2022 Doug Wright Awards winners announced

Congratulations to this year’s winners.

The Doug Wright Awards, which honor “the best work and most promising talent in Canadian comics,” presented their 2022 awards over the weekend during the Toronto Comic Arts Festival.

This was their first in-person awards ceremony since the beginning of the COVID pandemic in 2020. The event was hosted by film critic Richard Crouse, and featured appearances by Jenn Woodall, David Collier and Dustin Harbin. The outdoor event was also livestreamed, but unfortunately the wind makes the audio very difficult to hear.

Here are the winners:

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Quick Hits | Spider-Man joins the Comic-Con Museum Character Hall of Fame

Plus: News on Danica Novgorodoff, Lucy Knisley, ‘Gender Queer’ and more.

Events | The Comic-Con Museum has announced the latest character to be inducted into their Character Hall of Fame. Spider-Man will join Batman, Pac-Man and Wonder Woman. The induction ceremony will take place on July 20 during Comic-Con International. The museum will also host a Spider-Man exhibit, “Beyond Amazing,” starting on July 1, which will showcase art, costumes and interactive experiences featuring everyone’s favorite web-slinger.

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What Are You Reading? | Thunder Gods + Powerbombs

This week the Smash Pages crew talks about ‘Mighty Thor,’ ‘Batgirls’ and ‘Do A Powerbomb.’

Welcome to What Are You Reading?, our look at what the Smash Pages crew has been checking off their “to read” list lately. Today’s reviews include a good chunk of the Jane Foster issues of Thor, as well as recent issues of Batgirls and Do A Powerbomb.

Let us know what you’ve been reading lately in the comments or on social media.

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Three Count | Jack Teagle, Kaiju Sunset, Omnis Temporalis

Here are three things to buy, to support and to hear in comics today.

1. To Buy: 100% Unofficial Simpsons Comix

“Illustrator and painter Jack Teagle works from an old shipping container he converted into a studio on his parent’s farm in Southwest England.” That’s the opening to a great interview with Teagle that appeared on Threadless.com (yes, the T-shirt website) that I first saw on LinkedIn, of all places, the other day. Threadless and LinkedIn! What is even happening here?

Anyway, in that interview Teagle talks about a fun side project he and several other artist friends had a few years back, the Simpsons Drawing Club, where they would draw zany pictures and comics featuring Simpsons characters. They stopped posting art to their Tumblr in 2020, but Teagle has collected some of his comics from the project into a 52-page collection titled 100% Unofficial Simpsons Comix.

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Bunn + Luckert + Leiz flip for horror in ‘Shock Shop’

The new horror anthology arrives in September.

Dark Horse will publish a new “flip book” horror anthology that features stories by Cullen Bunn, Danny Luckert, Leila Leiz and more starting in September.

Each issue of the four-issue miniseries will feature two stories, as well as variant covers by Francesco Francavilla, Fábio Moon, Caitlin Yarsky, James Stokoe, James Harren and Tonci Zonjic.

Shock Shop will be set in a comic shop with “a twisted retailer filled with tales of terror,” in the tradition of Creepshow, Tales from the Crypt and other horror anthologies with a spooky host. Bunn said it will feature “horror yarns and celebration of horror” on Twitter. Bunn previously worked with Luckert on Regression from Image Comics, and with Leiz on The Last Book You’ll Ever Read from Vault Comics.

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Dark Horse will collect Justin Madson’s ‘Breathers’

The nine-issue series originally published by It’s Alive! lives again next year.

Dark Horse Comics will collect Tin Man creator Justin Madson‘s nine-issue series Breathers into a trade paperback next year. The series is currently published by Drew Ford’s It’s Alive! Press, which is crowdfunding the seventh issue now.

“Long before the word ‘pandemic’ became a part of our daily conversation, I started work on Breathers, a story set in a world where the air was deadly to breathe, so everyone had to wear gas masks when they went outside,” Madson said. “Wearing these ‘breathers’ was an accepted part of life since, really, there was no other option. It seemed like a bit of a far-fetched idea at the time, but, as recent years have shown, I was not too far off. I am thrilled to be working with It’S Alive! and Dark Horse to bring my dystopian tale, Breathers, to a wider audience.”

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A new ‘Midnight Suns’ title rises at Marvel

Blade, Magik, Nico Minoru and more come together in September.

Marvel has announced that a 1990s team — with a slight name change and a different roster — will return in September. Midnight Suns by writer Ethan Sacks and artist Luigi Zagaria almost shares a name with the classic Ghost Rider-led team Midnight Sons, but does share its name with the upcoming Midnight Suns video game that Marvel and 2K will release later this year.

The new team will feature several classic and new mystical heroes, including Magik, Blade, Kushala the Spirit Rider, Nico Minoru and Zoe Laveau from Strange Academy. Oh, and my favorite mystical Marvel character, Wolverine. (It used to be that Wolverine would pretty much pop up in every Marvel comic at some point, so it’s kind of funny and appropriate to see him here).

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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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Marvel will return to the ‘Planet of the Apes’ next year

The comics license for the film franchise returns to Marvel for the first time since the 1970s.

Marvel has announced they’ve secured the license to publish Planet of the Apes comics –a license the company first held back in the 1970s, when the original movies were popular.

“We’re thrilled to welcome Planet of the Apes back to the House of Ideas!” Editor-in-Chief C.B. Cebulski said. “The new saga in the pipeline is going explore the limits of what this beloved franchise has to offer through bold comics storytelling, and we look forward to setting foot on this new adventure!”

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‘Marvel’s Voices: Comunidades’ returns in September

Fabian Nicieza, Paco Medina, Edgar Delgado and more will contribute stories to the anthology.

Marvel’s Voices: Comunidades will return in September with another collection of stories by Latinx creators featuring Latinx characters.

Arriving just in time for Hispanic Heritage Month, this year’s anthology will include:

  • A Nova story by writer Fabian Nicieza and artist Paco Medina.
  • A Miles Morales story by writer Edgar Delgado.
  • A White Tiger story by author Alex Segura and artist Rogê Antônio, which will introduce a new character.
  • A Shark Girl/Namor team-up by Novelist Zoraida Cordova and artist Yasmín Flores Montañez.
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Cantwell + García awaken ‘Briar’ at BOOM!

What if Sleeping Beauty had to save herself?

The Blue Flame writer Christopher Cantwell and Ka-Zar: Lord of the Savage Land artist Germán García will retell the story of Sleeping Beauty as “an epic dark fantasy adventure” in a new miniseries coming from BOOM! Studios. They’ll be joined by colorist Matheus Lopes, who has been doing some phenomenal work on Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow.

Cantwell sited the creator of Conan the Barbarian as an inspiration for the series.

“I’ve never gotten a chance to tell a high fantasy story of any kind, but I’ve always wanted to, ever since I discovered old Robert E. Howard stories. One thing that kept me hesitant was finding a proper way in—something new and different that also celebrates all the sword & sorcery fun seen in the best of the genre,” Cantwell said. “In tandem, as I grow older, the world around us seems less and less stable with so many things falling into crisis. These two things came together in my head in the form of Briar… here’s someone that remembers the world one way, during a time of sheltered innocence, but has now overslept… and found herself in a place of complete entropic disarray. The question is, how will she even survive? And what happens when the plans for the entire rest of your life turn out to be completely meaningless and absurd? Where do you turn to in order to conjure up your own new meaning and purpose?”

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‘Castle Full of Blackbirds’ spins out of ‘Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.’ this September

Mike Mignola teams with novelist Angela Slatter and artist Valeria Burzo for the new miniseries starring Sara May Blackburn.

All the Murmuring Bones novelist Angela Slatter will enlist with the B.P.R.D. this September, has she joins creator Mike Mignola and artist Valeria Burzo for Castle Full of Blackbirds.

The miniseries puts the spotlight on Sara May Blackburn, the precognitive girl introduced in Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: The Return of Effie Kolb. The miniseries also features colors by Michelle Madsen, letters by Clem Robins and covers by Wylie Beckert.

“I’m thrilled to have Angela writing this series and, honestly, right now I have no idea how that came about,” Mignola said. “She is one of the small handful of fantasy writers I really love reading these days, and we were lucky enough to get her to write a short story for the last Hellboy prose collection, Hellboy: An Assortment of Horrors. After that we somehow got to emailing, and that led to this. About halfway through writing The Return of Effie Kolb I knew our little witch girl was going to want her own series. I had an idea how something like that was going to start, but really had no idea where it might go. I DID know that as it was a book about a young girl, I wanted a female perspective. Someone who would bring something new to the Hellboy world while still playing with the history and mythology we’ve created for the place. Angela was the first (and I think only) name that sprang to mind. Fortunately she said yes, and here we are. I love what she’s done and can’t wait to see where this will go. My hope is that this is just the beginning.”

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