Three Count | David Petersen, Council of Frogs, Sonic Frontiers

Here are three things to read, to support and to download in comics today.

Three Count spotlights, as the title suggests, three things from comics today. It’ll be three things with links, no more, no less. Don’t call it a comeback.

1. To read: David Petersen’s The Amazing Screw-On Head fan comic from 2004

Mouse Guard creator David Petersen posted a blast from his past to his blog this week — a fan comic he made for Mike Mignola’s The Amazing Screw-On Head with Maija Graham.

“Back in 2004 I was an active member of the Hellboy forums on CBR,” he said in his post. “We had a great community who were fans of Mike Mignola’s work, but also a support community for our various hobbies, crafts, and artwork. A group of us decided it would be fun to put together a web-only fan comic, a few pairs each working on a short story of a Mignola creation.”

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Edward Sorel awarded the Reuben; Powell, Petersen + more win NCS awards

The National Cartoonist Society recognized cartoonists and artist across several categories this past weekend.

The National Cartoonist Society has named Edward Sorel as the 2021 Cartoonist of the Year, presenting him with their annual Reuben Award.

The Reuben, along with the annual NCS Divisional Awards, were announced over the weekend during the Reuben Awards gala dinner.

Sorel’s work has appeared in The Nation, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Village Voice, National Lampoon, Fortune, Forbes, Time, Esquire and countless other publications. The 92-year-old artist’s memoir, Profusely Illustrated, was published last year.

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‘Mouse Guard’ returns in July

‘Mouse Guard: The Owlhen Caregiver’ will collect three new stories.

Award-winning creator David Petersen will return to the fantasy world of Mouse Guard in July with Mouse Guard: The Owlhen Caregiver, which collects three different stories.

“I’m so pleased that readers get to walk back into the Mouse Territories, be accompanied by familiar Guardmice, and encounter snakes, owls, wolves, rams, otters, toads, and foxes again. Short stories are magical things. Despite their size, they are exactly the right shape to hold large messages of morality and virtue,” said Petersen. “The common themes in these stories are ones of hope and of compassion, of service and the wellbeing of others. And every world could use more of that.”

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Staying home this weekend? Stream these comic-related events

In the wake of Emerald City Comic Con being postponed due to the coronavirus, there’s a lot going on online this weekend you can take part in.

While the coronavirus pandemic is causing event cancellations across many — heck, every — industry, one of the first events in the comics sphere to face the tough decision about whether to cancel or postpone was the Emerald City Comic Con, which was scheduled for this coming weekend in Seattle. ECCC was official postponed last week, with plans to pick a new date this summer.

But if the comic industry is anything, it’s resilient, made up of creative minds that can adapt to a changing landscape. This article in the Seattle Times spotlights several creators impacted by the cancellation and efforts to support the comics community this weekend — which includes many “pop up” online events.

Here’s a round-up of both live and virtual events that have popped up in the wake of the ECCC news. If we’ve missed any, please email me at jkparkin@yahoo.com.

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Comics Lowdown: Batton Lash, Ron Smith pass away

Plus: News on Grant Morrison, Tintin, Stan Lee and more.

Batton Lash, the creator of the long-running comic-strip-turned-comic-book Wolff and Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre (later re-titled Supernatural Law) passed away Jan. 12 at the age of 65 from brain cancer.

Lash’s comics career began in the late 1970s when Wolff and Byrd began running as a weekly comic strip in The Brooklyn Paper and then later in The National Law Journal. In the 1990s, he and his wife, Jackie Estrada, formed Exhibit A Press, which began publishing Wolff and Byrd comics under the title Supernatural Law. It later migrated to the web. His other works included writing the Archie Meets The Punisher crossover as well as Bongo Comics’ Radioactive Man book, which received an Eisner Award in 2002. He also collaborated with James Hudnall on Obama Nation, a conservative political comic strip that appeared on one of Andrew Breitbart’s websites.

Many of the creators and industry professionals who knew Lash have started to share their remembrances, including Heidi MacDonald and Rob Salkowitz. The Comics Reporter has a round-up of more of them.

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Comics Lowdown: Tom King’s CIA service

Plus: ‘The Arrival’ selected for Hong Kong’s first ‘One City, One Book’ campaign, the obituary Marie Severin should have received, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Phoebe Gloeckner, Diamond Gem awards and more best-of-2018 lists!

Happy New Year from the Smash Pages staff! Coming back from the holiday break, let’s ring out the old and ring in the new with today’s collection of comic book news links.

Let’s start with a weird one: Last week Abhay Khosla, comics critic and past Superman writer, posted about his attempts to confirm with the CIA that Batman and Heroes in Crisis writer Tom King used to work for them. The topic of King’s former employer frequently comes up in interviews related to his Batman work (not to mention King’s Vertigo series The Sheriff of Babylon), and Khosla questioned whether any reporters who interviewed King about it had ever confirmed it. So Khosla sent the CIA a letter back in 2016 asking for confirmation, and the response he received from the agency was inconclusive.

This exchange occurred in 2016, and why Khosla decided to go public with it now isn’t clear. The point of Khosla’s post doesn’t seem to be to call out King as a liar (he starts his post by saying, “I don’t think this is really a story about Tom King”) but is more of a statement about entertainment journalism and fact-checking. He points out similar situations where a past DC writer, Micah Wright, lied about being in the armed services, as well as current Marvel editor-in-chief C.B. Cebulski pretending to be Japanese early in his career.

The problem isn’t in asking the question — it’s posting about it without an answer or actually asking King about it. Like verifying facts, that’s also journalism 101. After the post went live, King was quick to respond on Twitter, showing proof that he was, indeed, in the CIA. Bleeding Cool, The Comics Reporter and Nick Hanover have more commentary on this.

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Check out David Petersen’s ‘Mouse Guard’ poster for Mondo

New poster spotlighting his creation ships in November.

Mouse Guard creator David Petersen has done a coupe of posters for Mondo in the past, but never one of his own creations — until now.

Petersen has created a poster based on Mouse Guard: Fall 1152, the first story he created featuring his diminutive warriors.

“For the Fall 1152 poster I needed to re-create the events of that book in one image that summed everything up,” he wrote on his blog. “No problem, right? Harder than you think. I started with the idea that I should have the 3 main mouse characters as well as the snake (everyone still remembers that scene from the first issue). So, I sketched on copy paper, Lieam, Saxon and Kenzie with the plan to put Lieam front and center, with the other two either side of him. The snake would loom up over them from behind.”

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David Petersen opens his vault in ‘The Plotmasters Project’ podcast

Petersen and his high school friends revisit the comics they made back in the day, starting with a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles homage called “Cats Trio.”

Here’s something fun — Mouse Guard creator David Petersen shares a “just for fun” project he developed with two friends in high school, Jesse Glenn and Mike Davis, called “Cats Trio,” Petersen and Glenn revisit the project on their podcast “The Plotmasters Project.”

“…it was a TMNT homage where three mutated/anthropomorphic cats befriend a similar raccoon as the group discover their shared origins, survive in abandoned places away from human eyes, and avoid being hunted by another of their kind,” Petersen wrote on his blog, adding, “I also want to state, that Jesse and I have no current plans to develop Cats Trio (or any of the subjects for our series) beyond these exercises.”

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David Petersen captures the essence of Third Earth with his ThunderCats portraits

Known for his drawings of mice in his popular Mouse Guard series, David Petersen recently turned his pen to a group of cats — The ThunderCats, to be precise. On his blog, the artist shares some recent portraits of the team from the popular animated series.

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