifth on the way), will come to comics later this year courtesy of Titan Comics.

Disenchantment: Untold Tales Volume 1 will collect two limited-release comics as well as bunch of previously unreleased material featuring Bean, Elfo, Luci and more. Titan plans two additional volumes as well.

According to the publisher, only the first two issues of these comics were ever released as a convention exclusive in 2019. Meanwhile, 500 pages and 17 issues of original strips with new stories were left unpublished. The first graphic novel will also feature exclusive content from the show’s creators.

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‘Me the People’ collects Pia Guerra’s political cartoons

Politically charged hardcover arrives in October from Image Comics.

Pia Guerra‘s recent editorial cartoons have been spot on, and just in time for the midterm elections, they’re getting collected by Image Comics. Covering a wide array of topics, from gun control to the Trump administration, the hardcover collection Me the People will arrive in October.

Comic fans probably know Guerra best from her work on Y: The Last Man, but it’s just as likely you’ve seen her work in the New Yorker, or maybe in the Washington Post or even on The Nib.

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Smash Pages Q&A: Maximilian Uriarte on ‘Terminal Lance’

The cartoonist and Marine discusses his ongoing strip about the military and its recent collection.

Maximilian Uriarte began making the comic strip Terminal Lance when he was still an active duty Marine. He continued making the strip while in art school and since. The strip has become a phenomenon, but Uriarte gained a larger audience with the publication of his 2016 graphic novel The White Donkey.

Little Brown has just released Terminal Lance: Ultimate Omnibus, which collects much of Uriarte’s strip along with notes and commentary. The strip skirts the brutal realism of The White Donkey and is instead strange and surreal, funny and weird. It’s easy to see why the strip became so popular. So often marines are portrayed in very one-dimensional ways, but what runs through all of Uriarte’s work is the desire to show them as human. This is not propaganda, this is not a recruitment tool; rather, in both the comic strip and the graphic novel, Uriarte seeks to be honest above all. Sometimes it’s funny or absurd, sometimes disturbing, sometimes brutal. I spoke with Uriarte about the strip and the collection.

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‘Black Hammer’ Library Edition coming this fall

Jeff Lemire and Dean Ormston’s series gets a deluxe edition, due out Oct. 24.

Jeff Lemire and Dean Ormston’s Black Hammer has delivered an interesting take on superheroes, playing off the archetypes of the genre and creating some pretty great characters in the process. The Eisner-nominated series has proven popular enough to warrant several spinoffs, and now Dark Horse has announced Black Hammer Library Edition Volume 1, a deluxe, oversized hardcover collecting Black Hammer #1-13 and other material from the series.

“I couldn’t be prouder of this deluxe library edition,” Lemire said. “I love the world of Black Hammer so much, and I love seeing the stories Dean and I worked so hard to create collected in such a gorgeous volume.”

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Smash Pages Q&A: Zack Soto kickstarts ‘The Secret Voice’

‘This is me pouring all my love of adventure and fantasy narratives, artcomics, manga, and eurocomics into one misshapen container.’

Zack Soto has been making and publishing comics for years. People might know him best as the Editor in Chief and Publisher of Study Group Comics, which has published great comics and minicomics from Farel Dalrymple, Aidan Koch, Sam Alden, Jennifer Parks and others. Soto was also one of the co-founders of Linework NW, the comics festival in Portland that ended in 2016.

Soto has also been making his own comics like Power Button, but perhaps his best known work is The Secret Voice. The comic is epic fantasy, but it takes the rough outline of that genre and incorporates elements of superhero and art comics, martial arts, mysticism and psychedelia. The result is both epic fantasy and part of an unclassifiable genre that is familiar to readers of Farel Dalrymple, Michel Fiffe and many other comics creators.

Soto has just launched a Kickstarter campaign to publish a collection of the first volume of The Secret Voice, and I reached out to ask him about the book and his work.

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‘Hellboy Omnibus Collection’ collects the series from the start

The adventures of Mike Mignola’s heroic half-demon will be collected in six volumes.

Clear some room — a lot of room — on your bookshelves. Dark Horse Comics will publish Mike Mignola’s signature, award-winning series Hellboy in Omnibus format, collecting the entire run in chronological order.

“I’m very excited to finally have all the Hellboy stories collected in chronological order,” Mignola said. “And I’m especially excited to have the three Duncan Fegredo books—all the stuff with Alice and the Queen of Blood—together in one collection for the first time.”

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Kevin Maguire covers the ‘JLI Omnibus’

Old friends reunite in the cover image for the upcoming collection.

Artist Kevin Maguire brought his signature style to the Justice League in the late 1980s/early 1990s, and along with Keith Giffen and J.M DeMatteis, redefined the team in the Post-Crisis DC Universe. Now their humorous take on the team is getting the Omnibus treatment, and Maguire has shared the cover to the massive book:

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