SDCC Slugfest | News from DC, 2000 AD, Fantagraphics + more

As San Diego Comic-Con looms, we round up news on the show, recent comic announcements and more. Plus: comics at the G1 Climax opener!

With the San Diego Comic-Con coming up on July 23-26, we have news and announcements dropping left and right, so here’s an attempt to keep up with it all. Hit the links for more info.

DC has unveiled its plans for San Diego Comic-Con, which includes a continuation of their decade-long plan to spotlight a different era of the company in their booth, building toward their 100th anniversary in 2035. Last year the spotlight fell on the 1940s, so, given how numbers work, this year will focus on the 1950s — the decade that brought us Supergirl, Legion of Super- Heroes, Barry Allen, Hal Jordan and MAD Magazine.

Their booth will feature a 1950s-style Daily Planet newsstand, and they plan to give away free copies of MAD Magazine #1 facsimile edition, based on the original that debuted in 1952.

Here’s a video DC released spotlighting the comics and characters of that decade:

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Oni Press will crowdfund ‘Covenant: The Final Chapter,’ the final collection of LySandra Vuong’s hit webcomic

The sixth and final volume of the supernatural queer romance will launch for pre-order on Kickstarter Thursday.

Oni Press will launch a Kickstarter campaign for Covenant: The Final Chapter, the sixth volume of LySandra Vuong’s supernatural queer romance series, tomorrow.

The book will be available in stores in July 2027, but readers can reserve copies through the campaign next week. The popular Webtoon comic has had more than 20 million reads on the platform since it launched in 2020.

The series follows Sunny, a powerful exorcist with no faith in God, tasked with protecting a seemingly ordinary human from rising demonic forces.

Covenant is a supernatural action series about faith, family, and finding your place in a world that expects you to be something you’re not,” Vuong said. “At its heart, it follows Sunny and Ezra as they navigate Heaven and Hell while learning who they are — and who they want to be.”

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Smash Pages Q&A | Mel Gillman on ‘The Goblin Throne’

The webcomic-turned-graphic novel is now being crowdfunded by Iron Circus Comics.

Mel Gillman’s The Goblin Throne begins with a broken promise and the consequences that follow when you think you can outrun it.

The graphic novel, the latest from the creator of As the Crow Flies and Stage Dreams, follows a young woman who makes a pact with the Goblin Queen for peace and safety, then flees when confronted with the true cost. What she doesn’t realize is that all roads lead back to the Goblin Kingdom.

The Kickstarter campaign from Iron Circus Comics has already blown past its funding goal, with more than $20,000 raised as I type this. I spoke with Gillman about sapphic fairy tales, colored pencil illustration and more.

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DC announces DC Go expansion, including its first crossover

The webcomics imprint adds new seasons, original series and ‘Runway to Ruin!,’ its first crossover, later this year.

DC Go, the publisher’s vertical-scrolling digital comics imprint, will expand in 2026 with new seasons of returning series, three new originals and its first-ever crossover event.

The expansion kicks off with new seasons of three existing series:

  • Jon Kent: This Internship Is My Kryptonite, by writer Sam Camp and artist Seraji, launched its new season this month.
  • The Magical Mysteries of Shazam!, by Steve Orlando and artist Giopota, arrives in August.
  • Then Nothing Butt Nightwing, by Patrick R. Young and Moy R. Marco, returns in September.
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Three Count | Outlaw’s Apprentice, Forgotten Five, Fireborn theme song

Check out three things to read, to support and to hear today.

To read: Chris Schweizer’s Outlaw‘s Apprentice

You may know Chris Schweizer from his work on everything from 6 Sidekicks of Trigger Keaton to The Creeps series, and he’s back with a tale of swashbucklers and swords. Outlaw’s Apprentice debuted a few weeks back on Webtoon, and it’s as fun as it sounds:

Otis is a teenaged artist-in-training, but when he and the former mercenary to whom he is apprenticed find themselves on the wrong side of the law, they have to make their escape across the country with the law, bounty hunters, and old enemies dogging their heels.

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Cullen Bunn unearths more ‘Deepest Catacombs’

The 2020 webcomic inspired by vintage D&D ads is back with a new arc, new artists and darker dungeons.

The Sixth Gun writer Cullen Bunn has returned to the dungeons for a new arc of Deepest Catacombs, his serialized fantasy-horror comic strip inspired by vintage Dungeons & Dragons advertisements that appeared in comics. The new strips debuted in his Nightmare Fuel newsletter this week.

“When I finished releasing the initial run of Deepest Catacombs, I knew I would return,” said Bunn, “I just loved the characters and the world. I loved how it made me feel like a kid again. And I loved working with so many talented artists! This was, of course, a labor of love, so it has taken me a bit of time to get the ball rolling again, but the story is going to be a ton of fun!”

The original run debuted in 2020 across 25 single-page installments, each illustrated by a different artist, and was released for free in the early days of Covid. The new arc picks up directly where that series ended, reuniting the party of adventurers — Randall, Annalynn, Kezira, Chops and Fingerbones — as they venture into a frozen, haunted castle filled with wyverns, ghosts, dragons and vampires.

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Nominees announced for the Reuben, NCS Divisional Awards

The National Cartoonist Society has announced nominees for the 80th Annual NCS Reuben Awards, which will be presented in August.

The National Cartoonists Society has announced the 2025 NCS Divisional finalists and nominees for the annual Reuben Award, which recognize creators of comic strips, illustrations, comic books and more.

The awards recognize the cartoonist or artists specifically, so you’ll note that the actual comic, the writer and other creators, and the publisher aren’t called out in the nominations. Winners will be selected through a vote open to all NCS members.

This year’s Reuben list includes everyone who was nominated and didn’t win last year: Dave Blazek, Tauhid Bondia, Will Henry and Dana Simpson. Also nominated this year are arguably the two most prominent kids graphic novel creators right now, Raina Telgemeier and Dav Pilkey.

The comic book category features two veterans, The Goon creator Eric Powell and Usagi Yojimbo creator Stan Sakai, along with Jackie Musto, creator of Kay and P. On the graphic novel front, Raised by Ghosts creator Briana Loewinsohn, Sunder creator Pierre-Alexandre Comtois and One Path creator Greg Broadmore were nominated.

The winners will be announced in August. Check out the full list of nominees across all the categories for this year:

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Smash Pages Q&A | Jay Eaton on ‘Runaway to the Stars’

With a Kickstarter launching this week, we talk to Eaton about biology degrees, base-8 numeral systems and why a wall clock can take hours to draw.

Jay Eaton describes their path to comics less as a choice than as an inescapable gravitational pull, one they spent years trying to resist before giving in entirely.

After pursuing biology in college and working in horticulture, Eaton eventually committed full-time to the project they’d been building on the side all along: Runaway to the Stars, a hard sci-fi slice-of-life graphic novel about a centaur aerospace engineer, a shipwrecked AI pirate and the unlikely friendship that upends both their lives.

Eaton has been building this story on the web for years, and now it’s coming to print via Kickstarter through Iron Circus Comics. We talked about world-building as narrative, designing for bodies that aren’t human and what a biology degree is actually good for when you’re a cartoonist.

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Anders Nilsen, ‘Precious Rubbish’ + more win at the 2025 Ignatz Awards

The annual small-press awards were given out at SPX in Maryland this weekend.

The 2025 Ignatz Awards, which recognize the best in small press comics, were presented last night as part of this weekend’s Small Press Expo festivities. The event featured a keynote by cartoonist Mimi Pond, which you can watch in the replay of their livestream.

Creator Anders Nilsen took home two awards for his supplemental comic to his Tongues series, while Kayla E. won the graphic novel category for Precious Rubbish. While most of the winners were self-published, Fantagraphics took home two awards and Silver Sprocket received one.

The Ignatz Awards have been presented since 1997 and celebrate the outstanding achievements of independent comics, graphic novels and minicomics. They are named for the brick-throwing mouse that appeared in the Krazy Kat comics by George Herriman.

Congratulations to this year’s winners:

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NASA removes two digital comics featuring diverse astronauts from its website

The comics were meant to inspire “the next generation of explorers” when they were posted just a few years ago.

Two digital comics that once lived prominently on the NASA website have now been scrubbed from it in the wake of executive orders to remove all traces of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, or DEI, from government websites.

The two titles were First Woman: NASA’s Promise for Humanity and First Woman: Expanding Our Universe, which were posted to the site in 2021 and 2023, respectively. The first features the fictional story of female astronaut Callie Rodriguez as the first woman to walk on the moon. The second showed a diverse crew of astronauts exploring the moon. The comics were written by Brad Gann and Steven List, with artwork by Brent Donoho and Kaitlin Reid.

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Hourly Comics Day 2025: One day, countless stories

Check out comics by Ethan Aldridge, Mike Dawson, Mel Gillman, Hannah Templer and more.

Cartoonists worldwide picked up their pens this past weekend for #HourlyComicsDay, the annual challenge where creators commit to making and posting a comic every hour for a day.

Hourly Comics Day has a different rhythm than 24-Hour Comics Day, where artists try to create a complete comic in one day. Due to the quick turnaround of posting a new comic every hour, these pieces typically take the form of autobiographical or personal journal entries, with participants documenting their day through sequential art.

You can discover this year’s entries by searching for “Hourly Comics Day” or “#HourlyComicsDay” on various social platforms like BlueSky, Tumblr, Instagram, Patreon and more.. The diverse range of artistic styles and daily experiences shared makes for fascinating reading.

Here are a few I enjoyed this weekend:

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Sunday Comics | Nightwing’s Butt takes center stage on DC Go

Plus: Crucial Comix, Poetry Comics Month and more!

Here’s a round up of some of the most interesting comics we’ve seen online recently. If we missed something, let us know in the comments below.

In the lead-up to the New York Comic Con, DC announced DC Go, their Webtoon-esque scrolling comics addition to their DC Universe Infinite digital comics. They’ve now posted four chapters of their original comics featuring Harley Quinn, Raven and Nightwing’s butt, as well as several “vertically reformatted” DC and MAD Magazine classics, including Batman: Hush, All-Star Superman and the Court of Owls storyline that kicked off Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s New 52 Batman.

And what’s great is, everything they’ve posted so far is available for free.

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