Month: April 2018

IDW announces their ‘Big Hero 6’ creative team

Hannah Blumenreich and Nicoletta Baldari bring the Disney characters back to comics.

IDW Publishing has announced the creative team and release date for Big Hero 6, the comic based a TV show based on a movie based on a Marvel comic that they announced at New York Comic-Con last year.

Hannah Blumenreich, creator of some pretty awesome “Spidey” fan comics as well as some that were published by Marvel, will write Big Hero 6. Nicoletta Baldari, who has worked for IDW on Star Wars: Forces of Destiny, will join her on art. (Baldari is also working on another Disney property, The Incredibles, over at Dark Horse). The first issue will feature covers by Gurihiru (Gwenpool) and Sophie Campbell (Jem and the Holograms, TMNT, Wet Moon).

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Nominees for the 2018 Eisner Awards announced

‘Monstress’ and ‘My Favorite Thing Is Monsters’ receive multiple nominations.

Comic-Con International has announced the nominees for the 2018 Eisner Awards, presented annually in San Diego at the convention.

Monstress by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda and My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris each received five nominations across various categories; other comics with multiple nominations included Mister Miracle, Black Hammer, The Flintstones, Grass Kings, Eartha and Hawkeye.

Check out the complete list of nominees below.

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Smash Pages Q&A: Julia Kaye on ‘Super Late Bloomer’

The cartoonist and animator discusses the first collection of her webcomic ‘Up and Out.’

Julia Kaye had been making comics for years – and making the webcomic Up and Out for years – before she transitioned. What had been a humor strip made in full color then became something else as Kaye used the strip to document her own life and trying to adjust to life as a woman. Her first book is Super Late Bloomer: My Early Days in Transition. The book collects six months of strips from 2016. They range from funny to absurd to heartbreaking as Kaye captures her changing life three panels at a time.

Kaye is currently working at Disney Animation and continues to draw Up and Out. With Super Late Bloomer out this week, we sat down to talk about the book, her work and how it’s changed over the years.

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Smash Pages Q&A: Remy Boydell and Michelle Perez

The duo discuss the collected edition of ‘The Pervert,’ which is out this week from Image Comics.

The short-lived anthology Island featured great artists producing great work, but one of the stand outs had to be the series of stories by Remy Boydell and Michelle Perez around a young trans sex worker. Beautifully painted, powerfully raw, the stories from Island have been collected along with a number of other stories that have never been published in the new book The Pervert, which is out this week from Image Comics.

The Pervert utilizes a structure and approach that might be more familiar to prose readers accustomed to short story collections following a single character. The book isn’t interested in tackling stories and themes that are common in trans narratives. It is a story about sex work that refuses to glamorize or demonize sex workers and their work. The artistic choices and the way the book is drawn, using mostly anthropomorphized animals, forces the reader to rethink their assumptions of the characters’ gender. It also lends the story, which can be dark and ugly, a certain dreamy quality.

The book can be laugh out loud funny, but also tough to read. It is beautifully drawn, and tackles ugly topics. It is in the end heartbreaking and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since finishing it. I spoke with Remy and Michelle about the book and how they worked.

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Leslie Stein’s ‘Present’ wins the L.A. Times Book Prize

Stein’s collection of short comics from Vice.com wins in the “Graphic Novel/Comics” category.

Leslie Stein’s Present,published by Drawn and Quarterly, has won this year’s Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the “Graphic Novel/Comics” category.

Called “her best work to date” by our own Alex Dueben, Present collects short comics that originally appeared on Vice.com.

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2018 Glyph Award nominees announced

The awards will be presented at the East Coast Black Age of Comics Convention, which will occur on May 19 in Philadelphia

Nominees for the 2018 Glyph Awards, which recognize the best in comics made by, for and about people of color, have been announced. The awards are presented annually at the East Coast Black Age of Comics Convention, which will occur on May 19 in Philadelphia.

Founded by Rich Watson, the Glyph Awards have been presented annually since 2006. This year’s nominees are listed below:

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‘Beasts of Burden’ returns in August from Dorkin + Dewey

Guest artist Benjamin Dewey heads to Burden Hill to help Dorkin tell a tale featuring the Wise Dogs.

Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson’s Beasts of Burden has appeared as a series of miniseries and one-shots over the years, winning awards and sharing tales from the fictional town of Burden Hill, where a group of dogs and cats defend their world against supernatural threats.

In the background of these stories has been another group called the Wise Dogs, who seem to have a much bigger jurisdiction than just Burden Hill. Dorkin and guest artist Benjamin Dewey (The Autumnlands, The Tragedy Series) will explore this other group in Beasts of Burden: Wise Dogs and Eldritch Men. Nate Piekos will letter the four-issue miniseries.

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Nominees announced for the 2018 Doug Wright Awards

Guy Delisle, Connor Willumsen, Joe Ollmann and many more nominated for this year’s awards.

Nominees for the 14th annual Doug Wright Awards have been announced by the nominating committee. The Doug Wright Awards honor “the best work and most promising talent in Canadian comics.”

Duncan Macpherson, editorial cartoonist at the Montreal Standard, Toronto Star and Maclean’s magazine over the course of five decades, is this year’s inductee to the Giants of the North, the Doug Wright Awards’ hall of fame. Macpherson passed away in 1993. You can read more about him on the Doug Wright website.

Other nominees include:

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Smash Pages Q&A: Pamela Ribon and Cat Farris on ‘My Boyfriend is a Bear’

‘This is a story for people who can relate to falling in love with someone they least expected.’

My Boyfriend is a Bear is about a woman dating an American black bear. As a woman in East Los Angeles, it’s far from her worst relationship, and the two navigate a new relationship and its many challenges in ways that are bizarre but also touching. It is quite possibly the most touching interspecies relationship since Gonzo and Camilla started dating on the Muppets. Written by Pamela Ribon and drawn by Cat Farris, the book is also one of the funniest and most emotionally honest romance stories of the year.

Pamela Ribon is best known in comics for writing Slam! at BOOM! Studios and for writing Rick and Morty at Oni, though she’s also a well-known novelist, screenwriter, memoirist and filmmaker. Cat Farris has drawn a number of comics including Emily and the Strangers, the minicomic series Flaccid Badger and her webcomic The Last Diplomat. They answered a few questions about why they made a romance story involving a nameless bear who likes to wear an Arcade Fire T-shirt.

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Smash Pages Q&A: Marco Finnegan on ‘Crossroad Blues’

The artist discusses his collaboration with novelist Ace Atkins, his work for the ‘Where We Live’ anthology, his upcoming Young Adult graphic novel, and more.

Marco Finnegan was a comics novice when Last Fair Deal Gone Down was published in 2016 by 12 Gauge, though he’d been working as an artist for some time. The book was his first collaboration with the writer Ace Atkins, and the two have established a close working relationship. Their second collaboration is out now from Image Comics.

Crossroad Blues is the adaptation of Atkins’ debut novel. The two have set out to adapt all of Atkins’ Nick Travers stories to comics. The stories are about a former football player turned academic, blues researcher, and harmonica player. In this book Travers tries to find a missing researcher, and gets involved with a strange cast of characters including an Elvis-worshipping hitman, who are trying to uncover – or hide – the true story of the legendary musician Robert Johnson.

People who follow Finnegan on Twitter know that he seems to always be posting drawings and sketches, and has mentioned working on comics for younger readers. I reached out to ask about working with Atkins, and find out more about his other comics projects.

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Floating World Comics to publish Soto’s ‘The Secret Voice’ collection

The Study Group editor ‘will be hanging up his publishing hat’ to focus on making comics.

Comic book store-turned-publisher Floating World Comics announced this week that they will publish a collection of one of my favorite comics of last year, The Secret Voice, in the spring of 2019. Created by Study Group Comics editor Zack Soto, The Secret Voice is about a warrior monk named Doctor Galapagos and his battles with The Smog Emperor.

“The Secret Voice is my own personal version of an epic fantasy saga,” Soto said. “Because I’m me, it’s a trippy, sometimes meandering affair that’s just as focused on the sense of space and atmosphere as it is on the big picture plot stuff. This project is a place for me to pour all my love of adventure & fantasy narratives, artcomics, manga, and eurocomics into one misshapen container. It’s about a big old fashioned land war driven by the invasion of a despot; it’s about a bunch of weird psychic warrior monks; it’s about wild kung fu magic battles; it’s about monsters and supernatural beings.. But it’s also about someone over their head and not being honest with themselves or the people they love, and figuring out how to own their mistakes.”

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Smash Pages Q&A: Eleanor Davis on ‘Why Art?’

The creator discusses her latest graphic novel from Fantagraphics, political activism, PowerPoint and much more.

In her new book Why Art? Eleanor Davis tackles some of the questions around what art is, how we respond to it, how artists think about it and try to use it. Which may sound dry and perhaps dull but in Davis’ hands the idea becomes something strange and unexpected and at times laugh out loud funny. Davis describes one character in the book, “If she were a bad artist her art would be a lie and people would hate it. Instead, somehow she has made the statement into her truth.” This statement could be applied to Davis and her work. For many of us over the past few years she has become one of the essential cartoonists working right now.

Davis has also become very political active and currently serves as the membership coordinator for Athens for Everyone. We spoke recently about her book, political action, finding one’s artistic voice and coming to understand that everything is easy. She also mentioned the graphic novel she’s working on now and she answered, why art?

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