The big news coming out of Stumpown this weekend is that Larry Marder’s resurgent Beanworld comics will be published by Dark Horse:

Steve Duin of the Oregonian did a nice write up of today’s panel–including the announcement above and includes the following summary:”Dark Horse plans to republish the first 21 issues of Tales of the Beanworld, possibly in deluxe hardcover editions, then deliver Marder’s new adventures sometime in early 2009. Diana Schutz will edit.”

I’m really very excited to be affiliated with Dark Horse. I’ve admired Mike Richardson and his crew from across the playing field for two decades and have always had the greatest admiration for the entire Dark Horse team.

Today I gave the first solo Beanworld panel presentation in over 15 years. It covered a lot of ground, and I’m almost certainly going to be giving it again at SD08. Also revealed was the name of the up-coming NEW graphic novel: “Remember HERE when you are THERE.”

More: Steve Duin in the Oregonian and an interview with Marder at CBR.

Just for NYCC.

Numerous sources are reporting that Join HETFET.org appears to be a viral marketing site for HELLBOY II. Keep watching.

It’s up at Yahoo. Also more stills. We are, like, sooooo looking forward to this movie.

Recent comments on Dark Horse manga sales have been much talked about, and a post at Blogorama drew a response from Dark Horse Big Cheese Mike Richardson himself:

Saw these posts and had to respond. First, most of Dark Horse manga sells extremely well. While it is true that the horror line did not sell as well as expected, and that quality titles such as Eden and MPD Psycho are below expectations, most of our titles do quite nicely. Berserk. Ghost In the Shell, Blade of the Immortal, Trigun, Hellsing and others have all been big sellers and all of our manga continues to sell on backlist. The Lone Wolf & Cub series, by the way, has sold over 1 million copies to date.

More in the link. As Richardson points out, Dark Horse has been in the manga game since the very beginning, and they certainly have brought us some good reading. Also, Lone Wolf & Cub has sold more than 1 million copies. Via John Jakala, who has more Dark Horse manga facts.

Now on sale.

Dark Horse has been kind enough to give us a peek at the cover of their first collection of Achewood strips by Chris Onstad: The Great Outdoor Fight.
This will look strong on our shelves!

Dark Horse and Universal have announced a 3-year production/distro deal. Universal is putting out this year’s HELLBOY 2 (which was long without a studio; HELLBOY 1 was at Revolution). With the success of Sin City, 300 and 30 Days of Night (which Dark Horse also had a production credit on, despite it being published by IDW) it’s a nice proven brand for Hollywood. Up next: the Goon movie, perhaps?

Universal Pictures and Dark Horse Entertainment have signed a three-year production and distribution agreement that establishes a studio home for all of Dark Horse’s creative properties going forward. The agreement was jointly announced by Marc Shmuger and David Linde, Chairman and Co-Chairman of Universal Pictures; and Mike Richardson, founder and President of Dark Horse.

Under the terms of the deal, Universal would have creative access to all Dark Horse characters and properties, as well as any material that Dark Horse might acquire on its own and want to develop as a motion picture. In addition, Dark Horse would have the opportunity to distribute movies through Universal.

Universal Pictures is opening Hellboy II: The Golden Army, directed by Guillermo del Toro and based on Mike Mignola’s Dark Horse Comics character, on July 11, 2008.

“Dark Horse is one of the most creative and innovative brands in the entertainment industry, as well as an incredibly supportive home for some of the most exciting storytellers working today,” said Shmuger and Linde in a joint statement. “Their unique connection to youth culture is proven, and we are thrilled to be part of their expanding film production work.”

Mike Richardson responded, “We’ve worked with many studios and have had several great experiences, but we are particularly happy to be joining forces with Universal Pictures in this deal. We feel a real connection with their vision and the energy and creativity they bring to developing our properties. We are also excited by the option that we’ll have to independently produce our own material and distribute it through
Universal; their flexibility in this collaboration is what we were looking for, and we’re glad we found it.”

Donna Langley, President of Production, Universal Pictures, added, “We are very much looking forward to working with Dark Horse’s talented writers and artists, and to realizing their wealth of creative content onscreen.”

Dark Horse Entertainment is represented by Endeavor and The Gotham Group.

Wow, there are more free things than EVER on the internet! What is the use of playing softball in the park or brunching with the girls when there is so much cool free shit?

First off, some that is NOT FREE, repeat NOT FREE, but it is pretty affordable: yesterday’s news BOMBSHELL: TEZUKA ON THE WEB! Japanese bookstore Papyless will make 448 stories from manga forefather Osamu Tezuka available, including ASTROBOY, BLACK JACK and NEW TREASURE ISLAND. Starting March 18th it will cost 105 yen, or about one dollar, to read a volume over 48 hours. You can buy it for keeps for 315 yen per volume. Hopefully with a little Googling and Paypaling we can finally read NEW TREASURE ISLAND which was to manga what D. W. Griffith was to filmmaking, technically speaking.

Technorati Tags: Dr. Goldfoot, Tezuka

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Tom broke the news that one of the most fondly remembered of all golden age humor comics is finally getting a reprint courtesy of Dark Horse . It’s HERBIE by Ogden Whitney. We can’t say that we’ve ever actually read an issue of Herbie, by Ogden Whitney. (It was before even our time.) But we’ve certainly HEARD enough about it over the years, and lollipop sucking Herbie Popnecker is a familar symbol of the golden age of funny comics. Don Markstein’s Toonopedia has more

Herbie first appeared in the 73rd issue (December, 1958) of Forbidden Worlds, a sci-fi/fantasy/horror title that had never before featured continuing characters. “Herbie’s Quiet Saturday Afternoon” was a typical ACG story, about a character despised by his peers (in this case, because he was a very fat and slow-moving little boy, and overly addicted to lollipops), but who has hidden depths. Unknown to family and schoolmates alike, Herbie had vast, undefined, and unexplained super powers, which he used several times in the story, including foiling an alien invasion before anyone else even became aware of it. By story’s end, like Michigan J. Frog, he shed all signs of the extraordinary, and resumed his patient endurance of the constant taunts and barbs.

The artist was Ogden Whitney (Skyman, The Hooded Horseman). His illustration was understated almost to the point of blandness, but often showed flashes of subtle, sometimes sly humor. He proved perfectly suited to Herbie (who, by the way, is said to have been based on Whitney’s own appearance as a boy), depicting the “Little Fat Nothing” (as Herbie’s father, Pincus Popnecker, often called him) as a profoundly dull slug, yet able to make the character work in action scenes.

A couple of graphic novel film adaptations making the rounds this am. First, Columbia has a film based on THE BOYS in development, with producers Neal H. Moritz, Ken F. Levin and Jason Netter on board. THE BOYS by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson follows the darkly humorous adventures of a team assigned to clean up the often very excessive excesses of superheroes. The book is published by Dynamite after a much-publicized early run at Wildstorm.

Next up, Warner’s is fast tracking a two-picture adaptation of Katsuhiro Otomo’s AKIRA. The first part could be out as soon as 2009. Otomo, who directed an influential anime version in 1988, is listed as a exec producer, Leonardo DiCaprio is a producer, and first-time director Ruairi Robinson will direct from a script by Gary Whitta (”Book of Eli”). According to Variety, WB had held the rights to Akira for years, but had to recapture them in a “spirited” bidding war which ended up with a seven figure deal to publisher Kodansha.

Dark Horse last published the 6-volume AKIRA series in the US, but from a scan of the Dark Horse site it seems several volumes are out of stock. Time to fire up the presses!

Technorati Tags: Garth Ennis

ICv@ holds on of it’s periodic sit-downs with Dark Horse CEO Mike Richardson in three parts. Richardson is never afraid to give good pull-quotes and he obliges here:

We’ve seen over the years that comic book retailers have gotten more and more sophisticated. Many of the stores have expanded their product base, which is very important today. It’s hard to survive these days as the hobby shop that we remember, and I think that unless a store owner is looking to run his business just as a hobby, they need to be aware of the trends in the market and which books are selling.

It’s amazing when I look at particular stores, when I look down the list of retailers and see the number that don’t order Buffy or Star Wars, and it’s just lost sales. From the old days some retailers have their ideas of what can and can’t sell in the store, but I think today in order to be successful the stores that are doing well are the ones that are paying attention to the trends.

More here:
Part Two
Part 3

Herb Trimpe on MySpace.com !

[Thanks, Kurt!]

The trailer for Hellboy II: The Golden Army launches today at noon PST simultaneously over four Fox-owned websites:

The trailer will launch simultaneously across four of Fox Interactive Media sites, including MySpace (http://www.myspace.com), IGN (http://www.ign.com), Rotten Tomatoes (http://www.rottentomatoes.com) and AskMen (http://www.AskMen.com) and is set to premiere at 12 noon PST on Thursday, December 20.

We’ll have a link when it goes up.
And here it is.

And it looks kind of unbearably kickass.

Da-yumn.

This Wall Street Journal profile of Dark Horse VP Anita Nelson does not get off to a promising start:

Anita Nelson is one of only two female executives at a comic-book publisher in the last 10 years. Yet she says the only times in her career when she experienced gender bias was while she was working in telecommunications and cable TV, two industries where more women are present.

Huh? DC alone has half a dozen women on the masthead, with Jenette Kahn (now departed for her own production company) and Terri Cuningham springing to mind. So that’s, like, at least THREE. Granted there aren’t a ton, but there’s more than two.

Then, the next few paragraphs are the kind of odious “Wow! She carries a handbag! And yet she is allowed in the workplace!” that shouldn’t even be an issue in this day and age to a professional newspaper or organization.

At Dark Horse Comics, in Milwaukie, Ore., where she is vice president of sales, marketing and licensing, her gender has never been an issue, Ms. Nelson says.

While working alongside seven male executives and supervising about 20 workers — most of them male — she’s never felt like she’s any less valuable than her male colleagues or less advantaged in any way. The culture there is equally welcome to men and women, she says, and it’s one of the reasons she considers herself lucky.

Yes, and the womenfolk are even allowed to eat at the same table as the men, too! We’re very progressive in the US of A.

Yech. Is this part of the new Murdochified WSJ or just busines as usual?women movies xxx hothuge movie cockmasala movies indianlong movies free spankingmature movies ladiescock monster moviedoor girl movie next thegallary movie Map

While we’ve been going on and on about the space problems here at Stately Beat Manor, there are still a few things which we would let pass beneath our lintel…one of them is this amazing Jimbo Vinyl Figure from Dark Horse, designed by Yoe! Studios, with extensive input from the award-winning creator Gary Panter himself.

Well it seems David Scroggy read our mind, because one arrived in the post just the other day, and it has been enshrined in some of the very very rare shelf space here. The figure has an eerie nuclear glow to it, and comes in a specially decorated box designed by Panter, along with a 32-page comic filled with production sketches. Or so we hear. We just want to admire it in the box before we take it out of it. Panter’s post-apocalyptic punk roamed first through Slash magazine, then early issues of Raw, and he even won an American Book Award. It’s a limited edition, so get it before it’s gone.

Mike Richardson and BRUCE CAMPBELL talk of many things at an Oregon appearance:

Q. You each work in slightly different, though certainly overlapping, sectors of fandom. What have you learned from each other?

BRUCE CAMPBELL: Well, I’ve learned that you’ve got to do comics and merchandising and everything else with your movies. It’s a better deal.
The nice thing about working with Dark Horse is they not only make movies, they can handle publishing, they can handle comics, they do merchandising. That’s been kind of nice for me, working with a company that has it all wrapped up in a one-stop shop.

MIKE RICHARDSON: The big lesson, for me, was that you can actually have fun making a movie.

BRUCE CAMPBELL: Yeah, every so often a mistake happens and people have fun.

30 Days of Night had its big Hollywood premiere on Tuesday night. IESB has lots of red carpet interviews, including Steve Niles, Ben Templesmith and Dark Horse’s Mike Richardson. (To be honest, we didn’t know that Dark Horse was involved until we saw the credits at a screening the other night.) Some nice celeb pics:

Niles and the lovely Sara Wilkinson.

Templesmith and his lovely wife Lorelei.

And of course, it’s not official unless Bai Ling is there!

International rock star, MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE hearthrob and comics writer Gerard Way will be signing his new comics UMBRELLA ACADEMY at Forbidden Planet NYC. There are only a limited amount of tickets available and they may have already sold out, so call before going on down:

Gerard Way, writer of Dark Horse’s Umbrella Academy and lead singer of My Chemical Romance, will be signing at Forbidden Planet to celebrate the premiere of his new comic book.

Where? Forbidden Planet. 840 Broadway @ 13th Street. New York, NY.
When? 4pm - 6pm. Wednesday September 19th, 2007.

Please Note: THIS IS A TICKETED EVENT.
Limited to the first 200 participants.
Tickets may be purchased at Forbidden Planet starting Monday, 9/17 @ 4pm and include:

* One (1) copy of Umbrella Academy #1
* One (1) autograph from Gerard Way

Way signs TOMORROW in Boston at Newbury Comics.

Thursday, September 20th
4-6 PM Newbury Street
Boston, MA location
Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance will be autographing copies of his new comic book, The Umbrella Academy #1: Apocalypse Suite available Wednesday, September 19th.

Seriously if that single panel isn’t enough to make you read this, you have the Beat’s pity. But just in case, two more.

The story is running in the MySpace version of Dark Horse Presents.

ICv2 updates the sales of the 300 DVD, which topped both the sales and rental charts.

The 300 DVD sold over seven million units during its first week of release, seven times more than the cop comedy Hot Fuzz, which came in second during its debut week. 300 also topped the HD DVD and Blu-Ray sales charts with the Blu-Ray outselling the HD DVD disk by two-to-one. On the rental side 300 earned $11.9 million dwarfing Hot Fuzz’s second best total of $6.4 million.

The dvd release also impacted the sales of the graphic novel, which went from #90 to #19 on BookScan within four days of the release of the DVD.

The ultra-violent but very popular manga GANTZ is coming out from Dark Horse. Googling for an image we found the above and other stuff that somehow tells us this one will cause a bit of…comment among the uninitiated.

Inarguably the most highly demanded manga in the last half-decade, the enormously popular seinen manga series, GANTZ, has taken the bright path to Dark Horse. Hiroya Oku, creator of GANTZ, has put together a cast of characters that are both sympathetic and strong to which anyone can relate. The wildly renowned anime, also entitled GANTZ from ADV, primarily follows the same story and has been translated in several different languages captivating audiences all over the world.

Gantz tells the story of a team of dead people who are forced to take part in a “game” that has them hunting aliens and other creatures who live among the populace of Japan. The story focuses on Kei Kurono, a teenage boy who died saving a homeless man from a train. He, along with a band of others who are recently deceased, is forced to complete a series of dangerous and complicated missions by a strange device called Gantz. On these missions characters can even die again, only to be quickly replaced by others like them. As the plot progresses, so does the intricacy of relationships between characters.

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The secret word is DIGITAL! You can’t spell Web 2.0 without COMICS, it seems, as all sorts of digital deals are being announced at this year’s San Diego, or else bubbling under the surface. Today’s big news: MySpace and Dark Horse are teaming to bring back the digital version of DARK HORSE PRESENTS with creators such as Joss Whedon, Rick Geary and Gerard Way on tap. The site goes live today.

More: PWCW’s son coverage.

MySpace, the nation’s most trafficked website, and Dark Horse Comics, pioneers of creator owned and licensed comics material, today announced a partnership to revive one of the most celebrated comic anthologies with the launch of a new online comic book, “MySpace Dark Horse Presents” (http://www.myspace.com/darkhorsepresents). The online series will include original content by top creators and premiere artists, all available exclusively on MySpace and free of charge to users. The announcement was made on-site at Comic-Con International in San Diego.

“MySpace Dark Horse Presents” takes its cues from the original Dark Horse Presents, a hard copy comic book published from 1986 to 2000, where high celebrated comics including Frank Miller’s Sin City and Paul Chadwick’s Concrete, made their mark in issues of the anthology and were later spun off into their own standalone comic franchises.

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Yikes! Somehow this never got posted

THURSDAY, JULY 26:
12:00 - 1:00 Joshua Dysart: Conan and the Midnight God
1:00 - 2:00 Tara McPherson: Lonely Heart
2:00 – 3:00 Will Vinton & Andrew Wiese: Jack Hightower
2:00 - 3:00 Chris Grine: Chickenhare
3:00 – 4:00 Matt Wagner: Celebrating 25 years of Grendel!
4:00 - 5:00 Jeff Smith: The Art of Bone
4:00 – 5:00 Eric Powell: The Goon, Chinatown
5:00 - 6:00 Rick Remender: Fear Agent

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