In what has already been a crazy busy year, Archaia Studios Press (ASP) amps it up at this year’s Comic-Con International: San Diego (July 26-29). Come by the booth (#2049), meet the creators, visit the panels, and see what’s happening at ASP!
Hard to believe, but Mike Golden is a San Diego first timer!
Renowned comics creator Michael Golden will be making a rare West Coast appearance in what will be his first ever foray into the madness that we know and love as The San Diego Comic Con.
Yeah…We’ve warned him–he just has no idea what’s in store!
To help mark the event in a grand way, TwoMorrows has announced that they will be debuting their much anticipated trade on Golden at the SDCC as well. “Modern Masters: Michael Golden” written by Eric Nolen-Weathington, is a comprehensive trade on Michael, featuring rare art and an interview with the creator, chronicling his experiences in the comic book biz and otherwise.
Booths 3848 and 3850 is going to knock your socks off at this year’s San Diego Comic Con International! The Hero Initiative is being generously sponsored by GameTap, the ever-expanding playground of video games from the arcade classics to console and PC hits. SDCC runs from July 25-29, 2007 so don’t miss out on any of the following awesome booth and convention activities!
Avatar Press is pleased to announce a full slate of signings, panels, and special comics & merchandise at San Diego Comic-Con 2007.
Avatar’s lineup of guests at booth #2800 features stars from the worlds of comics, television, and film, including Warren Ellis, George A. Romero (Night of the Living Dead), horror icon Robert Englund, Brian Pulido (Lady Death), Mike Wolfer (Streets of Glory), Jacen Burrows (Chronicles of Wormwood), Tim Sullivan (2001 Maniacs), Dheeraj Verma (Plague of the Living Dead), Mark Sweeney (Black Summer colorist), and Stargate SG-1 television stars Christopher Judge, Michael Shanks, and Gary Jones.
Just a reminder that the new FoL Anthology, THE GIRLS’ GUIDE TO GUYS’ STUFF will be on sale at the show.
They are here, and they are BEAUTIFUL!
Be sure to come see us at our booth, #832, at the San Diego Comic Con and meet some of the contributors to this great anthology!
Remember our Lulu Awards that celebrate the women of the comics industry? We hope you do! The 2007 Lulu Awards are being held Thursday, July 26 at 8:30 p.m. in room 10 of the San Diego Convention Center. We’ll have snacks and light refreshments all thanks to Minx, DC Comics’ new teenage girl-oriented line, our gold sponsor for this event. We are suggesting a $5 donation per person, and each donor will get a raffle ticket to win a copy of the hot-off-the-presses Girls’ Guide to Guys’ Stuff!
The ubiquitous Tim Sale, whose work pioneered the look and feel of the NBC hit HEROES, will be highly visible at this year’s Comic-Con International: San Diego (July 26-29)! Hoping to meet and interact with as many fans as possible, Tim will be appearing at various exhibitor booths; a guest on a HEROES panel; doing signings and sketches; and selling a brand new sketchbook (BLUES), a print (JUNGLE GIRL), and a t-shirt.
38 Studios (www.38studios.com), a pioneering entertainment force delivering a broad spectrum of immersive products, today announced its participation in the annual San Diego Comic-Con 2007. The company is comprised of luminaries from multiple industries including Boston Red Sox pitcher and game visionary Curt Schilling, Spawn creator Todd McFarlane, New York Times best-selling fantasy author R. A. Salvatore, and video game industry leader Brett Close. 38 Studios will be introducing the company, senior staff, and artistic and storytelling visionaries McFarlane and Salvatore at this year’s event, July 25-29, 2007, at the San Diego Convention Center, Hall C, Booth #2601.
THE SIMPSONS movie opens this week, and the LA Weekly, which is sort of Matt Groening’s alma mater has a long profile which captures much of what it was like. We remember listening to KPFK in the middle of the night long ago and hearing Matt spinning Messaien. Salad days.
Meanwhile, Vuleture collates some funny Groening quotes along with YouTube references.
“I have had a lifelong fascination with cartoons in which cute animals are force-fed by machines ever since seeing the indelibly-etched-on-my-brain Pigs Is Pigs, a 1937 Merrie Melodies cartoon directed by Friz Freleng…” Groening says he honored the film with “The Devil and Homer Simpson,” in which a Feed-A-Matic chair forces Homer to “eat all the donuts in the world!” Of course, Homer eats them all and asks for more.
Speaking of the movie, it has its world premiere in Springfield, VT this weekend
The picturesque town of Springfield in the hills of Vermont laid claim to be the home of The Simpsons at the weekend as its residents became the first people to see the feature film at a characteristically quirky premiere. The Vermont town, once famous for its machine-tooling industry, was chosen from 14 Springfields across America to host the premiere. Residents donned mustard-yellow T-shirts and blue wigs, munched pink doughnuts and exclaimed “D’oh!” as they filed into the 212-seat local cinema to watch The Simpsons Movie a week earlier than everyone else.
And James Kochalka was there. And so were his parents, now on You Tube.
The world premier for the Simpsons movie was held in my home town of Springfield, VT. Here’s a YouTube video somebody made of my elderly parents* dancing… to Phish, I think? One of my readers passed it along to me: *My dad is 89 and my mom is 78.
AND on October 7th, Alan Moore, Art Spiegelman and Dan Clowes guest voice on the original. Best episode ever.
Despite all our dire warnings, we’re still getting huge press releases. Frankly, we’re just not as fresh as we were a week ago, and we’ve made every effort to post as much stuff as we could, but is something feel between the cracks, we do apologize.
If you’re like us, you’ve already mentally been in San Diego for about 10 days. Worries about where to eat dinner on Wednesday, how to get across the railroad tracks, anxieties over getting to Ralphs. Like a ski racer, we’ve been down the course in our brains a dozen times already. We’re already planning how to get from Hall G to Hall B at 3 pm Saturday.
On the one hand it’s all going to be so horribly exciting. Our friends who are half our age or going to the show for the first time or else embarking on their maiden voyage as members of the inner circle…we’re thrive on their energy, we suck their enthusiasm. Not that we don’t have our own enthusiasms and wishes and hopes.
The #1 hope? Waking up the morning of Monday, July 30th with some mental facilities intact.
Nothing else matters.
[We’ll still be updating this over the next 24 hours]
Charles Vess
James Jean
Dave Roman
Dan Goldman
Mark Evanier
Cecil Castelucci
NakedFatRave a collective including artists:
Arthur Adams, Joyce Chin, Amanda Conner, J Scott Campbell, Michael Golden, Gene Ha, Phil Noto, Tim Sale, Bruce Timm, Matt Wagner, JH Williams III. All of them will have some cool stuff for sale, like this con exclusive poster by Gene Ha: Yowsa!
Dan Slott
Ben Templesmith
Randy Reynaldo — check out his cool contribution to the Program Book, below.
Sean McKeever
Raina Telgemeier
Andy Mangels
Throughout the 4 1/2 day “Geek Prom” that is Comic-Con, Andy Mangels will be appearing on a variety of panels and at events, as well as signing autographs. Check back here for regular UPDATES! HOME BASE BOOTH will be the BCI section of Funimation Booth #4129 You may also catch Andy frequently at the Van Eaton Galleries booth (#501) or the PRISM Comics booth Check in with the Pocket Books booth for Andy signing FREE books (on Saturday), and the TwoMorrows booth and panel to hear news about TWO new books coming from Andy in 2008!
Alex Ross Art above
Jim Rugg
Bill Sienkiewicz
Ted Naifeh
Debbie Huey
Derek Kirk Kim
I be appearing at the Cartoon Art Museum booth (E11):
Friday: 3pm - 4pm
Saturday: 3pm - 4pm
I’ll be promoting “Good As Lily” of course, but I’ll also have some convention exclusives like “Lowbright” mini-comics and a new poster, all of which can be seen at lowbright.com. I’ll also be speaking on the Minx panel:
Saturday from Noon to 1pm, Room 8
Steve Rolston
Brian Wood
David Lloyd:
For any of your visitors who are heading for San Diego ComiCon, I’ll be signing there at DC on Friday from 12.30-1.30pm, Dark Horse at 5-6pm. Then Saturday at DC from 4-5.30pm.
* Neil Gaiman
* The Unshelved guys
* Comic Foundry
• Penny Arcade
Not only does marvelcomics have a booth this year, breaking a long, long tradition, but they have signing schedules and panel listings up on their website! We’ve reproduced the signing schedule below the jump but here are other Marvel links of interest:
Comic-Con 2007: Event Schedule
Comic-Con 2007: Panel Schedule
Marvel at San Diego Comic-Con 2007
We’re a little verklemmt here at SBM today. Basically twice as much activity must be crammed into half the time normally available. Some quick hits before we go out:
§ Robin Bougie vs Joe Chiappetta with his butt:
Back in 1998, I was a little jealous that Mr Chiappetta was getting so much attention for what I thought were extremely low quality comics — both in content and execution. Of course, this was back before he went back over his “Silly Daddy” comics for the reprinted editions and censored out any objectional words, so I guess I like his comics even LESS now come to think of it. Self censorship is so fucking pathetic. Anyway, I announced that his crude drawing style was SO rough and like sandpaper on my eyes, that I could probably draw better with my butt. Rebecca called me on my shit, and so I was forced to back up that statement. Here are the infamous results which were printed not only in my comic DEVIANT #3, but in a free Vancouver paper called TERMINAL CITY (which ended getting clipped out and hung up at the photography studio where I work)
§ Peter Sanderson has an interesting take on the Batgirl cover brouhaha:
I was a boy during that time, long, long ago, and I remember the story in question: it was “Batgirl’s Costume Cut-Ups” in Detective Comics #371 (January 1968), whose cover showed Batgirl declining to help Batman and Robin in a fight against bad guys because, she tells them, she has a “bigger” problem: “a run in my tights”. Should you read the story, you’ll find that Batgirl is actually slyly diverting the criminals’ attention to her shapely legs, or, as one of the crooks, apparently fond of slang that was outdated even then, puts it, her great “gams.” Batman and Robin are then able to kayo the distracted malefactors.
I was one of the regular contributors to editor Julie Schwartz’s letter columns back then, and I distinctly recall writing a letter about how bad this story was. Today I suspect that it was Schwartz’s attempt at doing a humorous story for a change of pace, but the joke still fell flat. This story is stupid now and it was stupid then.
It was also an anomaly. In her other 1960s appearances Schwartz’s new Batgirl characteristically dove right into fighting criminals. In the comics of the mid-1960s, Batgirl’s willingness to engage in direct physical combat was bold and daring. (William Dozier, producer of the 1960s Batman TV show, is said to have forbidden the TV Batgirl from punching people with her fists because he considered it “unladylike.” Instead, she executed dance-like kicks, drawing on actress Yvonne Craig’s Ballet Russes background.) Marvel’s superheroines of the time-Invisible Girl, Wasp, Scarlet Witch, Marvel Girl–didn’t engage in fisticuffs. In the early Fantastic Four stories Sue Storm’s original power, invisibility, basically enabled her to hide.
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The Weekly World News, home of Ed Anger and BatBoy is joining the big newsstand in the sky: as it is shutting down. Hopping mad columnist Ed Anger was a big inspiration on us here at Stately Beat Manor, and Bat-Boy inspired a musical and a comic strip, first illustrated by Peter Bagge then Danielle Corsetto. Other comics running on the site included Spy Cat by Ernie Colon. In addition comics vets Robert Greenberger and Paul Kupperberg were staffers there, and Greenberger has word of the cancellation on his blog:
Friday morning, Jeff Rovin comes in for a meeting and then the staff was to be called in. He’s looking harried, not at all relaxed. At 11:30, we’re finally shown into an office where we are told the Board of Directors has chosen to close Weekly World News. The reasons given make no sense. We’re stunned and shell-shocked. We’re to stay on through August 3, finishing the reprint issues and then we’re done. A glorious, funny, odd publication, born in 1979, will go out with a whimper and all I can think is that something’s going on that they’re not telling us because it just doesn’t make sense.
Farewell, Weekly World News. You may not have been SPy Magazine but in your own way you were just as funny.
The unimaginable has happened. Comic-con has sold out for Saturday, If you show up without a ticket, you WON’T BE ABLE TO GET IN. It was announced that four-day memberships had sold out two weeks ago. The image of shady guys in Members only jackets hanging out over by the railroad tracks saying “Tickets, tickets, tickets” pops into mind.
SAN DIEGO-Comic-Con, the nation¹s largest comic book and pop culture event, is making the public aware that Saturday admissions have sold out in advance of the show and none will be available onsite.
“We were pretty sure this would happen, and it has,” said David Glanzer, spokesperson for Comic-Con. Glanzer pointed out that three-day admissions (excluding Saturday) and single day admissions for Thursday, Friday and Sunday were still available though were being snapped up at a brisk pace.
Three-day memberships allow visitors to attend the show one day early for Preview Night held the Wednesday before the official opening of the convention.
Organizers urge early online registration to avoid the possibility of being turned away at the door. Online registration is available at the Comic-Con website at www.comic-con.org or via direct link.
Last year over 123,000 people attended the four-day event and crowds were such that on Saturday of last year, Comic-Con actually had to halt registration for some time. “This action was taken because the safety of our attendees is paramount,” continued Glanzer, “and the facility never reached capacity.”
Comic-Con International is a non profit educational organization dedicated to creating awareness of and appreciation for comics and related popular art forms primarily through the presentation of conventions and events that celebrate the historic and ongoing contribution of comics to art and culture.
DC had to WoW license for toys, so this isn’t much of a stretch, but it is a potentially very popular franchise.
DC Comics, the world’s largest English language comic book publisher and home to Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman announced plans today to publish a new comic book series based on World of Warcraft®, Blizzard Entertainment®’s popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). Preview art from the series will debut at Comic-Con International, held in San Diego, CA from July 26–29. The World of Warcraft comic book will be published through DC’s WildStorm imprint and debut this fall.
The ongoing monthly series will be written by industry veteran Walter Simonson (Thor, Orion) and feature art by Ludo Lullabi and inker Sandra Hope. The first six issues of the World of Warcraft comic series will each feature two covers, one by superstar comic book artist Jim Lee and a second by Blizzard Entertainment Senior Art Director Samwise Didier.
The Warcraft® series has been a pillar of gaming culture for over a decade, with multiple #1-selling titles. Blizzard’s World of Warcraft MMORPG allows thousands of players to explore the rich, war-torn setting of the franchise together, and has attracted more than 8.5 million subscribers worldwide. The Burning Crusade, the first expansion to World of Warcraft, recently shattered PC game sales records by selling more than 2.4 million copies in its first 24 hours of release and approximately 3.5 million in its first month.
The first storyline of the new ongoing series begins when a human is found unconscious on the shores of Kalimdor, with no memory of who he is or how he arrived there. Enslaved by an orc shaman, the man must fight for survival against members of both the Alliance and the Horde. He strikes uneasy relationships with other races in his quest to find the secrets of his past.
Judd Apatow repertory player Seth Rogen will take a break from getting KNOCKED UP to write and star in The Green Hornet, various entertainment sources are reporting. . Commentators who are as wise as they are prescient are predicting that the resulting film may have a comedic tinge, as opposed to portraying the drama inherent in the life of a man who dresses as a hornet and runs around with a Chinese sidekick. The Green Hornet has long languished in Hollywood with various approaches bombing out.
Rogen is just the newest player in a large and varied cast of characters who have tried to bring Green Hornet to the big screen. A Green Hornet film was previously announced at Universal with Ron Underwood directing. Three years ago Miramax entered a deal with Kevin Smith to adapt and direct a Green Hornet film. Actors as wide ranging as George Clooney, Jake Gyllenhaal and Mark Wahlberg have been rumored to be in talks to play Reid over the years. And at one point or another Jason Scott Lee and Jet Li have been rumored to play Kato.
Comics creators (Kevin Sean Michaels) and horror movie creators and actors (Michael Madsen) mingle at the Fangoria booth:
TwoMorrows Publishing will make their lucky 13th consecutive appearance
at Comicon International: San Diego from July 25-29, and this year’s
slate of panels and signings further builds on their reputation as the
industry authority on comics history and creation.
The “TwoMorrows Publishing” panel takes place on Thursday, July 26 at
Noon, spotlighting the company that celebrates the art and history of
comics through their award-winning magazine and book line. On hand will
be publisher and Jack Kirby Collector editor John Morrow, authors George
Khoury and Benjamin Holcomb, Modern Masters’ editor Eric
Nolen-Weathington, Alter Ego magazine’s Paul Hamerlinck, and Write Now!
magazine’s Danny Fingeroth, as they unveil new products and offer
exclusive previews of upcoming items, in a multimedia presentation.
Do not read this post if you do not want spoilers about HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS! I am serious! NO JOKES.
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You have been warned. Proceed at your own risk. (Although I will put the worst spoilers in white text just for the sake of propriety.)
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SLG Publishing will mark Comic-Con International 2007 with 30 artists signing at their booth debut books by Jhonen Vasquez and Roman Dirge, and special spotlight panels on Dirge and the company itself, which is now in its 20th year of publishing comics.
FANTAGRAPHICS / COMICON SIGNINGS
THURSDAY
1:00 Craig Yoe
2:00 Craig Yoe
3:00 Gilbert Hernandez * Jaime Hernandez * Mario Hernandez
4:00 Gilbert Hernandez• Jaime Hernandez * Mario Hernandez
5:00 Jordan Crane * Paul Karasik * Josh Simmons
6:00 Jordan Crane * Paul Karasik * Josh Simmons
Here we go again! A great lineup of artists are signing at the Last Gasp booth this year. Last Gasp will also have a new release from Mark Ryden that will surely sell out quickly! (Sorry, no details… it’s a surprise.)
We are proud to host Carol Lay, signing her brand new graphic novel “Goodnight, Irene” which the Guardian (UK) calls “sly, absurdist humour” and “a much-needed antidote” for the cliches of romance.
Mark Ryden signing “Fushigi Circus”; Peter de Seve signing his Sketchbook; Mitch O’Connell signing the last copies of the sold-out “Mitch O’Connell: Tattoos”; Molly Crabapple signing “Dr. Sketchy’s Official Rainy Day Coloring Book”; and Romain Hugault signing “The Final Flight.”
Booth activities include signings by Todd himself, David Hine, Brian Haberlin, Brian Holguin, Philip Tan, Jay Anceleto, Jon Goff, Khary Randolph, Jon Landry and R.A. Salvatore. See below the cut for times.
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