Quarantine Comix promises ‘a nice little surprise’ after sixth issue arrives

Support a good cause and get some great comics.

The creators of Image’s bonkers horror title Ice Cream Man — W. Maxwell Prince, Martin Morazzo, Chris O’Halloran, Good Old Neon — have been selling four-page comics to help support comics retailers over the past few weeks, with issue #6 arriving this week.

If you’re a fan of Ice Cream Man — or just good, kinda creepy, out-there comics — then you should check out Quarantine Comix. Half of their profits go to the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, aka BINC, so you get a quick read and a good cause, all for less than $2.

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Pires + Diotto team for ‘Youth’ digital weekly series

‘Olympia’ creators Curt Pires and Alex Diotto team with Dee Cunniffe and Micah Myers for a new comiXology Originals series.

The co-creators of the excellent Image Comics series Olympia are reuniting for a weekly four-issue digital series that will debut from comiXology Originals May 12.

Youth tells the story of Franklin and River, who “struggle to navigate family, friends, high school, work, drugs and all the pressures of growing up. As a queer couple, they yearn to escape their lives in a small, bigoted Midwest town. They steal River’s stepfather’s Mustang and hit the road. Their destination? California. But along the way, the car breaks down. They meet some kids who are traveling the country, partying and attempting to find themselves. They party some more … and soon everything changes.”

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Smash Pages Q&A: Kevin Huizenga

The creator of ‘The River at Night’ discusses insomnia, his process, endings and more.

In Kevin Huizenga’s book The River at Night, his main character Glenn Ganges has insomnia. One of Huizenga’s great gifts as a cartoonist is the way in which this is the entire plot of the book, but it’s not the point of the book, as Huizenga uses this scenario as a way to explore memory, our experience of time, death, deep time, the writing of John McPhee, how we experience change and those moments where people are able to step outside of themselves for a moment.

Huizenga has always been a formalist. He’s been compared to Chris Ware, but the two have very different interests in how they work. Huizenga is interested in consciousness and the subconscious, with perception and understanding, with finding ways to explain and understanding how the world works and how the mind perceives it. Glenn has been the protagonist of much of Huizenga’s work, but he uses the character as a way to explore ideas and experiences and we spoke recently about some of these ideas and trying to explore and depict these ideas visually.

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Marvel to release several comics as ‘digital only’ May 13 + 20

A limited number of comics, including issues of ‘Ghost-Spider,’ ‘Ant-Man’ and ‘Ironheart’ will arrive digitally over the next two weeks.

Marvel has announced that they will release several comics digitally over the next two weeks, before they return to releasing print comics on May 27.

“These comics will only be available as digital comics for the time being,” they say on their website. “However, they will be available in print collections later this year for fans looking to add them to their Marvel bookshelves. More information about these comics will be shared at a later date.”

The comics being released digitally include:

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Smash Page Q&A: Alex de Campi

The prolific creator pulls no punches as she discusses her brand-new Panel Syndicate comic, ‘Bad Karma,’ and a whole lot more.

Alex de Campi made a splash writing the 2005 miniseries Smoke and ever since then, she’s been a creator who’s been hard to pin down. Some of that is simply because she’s so prolific. De Campi is a writer who’s worked on My Little Pony and Judge Dredd, Josie and the Pussycats in Space and two Archie vs Predator series. She’s created series like Grindhouse, Kat & Mouse and Agent Boo, comics like Mayday and Bad Girls, Bankshot and Semiautomagic. She created the digital comic Valentine and wrote, edited and lettered the Image Comics anthology Twisted Romance

One theme that has run through much of her work is responsibility. De Campi does not write moralistic stories, but many of them revolve around people taking responsibility for who they are for what they’ve done, only to be forced to understand that doing the right thing is often harder than they ever considered. Omar famously said in The Wire, “a man’s gotta have a code,” and so many of de Campi’s characters live similarly. Or finally make a stand and choose to live by a code, only to find that decision often becomes their undoing. Ethan and Sully in Bad Karma did not return from war better and stronger and more successful, but when they learn that someone is on death row for an assassination they carried out, they decide to do something about it. Their road trip and what follows are dark, funny, incisive and some of the best work de Campi has ever written.

Bad Karma from de Campi, Ryan Howe and Dee Cunniffe launches on Panel Syndicate today, with a new chapter coming out next month.

I joked with de Campi that she’s always working on a dozen different projects, and this year is an especially busy one for her. She’s editing and working on the comics anthology True War Stories, she’s collaborating with Erica Henderson on Dracula, Mother f**ker! and she’s writing Madi, a collaboration with filmmaker Duncan Jones that she can’t talk much about, all of which come out this fall. Meanwhile she’s serializing a graphic novel on Patreon, and her debut novel The Scottish Boy comes out the beginning of June from Unbound.

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‘Walking Dead: The Alien’ gets the hardcover treatment

Brian K. Vaughan and Marcos Martin’s digital one-shot will arrive in print for the second time in July.

Skybound will release a hardcover edition of Brian K. Vaughan and Marcos Martin’s “The Alien,” a story set in the world of The Walking Dead, in July.

The story was released on the Panel Syndicate website about four years ago now, where it is still available for whatever price you’d like to pay. It was part of a deal Vaughan and Martin made with Walking Dead writer Robert Kirkman and Image Comics, which in exchange received the print rights to their digital comic The Private Eye. It was printed and made available to retailers as a part of Local Comic Shop Day last year as a single issue.

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Can’t Wait for Wednesday: If you buy one plague-themed comic this week …

See what the Smash Pages crew has their eyes on this week, as a small number of comics make their way to stores and digital.

It’s week two of DC’s attempt to get comics in front of people during the global pandemic, and they’ve got more on their release list this week than they did last week. It’s still a very small number of comics, but here’s what Carla and I have our eyes on.

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Slate announces the shortlist for the 2020 Cartoonist Studio Prize

Annual prize awards $1,000 to one print comic and one webcomic.

The Slate Book Review and the Center for Cartoon Studies have announced the nominees for their eighth annual Cartoonist Studio Prize, which awards $1,000 to the creator of one print comic and one webcomic.

Slate began the program in 2012; previous winners include Noelle Stevenson for Nimona, Chris Ware for Building Stories, Taiyo Matsumoto for Sunny, Winston Rowntree for Watching, Carol Tyler for Soldier’s Heart: The Campaign to Understand My WWII Veteran Father, Eleanor Davis for Libby’s Dad and Keren Katz for The Academic Hour. Last year’s winners were Keiler Roberts for Chlorine Gardens and Lauren Weinstein for “Being an Artist and a Mother.”

This year’s print nominees include:

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Lemire + Kindt + Rubin create a new mythology in ‘Cosmic Detective’

The new Kickstarter project has already blown past its goal in its first day.

Jeff Lemire, Matt Kindt and David Rubin have all collaborated together in one form or another in the past, but now the three creators have united to create their own world in Cosmic Detective, which went live on Kickstarter earlier today.

The story centers on a detective tasked with discovering who killed a god.

Cosmic Detective is a crime story that channels Jack Kirby, David Lynch and Raymond Chandler,” Kindt said. “It’s a story grounded in noir that ultimately becomes absolutely cosmic-bonkers insane.”

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Insider Art establishes fund for female, non-binary comic retailers

Female creators unite to help raise funds for those affected by the coronavirus pandemic, with a planned anthology, auction and more.

As shelter-in-place orders continue to impact businesses of all shapes and sizes, an all-star list of female comics creators have come together to support female and non-binary comic book retailers.

Jen King, owner of Space Cadet Collections in Texas, will administer The Insider Art: Female Comic Book Retailer Fund, which will raise money in three key ways:

  • A digital comics anthology, details on which you can find below.
  • An Insider Art fabric: Two fabrics will beavailable in the coming months via Spoonflower — one featuring cat art by noted comic book professionals, and another by a host of young female artists.
  • An auctions of exclusive artwork, signed prints and various collectibles: King, who is also host of CBSN, her Comic Book Shopping Network FaceBook Channel, will run auctions, live on FaceBook and on eBay, to raise money.

“We couldn’t think of a better way to acknowledge the female comic book retailers who are on the front lines every day, spreading the good word about our favorite medium,” said former Vertigo and Black Crown editor Shelly Bond, who helped put the project into motion. “Over 50 female comic book creators have donated their time and mad skills to support female retailers who have lost incredible amounts of money due to the COVID-19 pandemic.”

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May the 4th Be With You: ‘Star Wars: Doctor Aphra’ arrives digitally today

The first issue of the new series by Alyssa Wong and Marika Cresta can be found on comiXology now.

Everyone is celebrating Star Wars today, from Disney+to that purse company my wife likes. Marvel is getting in on the action by releasing the first issue of their new Star Wars: Doctor Aphra series on digital today.

Physical copies won’t arrive in comic shops until May 27, in the first wave of Marvel titles scheduled to hit comic shops since the coronavirus shut down Diamond Comics Distributors.

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What Are You Reading? ‘Friday,’ Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel and more

See what the Smash Pages crew has checked off their “to read” list lately.

If you’re looking for something to read while sheltering in place, you’ve come to the right blog, as the Smash Pages crew has a whole mess of comics to talk about this week. So without further ado …

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