Smash Pages Q&A: Tee Franklin on ‘Bingo Love’

Following a successful Kickstarter, Franklin discusses how the graphic novel landed at Image Comics.

Last month Bingo Love came out from Image Comics. Written by first-time graphic novelist Tee Franklin and illustrated by Jenn St-Onge, it’s a realistic love story that jumps from 1963 to the present before ending in 2038. It tells the story of two women, Hazel and Mari, who meet when they’re young and are reunited decades later. It’s a story with a happy ending, which is not to say that the book is not also a fraught and complicated journey for the characters.

Franklin is known to many in the comics community for her journalism. She’s written short comics for various anthologies, but after a successful Kickstarter, the book looks to be one of the breakout comics of the year. The book has already gone into a second printing before it was ever published, and Image isn’t run by fools; Franklin announced her next project at Image Expo shortly after Bingo Love hit the shelves.

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Slate announces 2018 Cartoonist Studio Prize shortlists

Winners of the annual award by Slate and the Center for Cartoon Studies will be announced March 30.

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

Slate began the program in 2012 in conjunction with the Center for Cartoon Studies. 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, and last year’s winners, Eleanor Davis for Libby’s Dad and Christina Tran for “On Beauty.”

The shortlists for both prizes are:

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ECCC: Black Crown announces new titles from Sebela, McManus, Howard, Robles

‘Euthanauts’ and ‘House Amok’ join Shelly Bond’s imprint.

At this weekend’s Emerald City Comic Con, IDW’s Black Crown imprint has announced two new titles: Euthanauts by Tini Howard and Nick Robles, and House Amok by Christopher Sebela and Shawn McManus.

“A year ago, we announced Black Crown at Emerald City Comic Con,” editor Shelly Bond said in a press release. “It’s the perfect venue to debut our newest titles. Euthanauts and House Amok share the dysfunctional irreverence you’ve come to expect from the cross street of comics + chaos. We’ve saved you the best table at the Black Crown Pub, and your favorite song is on the jukebox. 2018 is just getting started! Viva Comics!”

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ECCC: Two new Jinxworld titles coming from Bendis, Gaydos, Mack

‘Pearl’ and ‘Cover” due out later this year from the imprint, which now resides at DC Comics.

At Emerald City Comic Con today, writer Brian Michael Bendis announced two new creator-owned titles coming soon from his Jinxworld imprint, which recently moved to DC Comics.

“I’m BEYOND excited to announce these new titles at Emerald City Comic Con,” said Bendis in a press release. “The show has always stayed true to its comics roots and that makes it a perfect place to talk anything Jinxworld, especially new titles I’m working on with creators like Michael and David whom I value and respect so highly.”

Bendis will join with two artists he’s very familiar with on the new comics, titled Pearl and Cover.

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Gaiman to curate ‘The Sandman Universe’ line for Vertigo

Nalo Hopkinson, Kat Howard, Si Spurrier and Dan Watters join Gaiman for four new titles in the new line.

Neil Gaiman will return to the world of The Sandman in a new curated line for DC’s Vertigo imprint, called, appropriately, The Sandman Universe. The line will kick off with a one-shot that’ll set up the return of three former Vertigo titles and one new one.

“… it’s a huge sandbox with so many wonderful toys that nobody’s getting to play with right now,” Gaiman told Entertainment Weekly about why he decided to return to these characters. “I started feeling guilty. I liked the idea of getting the toys played with again, reminding people how much fun this is, and also getting the opportunity to work with some fantastic writers. Down the line, there will be fantastic artists as well.”

The project kicks off this August with The Sandman Universe one-shot special, which catches readers up on what’s been happening in The Dreaming, the realm where the Daniel, the current Sandman, rules. But Daniel’s gone missing, leaving chaos in his wake. The one-shot will also catch up with two other Gaiman creations who enjoyed their own success at Vertigo — Books of Magic star Tim Hunter and Lucifer, whose ongoing series ran for 75 issues and later inspired the FOX TV series of the same name.

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Smash Pages Q&A: Sloane Leong on ‘Prism Stalker’

‘It’s a weird sci-fi biopunk adventure about colonization, autonomy, the pain of desire and the wonder, power and horror of expression.’

Comics readers might know Sloane Leong as the artist of From Under Mountains. She’s also drawn fill-in stories for a number of comics, including Prophet, Glory and Bravest Warriors, and has contributed to gallery shows, but starting this week, she will be known for Prism Stalker.

The ongoing series launches next week from Image Comics, and the first issue is simply stunning. It manages to convey a lot of information about this world, much of it through suggestion. Her pages quite frankly do not look like most comics pages but are instead complex works of design that echo the musicality within the story and defining the pacing. The story itself, which is about language and culture, memory and what is passed down, could not be more relevant today. Like the very best science fiction, the issue manages to depict something strange and truly alien, while drawing parallels to the present, the past and our own experiences.

For many, writing, drawing and coloring a monthly series is more than enough, but Leong is also finishing a graphic novel, A Map to the Sun, for First Second Books, and writing a regular review column for The Comics Journal. Happily, she somehow found the time to talk with me.

Leong will be at Emerald City Comic Con this weekend at Table #208 where she’ll have advance copies of the first issue for sale. It will be available in stores on March 7.

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Fantagraphics’ ‘Disney Masters’ line begins in May

New line of hardcovers includes work by Romano Scarpa, Luciano Bottaro, Paul Murry, Freddy Milton and Daan Jippes.

Beginning in May, Fantagraphics will publish a new line called “Disney Masters,” building on their already impressive line of classic Disney comics collections. The new line is devoted to “Disney’s greatest cartoonists,” and will include the works of Romano Scarpa, Luciano Bottaro, Paul Murry, Freddy Milton and Daan Jippes.

These will be full-color hardcovers, running about 200 pages each. Many of these stories originated overseas, and this will be their first American appearance.

Here’s the rundown of what you can expect from the first four volumes, which come out later this year:

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New edition of ‘Banana Sunday’ adds a sprinkle of color

Rian Sygh colors Colleen Coover and Paul Tobin’s classic, all-ages comic about a girl and her primates.

Before creating the award-winning Bandette, the husband and wife team Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover collaborated on the black-and-white comic Banana Sunday, an all-ages story about a woman and her pet primates. Originally released in 2006, Banana Sunday will return in October from Oni Press in full color.

For the new edition Tobin and Coover have teamed up with colorist Rian Sygh. It’ll also feature a new introduction by Tobin (who wrote it under the pseudonym Root Nibot) and previosuly uncollected artwork by Coover. Coover also said it has been “revised and edited for today’s readers.”

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Smash Pages Q&A: Ilan Stavans

The essayist, translator, editor and scholar discusses his latest work, an autobiographical graphic novel with artist Santiago Cohen.

Ilan Stavans does so many things that most of his readers likely struggle to keep track of them. Stavans is a renowned essayist, translator, editor and scholar. The publisher of Restless Books, he was the General Editor of The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature. He’s written or co-written dozens of books including Quixote: The Novel and the World, Singer’s Typewriter and Mine: Reflections on Jewish Culture, Octavio Paz: A Meditation and Gabriel García Márquez: The Early Years, the first of a two-volume biography. He’s the producer and host of the podcast In Contrast, a fiction writer and playwright, and his debut volume of his own poetry, The Wall, comes out this year as part of the Pitt Poetry series.

Stavans is also a lover and writer of comics. He’s collaborated with Lalo Alacaraz on two books (Latino USA: A Cartoon History and A Most Imperfect Union: A Contrarian History of the United States) in addition to writing graphic novels like Mr. Spic Goes to Washington and El Iluminado. His new book, a collaboration with artist Santiago Cohen, is Angelitos.

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‘Pope Hats’ collected (finally!) in May

Hartley Lin drops his ‘Ethan Rilly’ pseudonym for the release of ‘Young Frances,’ which collects his award-winning comic.

AdHouse Books brings some long-awaited news — the award-winning Pope Hats by Hartley Lin, a.k.a. Ethan Rilly, will be collected in May. In addition, the creator is dropping his “Ethan Rilly” pseudonym and will begin using his real name.

Young Francis collects the series, which AdHouse has been publishing since 2009. Lin received a Xeric Foundation Grant in 2008 to create the series, and it has since won a Doug Wright Award, an Ignatz Award and a Joe Shuster Award, and has been nominated for an Eisner Award.

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Smash Pages Q&A: Trungles on ‘Twisted Romance’

The comics artist discusses his work with Alex de Campi on the Image Comics anthology, how he came into comics and more.

Trungles is coming off a busy 2017. His Fauns and Fairies: The Adult Fantasy Coloring Book was published by Limerence Press, he was a contributor one of the year’s best anthologies, Mirror Mirror II, and he’s been making the webcomic Vampire Buddy. His new project is “Treasured”, the main story in the fourth and final issue of Twisted Romance, which is out this week from Image Comics. I reached out to ask him about romance stories, fairy tales, and finding ways to subvert expectations and tropes.

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Image reveals many, many new titles at Image Expo

New projects announced from Matthew Rosenberg and Tyler Boss, Rob Guillory, J.H. Williams and Haden Blackman, Sam Humphries and Jen Bartel, Annie Wu and more.

As they’ve done in previous years, Image Comics dropped a metric ton of announcements at their Image Expo event, held today in Portland, Oregon.

The line-up of announcements this year includes five new titles from Todd McFarlane’s camp, new titles from Chew creators John Layman and Rob Guillory, two comics from Christoper Sebela, the fact that they’ll publish the Netflix/Millarworld titles starting with The Magic Order and much more. No doubt there are interviews aplenty dropping around the internet on all these new projects, so I’ll start with the text of the press release, then add art and commentary as I find it.

So let’s get to it …

Blackbird by Sam Humphries & Jen Bartel
Sam Humphries and Jen Bartel team up to co-create Blackbird, a modern fantasy story best described as Harry Potter meets Riverdale. It follows a young woman named Nina who discovers a neon-lit world of magic masters in Los Angeles. Now they’ve kidnapped her sister, and Nina is the only one who can save her.

“Blackbird is a labor of love, a coming of age story and beautiful people doing insane things with magic,” said Humphries.

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