Jordan currently lives in Seattle, where we works with PopCap Games as a studio artist. Despite his lifelong interest in comics, the bulk of his illustrative career has been spent working in the video game industry. (Some of the titles he’s worked on include the Sly Cooper franchise, League of Legends, Zuma, and Bejeweled 3).

That’s right, Jordan has every kid’s dream job – he designs videogame art by day and spends his free time working on comic books.

While he has dabbled in comics in the past, Hominids represents Kotzebue’s first foray into an ongoing series. The comic, which is now two issues in, is set in an era of ancient history in which early humans coexisted with another intelligent prehistoric species – Neanderthals. The world Jordan paints is lush, mysterious, and filled with the potential for adventure. As a neat aside, it was a concept originally dreamed up by his twelve-year-old self that Jordan decided to return to later in life and flesh out more fully.

I talked with Jordan about Hominids, his early interest in comics, and some of his background in doing artistic design for videogames.

That interview is below:

KD: Is it a fair statement to say that most of your illustrative work has been for the gaming industry?

JK: Yeah, primarily. I’ve done a few comic things as well. I did one of the online books for Heroes back when the show was popular and still on the air. Then I did some posters and a couple of commission projects for DC.

But mostly my work has been in the gaming industry.

KD: Was that something you shot for right from the start, or did you sort of fall into that particular niche of illustration?

JK: I shot for it, definitely. My older brother Travis, he was always a big influence on me and he helped me get into the industry. We’ve always had each other’s backs that way. We’ve helped each other get work and jobs, and it was an easy transition pretty much right out of school.

KD: What would you say is the best part of working in the gaming industry for you?

JK: Definitely my favorite part is the storytelling aspect. A lot of my work on Sly Cooper was doing the cutscenes, and so I had the opportunity to contribute to the story there and push that forward, which was neat. Also when you’re doing concept art, you get to play around a lot and get creative with it. With the Sly Cooper franchise, we were pretty much working from scratch and we had the opportunity to take a lot of liberty with the designs. This is opposed to working on something like, say, Call of Duty or something super serious like that.

KD: Between the stuff you’ve done to date, from Sly Cooper to the work you’re doing right now for PopCap, do you have a project you’ve worked on that holds a special place in your heart?

JK: PopCap’s great just because they’re a super awesome company and they treat their people really well. When I started Hominids, they were really, really supportive.

A lot of the backgrounds I did on Bejeweled 3 were a lot of fun because I got to be really painterly and imaginative with it. The project I’m working on right now, which unfortunately I can’t talk about, is a total blast. It’s really hard to compare because they’re sort of different animals, you know? But at the same time a lot of the people that I worked with on those projects are the same people so a lot of us make the same moves between companies.

KD: How far back does your own interest in comics go?

JK: As far back as I can remember. I mean, I really got into it with like the Uncanny X-Men of the eighties, back in the Chris Claremont days. That was really when I started collecting comics and it just stuck from there. I got really into cartoons, like the Batman animated series and Gargoyles, and I grew up on G.I. Joe and Transformers.

I never really grew out of those interests, and I guess I knew from an early age that I wanted to be doing something related.

KD: Was your work on the Heroes online comic book your first real work in comics?

JK: It was, though the DC stuff happened right around that time as well. I think it was in ‘06 that me and my brother Travis decided to combine our portfolios together as a team. At the time, we called ourselves the Kotzebue brothers and we have that on our website.

Prior to that we were selling ourselves as individual artists and it just clicked that it made more sense for us to pool our efforts. After we rebranded as the Kotzebue brothers, we had more people start to take notice when we had a table at that year’s Comic-Con. That’s when things started to happen for us in comics.

KD: One of the cool things about Hominids is that its an idea carried over from some sketches you did as a kid. What can you tell me about those early years of Hominids?

JK: Back then they were just called ‘natives’, and it was something for me and my friends to pretend and play at in the park. Back in the town I grew up in, Bellingham, there was a city park that was reminiscent of a lush jungle. There were these big forty foot trees with massive leaves, it looked like something out of Avatar.

It was the perfect place for a kid’s imagination to run wild. We made up these characters and would run around in the park forest until we wore ourselves out, then we would draw sketches based on what we had dreamed up.

I kept drawing those characters and they sort of grew up as I grew up. I never thought  I’d do anything with them, but then I wanted to do my own comic I revisited the concept. The idea that there was a time when we weren’t the only intelligent species on the planet was fascinating to me. You hear about how humans are unique because we’re the only intelligent species, but we’re not the only one, we’re just the only intelligent species that survived.

That whole era interested me, when there were humans as well as this shorter species of little hobbit-like guys running around. It would’ve been kind of like Middle-Earth without the magic.

KD: How much of the world you had created as a kid carried over to Hominids as we know it now?

JK: On the Hominids comic website, I have some early sketches and you can kind of see how it was laid out. I did try and do like a little comic when I was in seventh grade and it had a prologue page that is similar in a lot of ways to the new comic. I mean, it’s a lot simpler and more silly, but it features pretty similar characters. Originally it was set on a small island surrounded by mystery and magic, but a certain TV show kind of ruined that for me. (laughs)

That was fine ’cause it pushed me to go in a more interesting direction. Back then the Neanderthal characters were grouped into regular natives, mountain natives,  then there were the cannibals, and some surfer natives in there somewhere. The chimpanzees they fight were called ‘peanut people’ in the first issue. They were just small little guys that always caused trouble.

There are some similarities, but the overall story is quite a bit different.

KD: Somewhere between the first and the second issue, you made the decision to switch from doing the comic in black and white to full color. What factored into that decision for you?

JK: The first issue was very much an experimental issue just to answer the question, ‘can I do this?’ Can I do a full issue while working as well? My original thought process was that I wasn’t going to have enough time to do full color. The more I got into it, the more I was rendering it and fleshing it out and I realized that wasn’t gonna take much more to put the color in there.

Also, when you have a lush jungle setting, you sort of want to see that world in color. I thought it would be worth that bit of inconsistency between the first two issues to have a higher quality book.

KD: Do you think you’d ever go back and recolor that first issue?

JK: I intend to, actually. That’s something I’m gonna do inbetween issues two and three. I’m also going to have a booth at the Emerald City Con, so my goal is to have it done before then.

For more Hominids you can visit it here and here at The Fabler (requires login), or here on its official website. You can also check out his art blog, or visit the website of the Kotzebue brothers.

- Interview by Kevin de Vlaming

Don’t believe me? Assuming you’re already familiar with Fredric Wertham and his unfortunate influence on comics  in the 50’s, I recommend you further check out some of the controversy that surrounded Omaha the Cat Dancer or Mike Diana’s obscenity charge for cartooning. Or, if you wanted something more recent, you could read up on comic collector Christopher Handley’s sentencing last year to six months in prison for possession of ‘Obscene’ Manga.

This sort of brazen disregard for freedom of speech in artistic expression is what led to the formation of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund in 1986 ‘to protect the First Amendment rights of the comic art form and its community of retailers, creators, publishers, librarians, and readers’.

The Comic Legends Legal Defense Fund is a similar fundraising organization, founded in 1987 specifically ‘to raise money for the defense of a Calgary, Alberta comic shop whose owners were charged with selling obscene materials’. The CLLDF, which has been largely inactive for the past two decades, recently reformed to lend their support to an American currently facing criminal charges in Canada on account of manga images found on his laptop that were deemed ‘obscene.’

You can find more information on the case here, but the gist of it is that an American in his mid-twenties was searched at customs upon his arrival in Canada to visit a friend. Upon searching his personal belongings they found the images in question and deemed them to be child pornography.

The reason I’m mentioning this now is that the Comic Legends Legal Defense Fund just last week sent out a press release announcing that they have finally been formally incorporated. Additionally, the board of Directors for the CLLDF has expanded from three members to five.

Regarding the move to incorporate, current Board of Directors member Derek McCulloch said in the press release that, “It’s a long overdue step, and one we hope communicates our intention to grow the Fund as a bulwark in the defense of free speech in Canada.”

The two new members on the Board of Directors are Jay Bardyla, founder of Happy Harbor Comics in Edmonton, Alberta, and Jennifer Haines, the owner of The Dragon in Guelph, Ontario.

Needless to say, this bodes well for all Canadian comic fans – the CBLDF has been an essential factor in matters pertaining to censorship  in North American comic books for decades now, and the renewed efforts of the CLLDF to keep a strong Northern front in the battle are enormously encouraging.

With that said, there were just a couple of additional news items I wanted to regurgitate here.

(Onto you. The reader. Our figurative splatter-bib.)

Item one!

Speaking of encouraging news, they sentenced that dude who robbed a mentally disabled Superman super-fan of thousands of dollars worth of comics and collectibles pertaining to the Man of Steel.

If you hadn’t been following the story, Mike Meyer is a 48 year-old-man who works part time at McDonald’s and lives alone with his two dogs, Krypto and Dyno. He has been receiving Social Security for a mental disability for over twenty years.

Mike, who has been collecting Superman memorabilia since 1974, made headlines in September when he was conned out of more than 1,800 Superman comics, figures, and miscellaneous memorabilia. The loathsome prick responsible, who we now know to be 38-year-old Gerry Armbruster, befriended Mike and manufactured a moment of opportunity in which he could make off with the Supes collectables while Meyer was distracted.

Armbruster was later caught and pleaded guilty yesterday to the theft, in addition to the assault and robbery of an elderly man in an unrelated case.

He was sentenced to six years in prison.

The redeeming element to this story is that, once the media caught wind of Meyer’s plight and broadcast it to comic fans and the world at large, he received a generous surge of support in the form of empathetic individuals rallying to replace his stolen collection.

Item two!

Have you been reading Kill Shakespeare? Were you, like I, left with a great void to fill after reading the final pages of the last issue?

May this little bit of news help renew your sense of purpose in life.

Turns out, co-creators Anthony Del Col and Conor McCreery (being the crazy couple of guys they are) are presenting a stage version of Kill Shakespeare in Toronto, Ontario on November 26th and 27th.

They’re billing it as ‘a mix of comic art, performance and music ‘ which will ‘tell the Kill Shakespeare saga in a way that will delight both theatre and comic geeks’. They also offer the teaser to those of us not in Toronto that they’ve been contacted by several other theatres who want to bring Kill Shakespeare to their communities.

Rad? Rad.

Oh also, for those interested, the second volume of Kill Shakespeare (containing issues 7-12) debuts on November 22nd. So if you haven’t been following the issues, this will be your chance to check out the complete run with two snappy purchases.

And that’s the forced adjective we’re riding out on…

Stay frosty,

-Kevin@thefabler

Perpetually accompanied by a squirrel who has taken to nesting on her head, Real Life Fiction arbitrarily segues between Robin’s daily musings and bouts of surreal randomness.  What constitutes ’surreal randomness’, you might ask?

Pink crime fighting unicorn men, gladiatorial figure skating, and polar bear milking for Coca-Cola… to name a few of the many topics featured in RLF.

Robin is also the author, and the concepts she writes and illustrates into Real Life Fiction are drawn from whatever happens to spark her imagination.

Real Life Fiction is just one of the many comics that can be currently found on The Fabler webcomics portal. We here at the Fabler thought it might be neat to showcase some of the talent that has popped up around the site, and ImaginaryGirl (Robin) immediately sprang to mind.

Fortunately for all involved, she was amiable enough to agree to an interview.

She’s  been relating ridiculously funny tales of pink unicorns, pop culture characters, and her own day-to-day life since 2008, when she first started Real Life Fiction.

“Way back when,” says Robin, “I did a comic called Mixed Myth and a collaborative comic called Metrophor. Then I I had to take a break because I had some issues with tendonitis. I still really wanted to do comics, so I tried to develop a style that would be fast and easy on my hand. It began as a gag-a-day thing that didn’t take a lot of commitment, as opposed to something with an overarching story. For that format I started by just pulling ideas from my everyday life.”

The title Real Life Fiction is an accurate reference to the subject matter Robin writes about, which ranges from tiny ninjas who master in papercut combat to socialist breakfast cereals and evil mullet-powered armies of the future. You can literally watch Robin’s mind at work as she transforms the random thoughts that occur to her throughout her day-to-day into simultaneously extravagant and goofball comic strips.

“Honestly,” she says, “I can’t deliberately come up with an idea. As I go through the day something will pop in there like… what if this were different, or what if this notion were explored a little more. I used to have sticky notes that I would write them down on, which of course I would constantly lose. So now I have a tablet that I record ideas on, and I actually have a backlog of them, which is good.

When asked about the approximate ratio of Real Life to Fiction in Robin’s comic strip, she is quick to reply that, “It’s about 80% fiction, 20% real life.”

For those wondering, Robin does not in fact go about with a squirrel on her head in real life. (Much to my own personal disappointment. )

“The squirrel is actually a reference to my college days. We would have these campus squirrels that were the craziest things. I swear they would throw nuts at people, or at least drop them deliberately.  I once saw one carrying a cookie that was about the same size he was up a tree. They were just so kooky and off the wall and the squirrel in RLF is sort of an homage to that.”

Kooky and off the wall are phrases that sit nicely within the context of Real Life Fiction. I asked Robin if she felt a need to constantly be working to outdo herself in terms of the more ‘ridiculous’ aspects of her comic.

“I do,” she says, with a laugh. “And it’s not just a challenge to myself but to what I imagine my reader expectations to be. It’s certainly a high standard that I have to keep trying to meet.”

Robin says that it can be a challenge to keep the content of RLF fresh and worthy of raising that bar.

“Particularly some of the Manicorn stuff. People really enjoy it, but at the same time I don’t want it to become mundane or expected.”

While Real Life Fiction may be Robin’s most absurd webcomic to date, it’s certainly not her first.

“Mixed Myth was a comic that I did during my comic years, and it ran for about four years. It was a story-based fantasy comic, but it was still a bit of a satire because I can’t resist. There’s a magic system in that world which is based on cinematics and how cool something would look, and also people are descended from rabbits.

That was actually rather popular, and by the end I had about a thousand visits a day.

Then I did – I don’t want to say Steampunk – but sort of a fantasy punk comic with my brother, who was the writer. That one was called Metrophor. The art was so intricate on it that when I started experiencing tendonitis I unfortunately had to set it down.”

For Robin, one of the biggest draws to webcomicking is the unique opportunities for feedback that it affords.

“I don’t want to say I put all of this out there specifically for the comments, but it’s really nice to hear what people think. If you publish something and you put it out there in print you’re basically sending it out to this void, but if you do a webcomic and people comment on it then you know what you can improve and you know when you do something right.”

I also asked Robin about some of the challenges she’s  faced in taking on the world of webcomics, and she was quick to isolate just one area: advertising.

“It used to be,” she says, “In the early days of webcomics that people would do link exchanges and that was the primary form of advertising. Now it doesn’t seem that people do that quite as much. While there are things nowadays like Project Wonderful and what have you, the internet these days is a much larger and more complex place and so it’s much harder to be heard.”

Not to confine her expressive endeavours exclusively to the field of comics, Robin is a woman of many talents. One of which, incidentally, is the making of intricate, inspired masks.

“I’ve been making masks for about four or five years now,” Robin says, “The first one I did was for a Mardi Gras party that never happened, then I just kind of got into it and kept trying to research new materials and new techniques to make masks faster and higher quality.

It was something that not a lot of people did. I mean there are a lot of people who do leather masks out there and that’s really impressive, but what I wanted to do was something a little more sculptural. I sculpted a lot with polymer clay as a kid, which was probably where that came from. I also liked the fact that masks actually had a use. I love wall art and certainly masks can double as that, but I like that  it’s art you can wear to things and actually get use out of.”

As a final question, I asked Robin to name some of her current favorite comics and videogames.  Since Real Life Fiction is chock full of references to everything from Katamari to Batman, I thought she might have an interesting personal selection. She did not disappoint:

“Oh my gosh. Videogames , I would say Portal, Katamari Damacy, Okami…I have a long love for the Final Fantasy Fantasy series but I don’t own a next-gen system, so I’m a little dated in that respect.

Comics, I would say Gunnerkrigg Court... From the print side I would say Fables and Hellboy. The very first webcomic I ever read was Sluggy Freelance, back in High School. Oh, and Manly Guys Doing Manly Things is one that I’ve gotten into very recently. It’s a little like Real Life Fiction in terms of how it uses game references, but it goes down a different path. ”

For more Real Life Fiction, you can read it here and here on The Fabler or visit rlfcomic.com.  You can also find links there to Robin’s other comics, art, and her masks.

-Written by Kevin de Vlaming

The comic, which saw wider distribution via publisher AdHouse Books in 2009, introduced us to roommates Frances and Vickie. Vickie is an alcoholic party girl, and Frances is ostensibly your average, down-to-earth type just looking to eke out a living in the world. Except of course for her numerous idiosyncratic behaviors – like, for instance, maintaining an ongoing dialogue with a fictional ghost named Sarsgaard.

At the time of my interview with Ethan, he was working on a graphic novel follow up to his well-received debut effort.

Now, nearly a year and a half later, his sophomore effort is available for purchase from select comic retailers as well as directly from AdHouse.

It’s not the graphic novel he had originally planned, but instead a 40 page second issue installment in the Pope Hats series. The book is also far less surreal, even going so far as to abandon the character of Saarsgard entirely.

Both of these changes reflect the new confidence that Rilly has found in his artistic voice.

Pope Hats # 2 may not be voluminous in nature or feature talking ghosts, but what we are given is presented with purposeful sincerity and a unique sort of human empathy. As Frances Scarland works her way up the corporate ladder as a law clerk in a high-pressure firm, the reader is given a candid glance at the abstract thought processes that separate people from worker drones.

Throughout her bouts with insomnia, exchanges with an obsessively intense new boss, and experiences on the rollercoaster ride that is living with Vickie, Frances is consistently a very real, relatable character.

The look and feel of Ethan’s art is similarly more polished. Solid, confident linework and memorable cityscape imagery establish a visually distinct backdrop against which Ethan’s characters casually live out their lives.

Ethan was kind enough to field a few more interview questions for The Fabler, ranging in topic from his decisions involving Pope Hats and thoughts on having Chester Brown moderate the book launch,  to his own current comic book picks and preferences.

Read on for more words from Ethan Rilly, writer and artist of Pope Hats Issues 1 & 2:

KD: I wanted to ask you about your decision to take Pope Hats back to a shorter, issue sort of format rather than do the graphic novel you had in mind back when we last talked.

You did an interview with Squidface & The Meddler where you touched on this, but could you elaborate a bit on what it was that just didn’t jive with you when you were working on that?

ER: Yeah. I probably shouldn’t have talked about it in the first place. I’m usually a pretty quiet guy.

It just didn’t feel right in the end. It’s a basic thing to step back from whatever you’re working on and ask, “Would I enjoy reading this book?” Unfortunately, in comics, you have to complete a fair amount of work before you can get a straight answer from yourself.

Abandoning the thing wasn’t difficult. It’s like trying to cook a new exotic recipe and messing it up. Just because you put effort into it does not make it good. But you learn from the experience, presumably.

KD: When you decided to scrap everything and take a fresh approach to this book, what was the first thing you established the new issue would focus on?

ER: I can’t remember exactly. I knew that the central character Frances was a law clerk and I wanted to flesh out her environment.

KD: As a whole, how was the experience of writing and illustrating Pope Hats # 2 different from the first book?

ER: It was more deliberate and intensive. Plus I did the second issue while I was living in this great apartment above a storefront on Bloor St. in Toronto. I had a big window facing the street, which was ideal for natural light and overt people-watching.

KD: What can you tell me about your decision to omit Sarsgaard from the second Pope Hats issue? Do you feel like any of your fans from the first comic were really choked about his absence?

ER: I think my interests simply changed over the lapse between issues. I haven’t really received negative feedback about switching gears. People who read the second issue seem to immediately get it.

It was never my intention to do a story with a really obvious hook. I don’t want to be that guy that does hundreds of books about a talking animal or whatever. For me, doing a straight-up fictional story is challenging enough.

KD: In addition to the feature story, Pope Hats # 2 features a trio of shorter vignettes. Speaking to the longer of the three, where did the Gould Speaks short comic idea come from?

ER: I was curious about whether I could capture the contained atmosphere of a very long bus ride. It’s a weird mixture of excitement and routine for people in long distance relationships. Time passes very slowly. It seemed like an impossibly boring thing to depict, and for some reason I found that intriguing.

KD: Hey, so Chester Brown did your comic launch event! How was that?

ER: Chester came onstage with a clipboard covered with post-it notes and opened with, “So Ethan, when was the last time you paid for a prostitute?” Ha ha. I figured it would be the only opportunity he would have all year to come out in public and not mention prostitutes, but no. Anyway, he was very gracious and asked challenging questions. We hadn’t seen each other in a couple months, so the whole thing was fun and conversational. Obviously, his work is monumental to me.

KD: What comics/books are you reading/consuming yourself these days?

ER: Matt Forsythe let me read the proof of his upcoming Comics Class book a couple weeks ago and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Publisher Annie Koyama has excellent taste. My friend Nick Maandag’s self-published book Streakers will be shipping through Diamond soon and it’s a wonderful oddball humour book. I came late to the Sublife books by John Pham, but I read them recently and they made my brain explode.

What else? I came back from the Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco with a big pile of stuff, including Mike Bertino’s Trigger from Revival House, two issues of the smut anthology The Thickness, co-edited by Ryan Sands and Michael DeForge, and the obligatory Charles Bukowski books and Cometbus zines from City Lights. When you’re a tourist, it’s okay to act like a tourist.

To pick up Pope Hats #2, visit AdHouse Books here. You can also visit Ethan’s website to see some of his additional illustration work.

-Interview by Kevin de Vlaming

You may have heard of him as ‘that guy who co-wrote the Cowboys and Aliens graphic novel, and then subsequently had his name unattached from anything remotely relating to the property and, later, film’.

Which I wouldn’t be miffed about at all if it happened to me.  <cough>

Alternately, you might have been fortunate enough to read one of his less widely distributed original comics, like Parting Ways (drawn by Scott Mooney and Nick Craine) or The Holiday Men in The Massacre Memorial Day Sale Massacre (art by Nick Johnson).

If you were really, REALLY lucky you may have even read one of the five issues from a 2006 vampire satire miniseries he did alongside (then-budding) comic star Fiona Staples. The miniseries, titled ‘Done to Death’, told the two distinct yet inexorably linked stories of a serial-killing editor out to rid the world of bad writers and a vampire so antithetical to Anne Rice, it would make Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise choke on their sweet goblets of blood.

Don’t fret too much if you missed this fantastic foray into the de-romanticized modern mythology of vampires. It may have taken five years, but Done to Death has been resurrected as a collected trade paperback available now from IDW Publishing.

Judging from the widespread indoctrination of vampire misinformation rooted in such ’sexy’, ‘emotionally gripping’ franchises as True Blood and Twilight, the collected edition of Done to Death comes not a moment too soon.

Done to Death is original, witty, and wickedly entertaining.

So don’t fret too much if you didn’t already know Andrew Foley

You will.

A good place to start would be the following interview I did with Mr. Foley when I caught up with him in Calgary after his signing at Another Dimension Comics.

Without further…whatever. Check it:

KD: Hey, you just finished a mini-tour during which you promoted Done to Death in comic shops in Saskatoon, Edmonton  and Calgary. How did that go?

AF: It was pretty fantastic. I was surprised because I sort of assume nobody’s interested in my work, so getting out and seeing people and hearing that people like it is always a real thrill. Even if I’m not always entirely certain that I believe them.

KD: Done to Death has an interesting publishing history. How did you get from doing those original issues with Fiona in 2006 to seeing it published through IDW just this year?

AF: Well basically, we did the original five issue series through a small press publisher called Markosia and we wound up having different views as to how the property should proceed. Eventually we came to an agreement where the rights came back to Fiona and I and we then basically… waited for a while, for the right opportunity to come up.

I was building up the resources to self-publish it if it came down to that, but then in 2008 at a conference in my hometown of Edmonton, I met (then-assistant-editor-now-associate-editor) Rachel Edidin from Dark Horse Comics.

We talked a bit and got along quite well, and I passed her a few comics to read. Then we kept in touch and sometime later she sent me an email asking if I’d ever thought about doing a Done to Death collection. I said ‘why yes, yes I have!’

She passed Done to Death up the chain at Dark Horse, but ultimately it got spiked for reasons I’m not entirely clear on. So Rachel then passed the book along to IDW editor (now also writer) Mariah Huehner, and shortly thereafter a publishing deal followed.

KD: Once Done to Death found a home with IDW, what was your experience with that company?

AF: It was surprisingly easy. Suffice to say, I expected them to want more than they actually did want in terms of media rights and it’s just really been a very easygoing relationship. There’s been nothing we wanted to do with the book that they haven’t allowed us to do, and Fiona and I still own and control our property.

KD: You originally wrote this book in 2006, which is before True Blood and Twilight and the whole modern vampire explosion. What was going through your head when you came up with the concept behind the vampire satire that is Done to Death?

AF: It basically stemmed from two ideas that I had been carrying around for a while. One of them was that whole notion of an editor getting so many bad vampire submissions that she starts killing the people responsible. My first paying job in the comic industry was as a submissions editor for a company, so that’s exactly where that idea came from.

The other idea, the ‘loser vampire’ came from my own concept of what vampires should be and where that deviates from stuff like Interview with the Vampire or The Hunger or now Twilight. Pretty much everybody represents them as these tragic, romantic figures, which felt off to me. I always thought of vampires as falling in the horror genre instead of the romance genre. I think part of the problem is also that I was friends with a lot of people in the goth community, and they would keep handing me these books by Anne Rice or whoever and telling me ‘this is the best book ever, you have to read it!’ Then I just kept feeling underwhelmed in the face of those high expectations.

If I’d gone in thinking, ‘this is gonna suck’, I probably would have come out the better for it. When I saw the Twighlight movie and didn’t want to actively pry my eyes out with a fork, that was a win for that movie because really, I was expecting to want to do that. I mean it’s terrible,  I don’t like what the books or the movie have to say, and I don’t like the acting – but – it wasn’t as grotesquely offensive as it could have been, had I had higher expectations.

KD: So was the character of Andy really a realization of what you’ve thought all along that vampires should be like?

AF: When I sat down and thought about making a vampire story, I wanted to focus on what is still scary about vampires despite the romanticized image that’s out there. They don’t look at humans with lust, they look at them with hunger. They eat people. When you look at how vampires are commonly portrayed as leaving these sanitary puncture marks in the neck, it loses that impact.

So when I was doing Andy, I wanted him to really be a creature that was devoid of empathy and just saw people as either a means to an end or, mostly, just as food.

KD: What can you tell me about your relationship with horror fiction and your interest in writing it?

AF: I do have some horror ideas that I’m working on, and I do have an affinity for the genre. The flip side to that is that I don’t personally really like being scared. I actively avoided horror movies until I was eighteen, then the first horror movie I watched and paid attention to without actively wanting to run away from it was Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. This sort of laid the groundwork for what I want out of a horror, which isn’t really to be scared so much as to satisfy a morbid fascination.

It’s just the idea of using disturbing, interesting imagery not to get a ‘boo’ sort of reaction but to examine ideas that could be unsettling without being the lowest common denominator of shock value.

KD: I know you’ve been pretty vocal in the past about how much you dig Fiona’s art on Done to Death. What is it about her style that you think complements your own approach as a writer?

AF: There’s an expressionistic quality to her work that isn’t photorealistic but is consistent in her work, so the world she draws remains consistent.  She’s basically just the ideal collaborator, and my only issue regarding Fiona is really with the rest of the world and how long they took to notice her. This might actually mark the first time in history that I was ahead of the curve.

KD: What else can you talk about outside of Done to Death that you’re currently working on?

AF: Well I’m working on a collaboration with another Calgary artist named Daniel Schneider. It’s an all-ages family adventure about a jester who goes off on a quest to fix this curse for a princess that causes her to cry uncontrollably.

While he’s on this journey, the jester comes across basically all the traditional fantasy archetypical characters turned on their heads. So the warrior who is a great hero to the local villagers because he killed a bear, but everybody fails to mention that the bear was really old and basically just fell down dead. Or the troll who has the soul of an artist and spends all of his time building sculptures of bridges.

That book will be called Fools and Madmen, and that’s the next comic thing I think I’m going to get done.

Many thanks to Andrew for the interview! For more from Andrew Foley, you can visit his official website.

-Interview by Kevin

I wanted to bring a couple of blogs to your attention. Because pals share that sort of thing.

Does anyone care about this whole debate about women working in comics? If you’ve been out to a convention in the past few years and caught a Q & A with editor-types from any of the larger publishers, chances are you’ve heard it addressed.

The assertion is that, despite a swelling demographic of female comic book readers, the major label comic book industry remains by and large a ‘boys club’. Granted, you do have your Gail Simones and Pia Guerras blazing trails through the pages of comicbookdom, but is that indicative of any larger shift in the industry’s mindset?

I don’t even know if you’d really call it a debate. More a possible issue that is brought up often, though is rarely addressed as opposed to being merely redirected.

Anyway, so Tim Hanley of Bleeding Cool has been tracking weekly statistics of all of the women with credits on DC or Marvel and posting them up on his blog. Condensed monthly versions of these stats, which he has been compiling since the start of 2011, can be found on Bleeding Cool under the blog heading ‘Gendercrunching‘.

He just posted the first of two special iterations of Gendercrunching, in which data is analyzed concerning women working in comics over the last fifteen years.  Part one entails a good, hard look at DC from 1996-2011. His conclusions?

” Now, over the past 15 years, I think it’s fair to say that the number of women who read comics has increased. Books like Y: The Last Man, Fables, and Alias have been good gateway books for guys to get their friends/girlfriends/wives/sisters/what have you into comics. People everywhere are noticing more women at comic book conventions and in comic book shops. But at DC Comics, the overall percentage of female creators has pretty much stayed the same…

… They’re not getting worse… they’re not actively excluding women and becoming more of a boy’s club. But they’re not getting better, and that’s disheartening. You stay the same by just not trying.”

As it turns out, people do care. Check out the full post here.

If you’ll refer back to my second paragraph in this post, you will notice that I mentioned two blogs I wanted to pal-share.

The second came to my attention via Sequential, and features an ongoing history of Canadian comic books.

Comic Syrup is written by Rachel Richey, and it provides a thorough post-by-post breakdown of significant Canadian comic publishers, titles, and artists – from Active Comics on.

Speaking of Canadian comic creators, I also wanted to mention a new trade paperback out this week from none other than artist Fiona Staples (North 40, Mystery Society) and scribe Andrew Foley (Cowboys and Aliens, The Holiday Men in The Massacre Memorial Day Sale).

Done to Death tells the story of an editor sick ‘TO DEATH’ of derivative vampire stories – so sick that she takes it upon herself to personally murder the worst of the would-be writers out there. Meanwhile, a real vampire who doesn’t quite fit the romanticized vampire mould seen in big budget Hollywood flicks embarks on a personal vendetta of his own.

Robot 6 has a massive preview of the book, which you can check out here.

Rad? Rad.

Stay tuned for some neat-o interviews and possibly…just possibly… some big-time announcements coming down the pipes from The Fabler.

But only possibly.

-Posted by Kevin

And not like, ‘Oh that’s quaint. I’m sort of impressed, but I’d rather just eat my sandwich,’ sort of impressed.  Like, genuinely, truly,  ‘oh man, we have stuff that good on here?!’ impressed.

Which is rad. Because one, it means The Fabler isn’t ostensibly shitty, which as it turns out is good for business. Also because two, more importantly, it means that while the ‘big boy’ publishers continue to slowly creep over the digital landscape (did somebody say same day digital?) – there exists an ambitious horde of indie comic creators lurking in the rafters of the interwebs, just itching to realize their full potential.

Only they probably only resemble sexual predators in that particular metaphor. We hope. But hey, who’s judging?

It’s been a while since I highlighted some of the new and hip and/or interesting submissions currently up on the Fabler, so I figured I’d toss a few out on here that you should probably check out (if you haven’t already).

First off, lucidk was one of the winners on our first Fabler Wacom Contest for her wicked cool webcomic about an alternate afterlife, GHOST! Lucid (aka Danielle Keller, whom you can read a Fabler Blog interview with here) recently posted 37 pages of her 41 page standalone story which she is currently doing as her senior comic project at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

It’s called Vixen, and it deals with themes that are darker, more sexualized, and ultimately more complex than GHOST! while refining her high contrast, intensely manic art to new levels of awesome.  From her description:

In Victorian England, a pagan sisterhood is abducting girls and making them decide between swearing devotion to their goddess or being cannibalized in their quest to reach true beauty. This story follows Lorna as she falls into the temptation of the clan.

One of the most artistically impressive Fabler contributors I’ve seen of late is Monsterzero (DC Roberts), who has been courteous enough to grace us with three sample stories in the vein of R Crumb meets hyper-realistic future videogaming meets testicle-headed comic creator meets… RV-ing, I guess?

Anyway, it’s all sorts of rad. For real. (z)

For comics with nifty (read: compelling) concepts,  the pair that immediately spring to mind are Coldblood: The Wild War # 1 by Weremagnus and Hominids by thejmon.

Coldblood presents a Civil War Era Western with a twist; a horrific plague is sweeping the West, transforming those it touches into demonic visions of their former selves.

Hominids follows the adventures of a group of Neanderthals that coexisted alongside primitive man. The presence of distinctly fantastical elements, plus the conceit of giving them modern conversational capabilities,  made this story stand out as uniquely engaging.

Two more shoutouts have to be made to Teenage Love Zombies and Welcome To The Gun Zoo.

Teenage Love Zombies by TeenageLoveZombies (appropriately enough) is ‘a rock n’roll romance horror comic’ that invokes retro ‘Greaser’ culture while side-slipping in the odd  talking pumpkin, mad professor, and reanimated corpse.  The Gun Zoo, adversely, draws on a pulpy look and feel while presenting a story of ruthless female vigilante-types dispensing ‘justice’ in the best way they know how.

Burkema submitted this one, and you can read the entire first issue here.

If I didn’t mention your Fabler comic on here, it’s not because you deserve to be eaten by rabid vultures or anything. You’re still special.

( Do vultures go rabid? A quick Google search yields only this video of thrash metal band Deathchain performing a song titled ‘Rabid Vultures’ – no help there. )

Seriously, there are tonnes more comics worth reading up on The Fabler right now- go here and explore for yourself.

- Kevin

There are some genuinely interesting items making headlines on the sequential front this month, and I would be remiss if I didn’t touch on a few of them here. From professional perspectives on a call to boycott one of the two major publishers (hint: not DC) to the wildly successful endeavours of a group of female artists and writers to kickstart their own new anthology, and finally to the birth of a new Canadian Comic Festival.

First, about this boycott business – Steve Bisette is a name you may or may not already be familiar with, probably depending on if you’ve read Alan Moore’s much-lauded run on Swamp Thing (on which Bisette was artist). A name you might be more familiar with is Jack Kirby, who famously co-created such Marvel characters as Captain America, the X-Men, and the Fantastic Four.

Kirby, who sadly passed away in 1994, has since become the subject of some controversy regarding those same characters. At least where Marvel is concerned. The long and short of it is, the heir’s to the Kirby estate brought  a lawsuit to Marvel’s front door seeking partial rights and royalties to all those great properties Jack Kirby had a hand in creating. Marvel adamantly denied any entitlement that the Kirby estate may have had to the copyright claims on those characters, claiming that Kirby’s creations were “work for hire”.

In July, much to the chagrin of Kirby fans everywhere, the courts ruled in favour of Marvel.

This is where Steve Bisette comes in. In response to this ruling, near the end of July he called for a boycott of Marvel products until they re-evaluate their treatment of Kirby and his legacy.

Some very interesting individuals in the comic industry have since weighed in on the matter, including Tom Spurgeon of The Comics Reporter:

“What remains most troubling about what Marvel has done and continues to do to many of its contributors and their families is how deeply unnecessary all of it seems. Marvel has resources out the wazoo. They have plenty of publishing money to provide royalties to a creator or an estate on work republished…

… For these companies that traffic in heroism and trumpet going the extra mile to do good to cling to a strict legalism that keeps the money flowing in certain directions should trouble even the most accepting, enthusiastic fan.”

Also, Seth:

“The corporate lie about Kirby’s role in the creation of all those characters is abhorrent. It’s a bold faced lie. Everyone knows it’s a lie. No one is fooled. Everyone lying for the company should be ashamed. Stan Lee should be ashamed. What the Marvel corporation is doing might be legal but it certainly isn’t right…

… I would encourage anyone reading this to refrain from supporting the corporation until some form of justice is brought forth for Mr. Kirby. Might I suggest that money usually spent on Marvel products be redirected into the back issue market –buy some of those charming early 60s comics. That’s the real stuff anyway. Not the decades of vulgar elaboration that followed.”

Even Scott McCloud had a brief weigh-in on the subject (via Google+):

“I’m sure this particular case has plenty of gray areas…

But hardly any artist in that end of the business was treated fairly in those days (much like in the music industry) and Kirby in particular deserved far more compensation — and RESPECT — than he received over the years from a royal procession of lawyers, asshole execs, and two-faced colleagues.

Anyone contesting that Marvel was largely built on Kirby’s ideas just doesn’t know their comics history.”

The good news is that the Kirby estate’s lawyer, Marc Toberoff, isn’t about to give up so easily.  Just a couple of days ago, he announced that his intentions to appeal the ruling were going forward.  Time will tell where this one ends up…

On a brighter note, here are two items of news worth getting excited for:

First, Womanthology. If you haven’t followed this story, a group of female comic artists and writers came together with the hopes of  creating a ‘large scale anthology comic showcasing the works of women in comics’. With such names as Gail Simone, Camille de’Errico, Fiona Staples, and a host of other talented professionals attached to the project, the folks behind Womanthology decided to use Kickstarter to raise funds for a goal of $25,000.00.

They put out the rallying cry to any and all friends or supporters that might be willing to help provide incentives for contributors, and came up with such nifty rewards as: receiving a hand-drawn postcard in the mail from Neil Gaiman; having Kevin Smith call you on his podcast for a quick chat; having one of several professional writers critique your script and, as an ‘UBER SPECIAL OPPORTUNITY’, one lucky contributor of $1,500 is going to have his 22 page script drawn by Bryan Denham (Marvel Artist for Iron Man, Avengers, Nova and more)!

Naturally, they blew away their $25,000 target. By the time they reached their August 7th deadline, they hit the absolutely astonishing landmark of just over $100,000.00 raised!

A wonderful success story, and one that reaffirms much of my faith in the same industry that produced the Marvel-Kirby lawsuit.

Oh hey, and here’s something else that’s pretty cool:

Major Canadian Comic Art Festivals look out! There’s a new kid on the block.

So VanCAF, the Vancouver Comics Arts Festival, has been announced as a new show modeled after TCAF which will be debuting in May in 2012.

Their website’s description lists the event as “a week-long celebration of comics…(featuring) galleries, readings, panels, and workshops before culminating in a two-day convention for cartoonists from across the country and down the coast to connect with their readers and peddle their wares”.

The West rises!

Not that anybody cares about that whole West vs East culture conflict in Canada anymore…just sayin’.

Anyway, how cool is that? If you’d like a more thorough look at what VanCAF is all about, BK Munn over on Sequential Spiltink has posted an interview with Shannon Campbell, the event’s organizer.

Shine on, you crazy diamonds.

- Kevin

What do these comic book artists have in common? (Other than that they are all based in Vancouver, BC)

They represent just a handful of the fantastically diverse talents who have contributed to Cloudscape Comics over the years.

Cloudscape is a Vancouver-based comic collective that has published four comic anthologies since their inception in 2008. For more about who they are and what they do, I would direct your attention to this post I wrote profiling the group.

This past year, the folks behind Cloudscape Comics decided to try their luck in the wonderful world of internet crowdfunding. Hey, publishing quality comic anthologies doesn’t come cheap – just ask The Anthology Project.

For their fourth publishing effort, titled “21 Journeys“, Cloudscape decided they wanted to produce a higher quality of book than their previous anthologies. Inspired by books like The Anthology Project Vol. 1, they wanted to release something that would make comic shop perusers take note and really stand out on the shelf.

To that end, they turned to IndieGoGo as their fundraising platform of choice. While they didn’t hit their ideal goal of $7000, they were able to break the $4000 mark – just enough to get the book done the way they wanted.

I recently caught up with Cloudscape Comics’ President Jeff Ellis to talk about the book, which is due out ’soon’ (though no date has been formally set) and can already be purchased in e-book form here.

My chat with Jeff is below:

KD: What can you tell me about how 21 Journeys came together?

Jeff: Well, we had a long planning meeting about what we wanted to do, and we actually ended up with two ideas on the table. Those ideas were either fantasy or travel. Ultimately, we decided that since the last book was sci fi, fantasy is maybe a little too similar. So we thought we would do traveling first – stories involving some sort of ‘journey’ theme -  and then we’d come back to fantasy after.

We had also just finished looking at the Anthology Project, and they had a hard cover full color book, and we thought ‘okay, let’s pull out all the stops on this one and do a full colour travel anthology.’

KD: What have you done in color before?

Jeff: We did Funday Sunnies, which was a 48 page full color book. Which is not nearly as difficult to pull off as a 250 page full color book. Our main problem with the new book was financing.

KD: Speaking of financing, what was your experience with IndieGoGo like?

Jeff: Oh it was really fantastic. We were getting a little worried if we could pay for the printing, and we didn’t have the ability to use Kickstarter because no one in our group has an American bank account.

Angela Melick from Wasted Talent sent me the link to IndieGoGo and said ‘you should be looking into this’.

So we set it up and started doing preorders, and we offered some of our older books as well as some sketches as incentives for donation. It was a little slowgoing at first, but we did hit our target and we achieved enough funding for the book.

KD: Do you feel like sites like IndieGoGo and Kickstarter can be game-changers for indie comic creators looking to put together anthologies?

Jeff: Absolutely. We’re not the only group that’s finding that if you show people what you’re going to do and ask for the money up front, people are willing to contribute. There are so many recent examples of people setting up an account on one of those sites and doing something that they wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise.

It’s funny, I had a friend sort of criticize me for using IndieGoGo, and his logic was, ‘well you have a website, and you have paypal – why don’t you do it yourself?’ I think people don’t trust to send their money to an individual. But then sites like IndieGoGo and Kickstarter add a bit more legitimacy to it. It makes people feel like they can trust where their money is going, and that really impacts fundraising for creative projects in a positive way.

KD: Sites like IndieGoGo allow for contributions from nearly anywhere around the world. Was it a surprise to you at all where some of the donations you received came from?

Jeff: We had a lot of contributions from Australia. In fact, we did a 24 hour event where we stayed up for 24 hours on our U-Stream doing comic jams and selling commissioned sketches, just sort of drumming up support as a last push for the remaining money we needed to hit our target. What was interesting is when we hit about two or three o’clock in the morning, most of our Canadian supporters had gone to bed, but suddenly we had about five Australians on chatting with us. They got us through to about 6am when the Canadians started joining in again.

KD: Now that you’ve done a book in color, do you think you could go back to doing another black and white anthology?

Jeff: It’s funny, if you were to ask Jonathan (Dalton), one of the other board members on Cloudscape Comics, he would say never again. He’d say we’re never doing another full color book.

I say this all the time, but this is probably the best book we’ve ever made. The quality, the art, the revisions we did, the fact that it’s in color – it really is the greatest book we’ve done, but it also logistically was a nightmare. It was more than we’ve ever had to cope with as an organization.  The fundraising alone was a whole other dimension we’ve never had to deal with, and it definitely burnt us out a bit.

Giants of Main Street, the next book, which is fantasy based, is going to go back to black and white. I don’t want to say we’d never do another, personally. I feel like if you give us a chance to rest up, and maybe check back in a year we could give it another shot. I think it would go a lot smoother now that we have the experience under our belts. Everything we’ve ever done was a struggle the first time around and then much easier the next time through.

KD: Speaking more to the content of the book, what can you say about some of the new contributors that are making their Cloudscape debut with 21 Journeys?

Jeff: We cast our net much wider with this book, which is also probably part of what made it more logistically difficult. One of the big ones for us is we have Steve Rolston doing the cover art. Which is really cool, because he’s out there doing Ghost Projekt for Oni Press, he did Emiko Superstar…he’s a veteran of the Vancouver scene and one of my favourite Vancouver-based artists. So having him do the cover was a real treat, and it made us feel like we were doing something right if Steve was up for taking some time out of his day to do some art for us.

A few new people submitted as well, which we were really excited about. Another big get for us was having Miriam Libicki contribute. She’s been working for years independently as part of Real Gone Girl studios and doing her comic Jobnik.

KD: Once the book releases, where do you anticipate people will be able to get their hands on it?

Jeff: This is where we’ve always kind of fallen flat, is distribution. I often comment to people that ‘we make the greatest books nobody’s ever heard of’. We’re hoping with this book we do our Diamond application.

We’re thinking that this could be the book that meets Diamond’s quota. We’ve always been a bit gunshy about that, because we don’t want to burn our bridges early on. We’re also doing e-books, which is huge for us. We believe that digital distribution is a big part of the future of comics, and to that end we’re going to be offering 21 Journeys as well as our last book, Exploded View, as purchasable e-books.

We’re going to sell the printed copies, but also go ahead with the digital books. Worst that can happen is nobody buys it – but nothing ventured, nothing gained. Selling books digitally could be the financial boost we need to help publish future anthologies.

You can purchase the digital version of 21 Journeys here, or go here to download a preview of the book.

For more from Cloudscape Comics, check out their official website.

-Interview by Kevin de Vlaming

No one man could hope to cover everything that went down, so I’ll just go over a few of the items I thought were of particular interest. For ease of navigation, I think we could reasonably break the comic-related haps into three main categories:

General Comic Industry News

Movie Reveals

-and-

Celebrity Arrests On-Location at the Comic Con

Beginning with the General Comic Industry News:

DC’s ‘New 52′ Panels were front and center of the comic limelight for a big chunk of the weekend. Newsarama posted an article that described the ‘mood of DC fans at Comic-Con’ as being “mixed…Curiosity seemed to rule the day (and) fans seemed to have more questions and judgements at this stage”.

How did DC’s representatives on location handle these questions? They engaged their audiences, challenging them to offer suggestions to better the comics. They also assured fans that the relaunch was a long-term plan, attempting to dissuade remarks that the ‘New 52′ is a flash-in-the-pan gimmick.  They also mentioned that the initial launch will see longer story arcs to build a foundation for the new universe, then as it progresses we will see more one-shots and smaller miniseries’ return.

Regarding specific characters, Gail Simone stressed that while Barbara Gordon has returned to the mantle of Batgirl, she will still be ‘the smartest character in Gotham’ and won’t be anyone’s sidekick. Manapul confirmed that Iris is in fact alive in The Flash, and that Barry Allen dated her in the past but he is currently single.

On the Marvel front, of course some of the biggest news is that they are going same day digital (more on that here).  In addition to that inevitable development, Marvel announced at their Fear Itself panel that they were launching a new Defenders series to be written by Matt Fraction and artists Terry and Rachel Dodson (formerly the creative team behind Uncanny X-Men).

The Defenders were a long-time supergroup with a rotating lineup known for producing offbeat and more unusual narratives than some of the other, more standard superhero fare Marvel has generated over the years (as with Fantastic Four, X-Men and The Avengers). Originating in the 70’s with the lineup of Doctor Strange, Silver Surfer, Namor and the Hulk, they contended with everything from galactic threats to demons to real social conflicts.

Fraction’s run on the X-Men was nothing short of fantastic, and I’m pretty excited to see him take on this reincarnated classic – which will include, for the record, Doctor Strange, Red She-Hulk, Namor, The Silver Surfer, and Iron Fist, among others.

Another interesting new comic (albeit a slightly more controversial one) was featured at the Comic-Con International on Saturday at the Legendary Comics Panel.  Frank Miller’s “Holy Terror” began in 2006 as a Batman project, centered around the Dark Knight taking the fight to Al-Qaeda type terrorists after they strike Gotham City. When the story went beyond Batman’s moral and ethical limits, he reconfigured the story to focus on  a protagonist called ‘The Fixer’.

At the panel, Miller reportedly adopted a challenging stance to the controversy around the book, stating proudly, “I hope this book really pisses people off”.

IDW announced that they would be bringing back a brand new series of The Crow comics (The Crow being the supernaturally-powered vengeance incarnate that has its day in the sun with the Brandon Lee movie of the same name). This makes sense, in light of the forthcoming Crow movie currently in production, but it’s still cool. I always dug the premise of the original comics, and how it allowed for so many different stories to be told through the lens of one conceit.

The new Crow series will debut in 2012.

Movie Reveals:

So this group of mostly dudes gets together and dresses up all brightly-colored and hang around each other just, y’know, waiting for cool stuff to happen.  And The Avengers, right? Right?

A wave of Avengers teaser posters were unleashed on fans to coincide with Comic Con, culminating in this particularly awe-inspiring shot of the not-so-jolly green giant, The Hulk.

I love the modern comics take to Bruce Banner’s alter ego, and I’m similarly smitten with the Captain America garb shown in Steve Rogers’ very own Avenger’s poster. Though I feel a little less favourably about Hawkeye’s comparatively uninspired outfit in Jeremy Renner’s turn as Clint Barton.

I know they’ve already alluded to him in Thor as more of a S.H.I.E.L.D. special agent than a super hero unto himself, and I get that they are perhaps wary of slapping a brand new face in purple and blue tights and tossing him in beside Iron Man… But really, his costume looks like a hand-me-down from the original X-Men movie, only with a different badge glued to the chest.

Lots of hubbub around this Cowboys and Aliens thing at the Con. Which I guess isn’t surprising, considering the bulky star power the adaptation of Scott Rosenberg, Fred Van Lente and Andrew Foley’s 2006 graphic novel brought to town. SDCC hosted the world premiere, which meant Spielberg, Favreau, Daniel Craig, Olivia Wilde and Harrison Ford himself were all present and accounted for.

It’s an interesting premise. Who would have thought of doing a Space Western?

I mentioned last week that Garth Ennis’ short zombie flick Stitched was worth taking note of. More good news for Ennis fans out of that: at the Q & A panel that followed the screening, they discussed plans for a tie-in comic series from Avatar debuting in November.

I also mentioned how cool it is that Frank Miller’s hugely popular graphic novel Batman: Year One was getting an animated film makeover. Turns out, they announced at the Con that his follow-up effort The Dark Knight Returns would also see the light as an animated feature film. Awesomer and awesomer.

The Amazing Spider-Man panel boasted, among other things: a heartfelt tribute to Peter Parker from none other than the new webslinger himself, Andrew Garfield; a look at how Emma Stone’s portrayal of Gwen Stacy will keep it close to the comics and; footage of Rhys Ivans both as Dr. Connors and in costume as the classic spider-foe The Lizard.

If you haven’t seen the much-publicized trailer yet for Spidey’s franchise reboot, I heartily recommend you check it out. The darker, character-driven approach to telling Peter Parker’s story seems so far to be the real deal. But then, the original Spider-Man trilogy didn’t get emo’d out and dancey til the Venom symbiote made an appearance… so only time will tell what direction this new interpretation will take.

Which brings me to my last category,

Celebrity Arrests On-Location at the Comic Con

Oh geez, Rhys Ifans. ‘Best known for his roles in Notting Hill and as The Lizard in The Amazing Spider-Man, and also for getting wasted and assaulting a female security guard back stage at San Diego Comic Con’.

Mr. Ifans was arrested and cited for misdemeanor battery mere moments before he went out to participate in the Amazing Spider-Man panel at Comic Con on Friday.

Curt Connors became The Lizard while searching for a cure to grow his arm back. How long will it take for Rhys Ifans to regrow his dignity?

(Boooo…hiss)

First rule of blogging: always end with a terrible joke. Else your readers might accidentally get the impression you are a valid source of source, and nobody really wants that, do they?

‘Ta.

-Posted by Kevin de Vlaming