Simonson and Brigman return to ‘Power Pack’ next year

‘Power Pack: Into the Storm’ will launch in January.

Louise Simonson and June Brigman, the creators of Marvel’s Power Pack, will return to the characters for a story set during their original run in Power Pack: Into the Storm.

The five-issue miniseries celebrates the team’s 40th anniversary and feature appearances by the Snarks, the Brood, Franklin Richards and the X-Men’s Storm.

“It’s funny how easy it is to slip back into Power Pack!” Simonson shared. “This story explores the looming question: Should Power Pack tell their parents about their powers? I loved hinting at Franklin’s nascent abilities, one blocked by his parents, but too powerful for even them to contain completely.”

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Captain Ginger takes flight once more in ‘The Last Feeder’

Stuart Moore and June Brigman return to the stars for another tale of evolved cats in space.

Although its existence was revealed in May when Ahoy Comics announced Project: Cryptid, they made it official this week that writer Stuart Moore and artist June Brigman will reunite for Captain Ginger: The Last Feeder .

The two-issue miniseries is part of Ahoy’s celebration of their fifth anniversary, and follows the two previous Captain Ginger series. If you aren’t familiar with Captain Ginger, it’s kind of like Star Trek, but with cats. Evolved cats at that.

“I’d rather write Captain Ginger than anything else in the world, so I’m grateful to AHOY for giving us the chance to continue our story,” said Moore. “This time, we decided to tell a self-contained, Strange New Worlds-type adventure that, at the same time, tackles some of the biggest questions in the Captain’s universe. All his life, Ginger has wondered about his father, and all the evolved cats have wondered about the long-dead humans who created them. Now the answers are in their grasp—maybe.”

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Sunday Comics | Where there’s a Wilbur …

Check out recent online comics by Karen Moy, June Brigman, Dave McKean, Ryan Bodenheim and more.

Here’s a round up of some of the best comics we’ve seen online recently. If we missed something, let us know in the comments below.

So have you been following the Mary Worth drama online? Those aren’t words I ever expected to type, but here we are.

If you aren’t familiar with Mary Worth, it’s a long-running, soap opera-style newspaper comic strip. And “long-running” is no joke; it’s been consistently appearing in newspapers and now online since 1938. And it’s origins go back even further than that, to a strip called Apple Mary that started in 1934. So kudos to the creators, Karen Moy and June Brigman, because here we are in 2022, some 80 years later, and the strip is getting all sorts of attention, kind of akin to Days Of Our Lives having Marlena get possessed by the Devil again.

(And yes, June Brigman, the co-creator of Marvel’s Power Pack and all-around awesome comics artist, is the artist of Mary Worth. Alex spoke to her about the comic Captain Ginger back in 2019).

So the attention the strip is getting centers on a character named Wilbur, who I’ve seen described as “miserable,” a “dingdong” and “a giant mayonnaise sandwich” online. Ryan Bradford, who writes for San Diego CityBeat and Vice, wrote about the last few months worth of strips on Substack, where he talks about how Wilbur is dating Estelle but hates her cat, so he kept making death threats against it. Eventually Estelle broke up with Wilbur, but eventually they got back together, and Wilbur proposed to Estelle while on a cruise. That’s where the story really gets interesting.

[SPOILERS WARNING for recent Mary Worth strips, something else I never thought I’d type]

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AHOY Comics announces more ‘Captain Ginger,’ ‘Wrong Earth’ prequel

The publisher will also bring back ‘Edgar Allan Poe’s Snifter Of Terror’ in October.

AHOY Comics has announced follow-ups to three of their previous titles, including a prequel for The Wrong Earth, and sequels for Captain Ginger and Edgar Allan Poe’s Snifter Of Terror.

“The third wave of AHOY Comic Magazines sees the return of some fan favorite faces,” Publisher Hart Seely said. “And what’s exciting to me, as both a reader and the publisher, is that each of these stories takes these characters to unexpected places. What happens when cats meet dogs in the far reaches of outer space? Is there something evil about being a superhero? Readers who wanted more of these stories can dive right in, but they also work as stand alone stories that provide a jumping-on point for readers who have only recently discovered AHOY.”

The three titles, with the publisher’s descriptions, are:

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Smash Pages Q&A: June Brigman

The cat is out of the bag for the Mary Worth illustrator

June Brigman has had a long, varied career in comics. She started working in comic books where she co-created Power Pack with Louise Simonson at Marvel, and drew a wide variety of projects including Supergirl, Star Wars: River of Chaos, and adapting and illustrating Black Beauty into comics. She’s also been working in comic strips for decades. She drew Brenda Starr from 1995 to when the strip ended in 2011, and since 2016 she’s been drawing Mary Worth seven days a week.

Brigman returned to comic books last year with arguably her best work to date, the miniseries Captain Ginger. The science fiction series features cats who have outlived the human race, and it’s a funny and dark and inventive story. The trade collection of the miniseries is out from Ahoy Comics this month, which also announced that there’s a sequel in the works – though readers are unlikely to forget the comic’s final page that sets it up.

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