If you aren’t at the con, there is still plenty of comics related frolic to be had, including this event at the McNally Robinson bookstre: Comics for Kids with TOON Books:

Geoffrey Hayes, author of Benny and Penny in Just Pretend
Frank Cammuso and Jay Lynch, creators of Otto’s Orange Day
Introduction by TOON Books editor Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly
In this very special McNally Robinson Saturday Storytime, kids will hear stories and make crafts with the creators of two new graphic novels just for kids! Geoffrey Hayes will show pictures on the big screen to tell the story of Benny the mouse and his little sister Penny in Just Pretend. Jay Lynch and Frank Cammuso will share their story and pictures about Otto, a cat who wishes for a genie to make everything orange! The artists will also wow the crowd with original drawings, and afterward kids will create their own graphic novels. The authors will be introduced by the creators of TOON Books — series advisor Art Spiegelman (author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus) and editorial director Francoise Mouly (art director for The New Yorker and co-editor of RAW magazine) — who will talk to kids and parents about what comics for kids are all about. Join us for a special comics edition of Saturday Storytime! Please note: Mr. Spiegelman will not sign books at this event.

Word Balloons is a new blog which aims to be the daily morning read for kids comics. Tt’s edited by Brigid Alverson, so that’s a good start. She’s aided by Katherine Dacey, Lori Henderson, Esther Keller, Eva Volin and Snow Wildsmith, a merry band of writers and librarians whom we intend to read avidly. The blog kicks off with an interview with Jerzy Drozd of Sugary Serials.

“In Saturday morning cartoons, as well as in the ’60s comics, you had very limited space to tell the full story,” he says. “How are you going to communicate characters in an economical fashion while avoiding simplifying? You want them to feel like rich characters, but you don’t have much time. So you turn up the volume on the characters to 11.” That means making every word count. “You can’t write whimsical dialogue,” he says. “You have to ask yourself ‘How is it servicing the story and the character?’”

Book mark now!

We get a lot of PR from Archie but hardly ever look at it. Today we did and we found out that the Riverside gang is kind of turning into Scooby-Doo

ARCHIE & FRIENDS #121
“California Dreaming Part One”: When news of Archie and his friends’ worldwide, mystery-solving adventures (see ARCHIE & FRIENDS #117 through #120 for details) spreads, it isn’t long before Hollywood comes knocking. MGG Studios exec Perri DeLane is sure the gang will be a hit, and takes them to the Catalina Comic Con to unveil her latest franchise.
Later, the “Minute Men of Menace,” a gang of thieves who pull off their crimes in lightning-fast fashion, crash a swank invitation-only party that the gang are attending… and promptly kidnap all the celebrity guests! Can Archie and his friends solve yet another mystery so hot on the heels of their European tour? Is the plot of their movie being written before their eyes? These questions and more will be answered (maybe) when you read this intriguing tale!
SCRIPT: Alex Simmons. ART: Fernando Ruiz.

Also, the realistic style Jughead soldiers on:

Technorati Tags: Archie Comics

The Nick Mag blog informs us that The April issue of Nickelodeon Magazine is another Cartoon themed issue. The cover above by Darwyn Cooke & Jacob Chabot isn’t the magazine cover but should be.

Francoise Mouly has been on a mission to bring comics to the littlest readers with her beautiful Toon Books line. Looks like she’s not alone, as the three debut books have already had to go back to press. PR below:

In response to overwhelming advance orders, TOON Books was taken by surprise and has had to go back to press for all three of its spring debut titles. Benny and Penny by Geoffrey Hayes is already out of stock with its distributor, Diamond Book Distributors, before its April 7 pub-date, and the same fate is imminent for Agnès Rosenstiehl’s Silly Lilly and Frank Cammuso and Jay Lynch’s Otto’s Orange Day.

“We were in the middle of preparing for our launch,” says Editorial Director Françoise Mouly, also the Art Editor of The New Yorker, “but I couldn’t imagine a more welcome distraction.” Self-published by Mouly under her RAW Junior, LLC imprint, and edited by Mouly with Series Advisor Art Spiegelman (Maus, In the Shadow of No Towers), the TOON Books are the first collection of high-quality hardcover comics for early readers. Heavily vetted by educators, the books “fill such a need in children’s publishing,” says Laura Lutz, Children’s Materials Specialist at the Queens Library.

The TOON Books have already received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist, review attention in Kirkus, Shelf Awareness, and School Library Journal, and feature attention in The New York Times, School Library Journal, Shelf Awareness, Time Out New York Kids, The Brian Lehrer Show, The Miami Herald and PrINT magazine, among many other venues.The three books’ simultaneous publication date is April 7, 2008.

A full schedule of author events in NYC is planned to mark the debut of the line:
Friday, 11 april, 6 – 7.30pm

• BORDERS BOOkS AND MuSIC, Columbus Circle @ 59th Street
Geoffrey Hayes, Agnès Rosenstiehl, Frank Cammuso & Jay Lynch, introduced by Françoise
Mouly and Art Spiegelman

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The second annual Kids Comic Con is taking place this weekend at the Bronx Community College:

KIDS’ COMIC CON 2008 will feature:

1) professional artists and publishers from the field of kids comics!

2) a huge variety of kids’ comics’ exhibitions, workshops, panels, and signings, aimed at kids, parents, and educators.

All in one day, March 29, 2008, from 10 AM to 6 PM!

Artists on hand include Kyle Baker, Raina Telgemeier, Dave Roman, Kevin Pyle and many more. Check it out!

Fresh off the news that his AMULET gn is getting the movie treatment, Kazu Kibuishi’s long running COPPER webcomic has been sold to Scholastic, ICv2 reports.

The Copper collection, planned for Spring 2010, will include both existing and new material. It will be released in both trade paperback and library hardcover editions. Judith Hansen of Hansen Literary Agency represented Kibuishi.

We would guess that the huge success of DIARY OF A WIMPY KID has webcomics on many book editors’ radar these days (yes yes it is not really a webcomic, but creator Jeff Kinney usually refers to it as such), and the idea of putting out a book based on something that people have been reading free for years is not really so daunting at all. Ya hear that?

Technorati Tags: Scholastic

ITEM! In case you haven’t heard, Kazu Kibuishi’s kids GN AMULET came out a few months ago, but it is already optioned and on the fast track, with Will Smith’s kids Willow and Jaden set to star as siblings who must traverse a strange world in search aided by a sinister amulet after their mother is kidnapped. Kibuishi comments on his blog:

I never imagined we would be moving so quickly on the film side of things. I better get the next few books done a little faster! Anyway, I’m really looking forward to meeting the Smiths. I’ve been a huge fan ever since the early Fresh Prince days, and seeing the kind of work they’ve been doing lately, I can see that we’ll be on the same wavelength on this project. This is going to be cool.

A total of five AMULET volumes are planned.

ITEM! According to a terse trade report, that Virgin Comics/Sci Fi Channel deal is paying off. The Sci Fi Channel is developing a TV series project around The Stranded, (left) one of Virgin’s Sci Fi branded comics. It’s written by Mike Carey and involves regular folks who discover they are really aliens,
ITEM! Speaking of the Sci Fi Channel, they are also developing a pilot for TRUE BELIEVER, a series created by Rosario Dawson and David Atchinson (OCCULT CRIMES TASK FORCE) about a comic book enthusiast who hires a former superhero to teach him about crime-fighting.

ITEM! Director James Mangold ( 3:10 to Yuma, Girl Interrupted, Walk the Line) has signed on the graphic novel express with French gn CYCLOPES by Alexis Nolent :

Variety reports that Warner Bros. has secured the rights to Alexis Nolent’s French graphic novel Cyclopes, set in a dystopian future where soldiers wear cameras in their helmets and broadcast what they see in real time. One soldier realizes that what he’s fighting for isn’t justice, but commerce.

Nolent is now a two-fer, as another one of his books, KILLER is being developed for David Fincher.
ITEM! More obstacles for the JUSTICE LEAGUE movie. It appears that the Australian government is refusing the film a 40% tax rebate which is offered to Australian productions of Australian films. Despite Aussie helmer George Miller and a few native actresses in the cast, the movie is under great suspicion:

Since Warner Bros suspended filming plans in January, citing uncertainty over the new incentive, opponents have argued that the offset should not be available for big-budget movies not developed by Australian filmmakers from inception.

The director of the equity section of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, Simon Whipp, has lobbied against Justice League Mortal’s eligibility, describing it as an American story that will be performed in American accents.

Has this guy no desire to see Green Lantern up on the big screen? With a $200 million budget, the tax rebate was an important financial element of the film, which could be forced to shoot somewhere else. Miller was non-plussed with the decision : “A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the Australian film industry is being frittered away because of very lazy thinking,” Miller said.

Cinematical has more analysis.

The problem seems to be that it is an American film, with American accents, and it will not do the Australian film industry any favors. But native director George Miller points out that the country needs movie franchises, even if they aren’t “recognizably” Australian, to boost production and bring in jobs. I can’t really say which side is right — it seems Australia is a bit miffed Warner Bros shut down production in January over uncertainty about the incentive, and they punished them for their doubts. (I’m really curious if X-Men Origins: Wolverine is getting that tax break. Everyone knows Hugh Jackman is Australian, but come on, that’s not going to be seen as a Down Under movie either.)

The film is also apparently called JUSTICE LEAGUE MORTAL.

Oni has announced the first volume in an all ages series by Matt Loux called Salt Water Taffy. In short it about two lads named Jack and Benny visit Maine and have adventures in the “unusual hamlet called Chowder Bay–a small town full of big mysteries, giant adventures, and gargantuan lobsters.” The first book is called “The Legend of Old Salty.” Sold!

Often disregarded as part of any continuity, Li’l Bruce Wayne was a long-running series of light-hearted comic books aimed at children, detailing the life of a young, fantastically wealthy Bruce Wayne (known in the series as “The Happiest Kid On Earth”) in the years before the deaths of Thomas and Martha Wayne and his subsequent transformation into Batman

The series was originally created by Bill Finger and Jerry Robinson to fill a gap in DC’s publishing schedule after the cancellation of More Fun Comics in 1946, and ran through the majority of the Silver Age despite being regarded by editors and fans alike as being “extremely depressing” [citation needed] and is usually left out of any discussion of the character. It is notable, however, as being the first published comic book work of writer/artist Frank Miller.

Fond at Chris’s Invincible Super-Blog, via. More in link. Can it be that the true purpose of Photoshop has finally been achieved?
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Fox 2000 has optioned the phenomenally successful WIMPY KID books. Nina Jacobson will produce. According to the article, five books are eventually planned, with Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw to be published later this year.

The Nickelodeon’s Kids’ Choice Awards are a televised award show with stars and hosts and all that. this year they also have comics. Or books, anyway. The nominees in the Favorite Book category include to comics:

Favorite Book
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, Volume One: The Long Way Home
Diary of a Wimpy Kid
Harry Potter series
How to Eat Fried Worms

Kids will be able to cast their vote online at http://www.nick.com/kca beginning Monday, March 3 in a total of 18 categories. Surprise awards also will be announced during the show. Kids also will be able to vote via the Nick mobile website (wap.nick.com).

What can we say, kids love comics!

[Thank to Jeremy for the item.]

We hear that DIARY OF A WIMPY KID: RODRICK RULES, the second volume of Jeff Kinney’s Wimpy Kid series, will debut at #1 on this Sunday’s NY Times Bestseller list. Wimpy Kid book 1 holds steady at the number two spot. With Hugo Cabret at #3, picture books definitely rule.

The Diary of a Wimpy Kid phenomenon is one that hasn’t been overanalyzed by the comics blogosphere — the books are very text heavy and are more truly called comics/text hybrids than straight out comics. However, the series has long been labeled a webcomic, and its sales success does prove you can give something away on the internet for free for a long time and still sell loads and loads of books — as long as someone wants to read it in the first place!

However did we miss this choose-your-own adventure tale by Jason Shiga and Drew Weing in Nickelodeon Magazine? Shame on us.

“Dynamic new look….a story that will shock you….” Can Dark Jughead be far behind? Or perhaps the heartbreaking storyline “One more shake.”

Last year, one of the most talked about stories in the comic book industry was the Dynamic New Look for Betty & Veronica; as seen in the story “Bad Boy Trouble”. Thousands of Archie fans responded by e-mail, snail mail and phone expressing their disapproval of the new look before the story was even printed. Those same fans, after reading “Bad Boy Trouble” let us know how much they enjoyed the story once seeing it in print. They thought it was fun and interesting to see the characters with a different look, AS LONG AS IT WASN’T IN ALL OF THE COMICS. The story was so popular it was collected into a Graphic Novel.
Thanks to the response of those thousands of fans, we have created another story with a Dynamic New Look. This time, starring Jughead in a story that will shock you. You can see Jughead’s Dynamic New Look in four consecutive issues of Jughead’s Double Digest starting with issue #139 through issue #142, with Dynamic art by the legendary Joe Staton. Remember, it is only one of the stories in Jughead’s Double Digest, the remaining stories will be in the classic Archie art style you know and love. Make sure you contact your local comic book retailer to reserve your copies today.

The final nominations for YALSA’s Great Graphic Novels for Teens list is up.
Via David Welsh, who has analysis, as does Blog@.

Tokypop and DC Comics lead the final nominations for the Young Adult Library Services Association’s annual list of Great Graphic Novels For Teens with 23 nods each.

DC’s nominations include titles from its CMX, Minx and Vertigo imprints.

Tokyopop and DC are followed by Del Rey with 11 nominations, Viz Media with 10, Go! Comi with eight, and First Second and Marvel with seven each.

Not only is Francoise Mouly launching a new line of comics/books aimed at very young readers, but the Toon Books website kicks all kinds of butt. Look at these awesome art previews — we made our own little montage but click on the link for more previews, bigger art and info.

There’s also a very informative blog which seems to have been going for months with nary a trackback. Clever!!! Anyway, you must bookmark it, because it is full of stuff like this summary of a study entitled “Pallenik, M. J. (1986). A Gunman in Town! Children Interpret a Comic Book. Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication, 3(1), 38-51.”

Fifth graders pick up far more information than third graders, with explanations seeming less stereotypic – allowing them to anticipate and integrate events more quickly and accurately. Eighth graders “move back and forth between their knowledge of conventional genre structure and the particular story” (46). Fifth graders are more capable of predicting future events from individual panels — each panel implies something about future events. While eighth graders can predict to the end of the story, fifth graders make more short-term predictions about action sequences.

Eighth graders see the story as conventionally ordered by the dictates of the genre. Two strategies were used by eighth graders. When uninterested, they use a “flat” style that perceives and decodes the story as it unfolds bit by bit. A contiguous reading style incorporates the understanding of the genre to expand on the given information with schematic knowledge (unlike with third graders, this isn’t to make up for missed information though).

Holy frak it’s the mother lode!

This Week’s Publishers Weekly spotlights Francoise Mouly’s new Toon Books imprint. Mouly will be publishing a new line of comics for very early readers.

Mouly has announced plans to launch a new line of book format comics called Toon Books, aimed at readers ages four and up, designed to nurture basic reading skills and encourage a love of visual storytelling.

The line will launch with three books in spring 2008 and will be distributed by Diamond Book Distributors. Titles include Benny and Penny by Geoffrey Hayes, Silly Lilly by Agnes Rosenstiehl and Otto’s Orange Day by Frank Cammuso and Jay Lynch. Mouly is providing all the financing and expects to publish six books in 2008, including a Toon Book by Art Spiegelman (called Jack and the Box) that will be part of the second set of releases.

Mouly has been consulting with educators along the way, and the books will be used in at least one pilot reading program in Maryland.

Over on his blog, Jeff Smith recently announced some impressive sales figures for Scholastic’s BONE reprints:

I received some astonishing sales figures from Scholastic - - the paperback edition of BONE 6: Old Man’s Cave, which just shipped last month, is in its third printing for a total of 260,000 copies! The combined hard cover & paperback sales for the series to date: nearly 2,000,000.

An imposing figure to be sure, but not one that surprises me. Kids like comics. Kids like fantasy. When both are done as superlatively as BONE, success should be sure to follow.

I learned that back in the day when I worked at Disney Adventures magazine, where Bone was serialized for about a year. I’ve often been given credit for reprinting BONE in the pages of DA, but to be honest, it was Marv Wolfman’s idea at first. After Marv left, I picked up the mantle, and continued the color reprints. There was even an all-new 8 page Bone story whose reprint history I’m sadly unaware of.

DA’s recent demise gave me (and many others) pause for thought. DA started back in the early 90s. It was the idea of Michael Lynton (who now runs Sony Pictures). Hyperion Books was also his idea — some how or other Lynton introduced Disney to the idea of publishing non-Disney books and magazines, and also comics. (The brief career of Disney Comics was also Lynton’s idea.)

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Speaking of educating the kids, Occasional Superheroine leads us to the NSA’s “kid’s site” complete with lovable with cartoon characters.

We’re the CryptoKids and we love cryptology.

What’s cryptology? Cryptology is making and breaking codes. It’s so cool. We make codes so we can send secret messages to our friends. And we try to figure out what other people are writing about by breaking their codes. It’s a lot of fun.

On this site, you can learn all about codes and ciphers, play lots of games and activities, and get to know each of us - Crypto Cat™, Decipher Dog™, Rosetta Stone, Slate, Joules, T.Top, and, of course, our leader CSS Sam.

John Green, Disney Adventures freelancer recounts the end of the magazine
— and by the way folks, he’s now looking for work and anyone who doesn’t hire him is stupid.

I can’t say it’s completely unexpected. When I started at the magazine almost ten years ago, I recall a big meeting about the fate of the magazine within my first few weeks. Basically, the decision seemed to be that the need for Disney to have a kids magazine out there was greater than the need for Disney to be making lots of money off said kids magazine. It’s subscription rate was great, and always has been, but ad sales have been on a steady decline. For a long time no one was really worried about that, though (other than of course people in the ad sales department.) So long as kids were still buying the magazine (or, parents buying their kids the magazine), Disney was going to make it for them. And if the magazine was in any real danger, the impression everyone got was that it would be reformatted, restructured, phased out, phased in, or something. At worst, I expected a “This is your last year” kind of scenario, so the “That’s it, finish what you’re doing and go home” scenario that has happened came as a bit of a shock.

Related: Drew Weing on his strip WULF AND MERL.

Ad Age reports that after 17 years, Disney has cancelled Disney Adventures magazine, with the November issue the last one.

Disney Publishing attributed its decision to an effort to better focus resources and maximize long-term growth potential through new magazine and book initiatives.

The demise of Disney Adventures, which was introduced for tweens in 1990, closely follows the end of fellow child soldier Nick Jr., which MTV Networks closed with the April issue. It isn’t clear that there’s any particular exodus of children from magazines, but proliferating competition and rising costs are knocking out big magazines at a fairly regular clip these days; adults for their part have lost Premiere, Jane, Life and Child so far this year.

While DA still had a healthy circ of over 1 million, ad pages were down — a common complaint among magazines — and that sealed its fate.

DA was of course, The Beat’s old stomping ground for many years, and this announcement fills us with a bittersweet feeling. With its vast circulation, and stand alone comics spin-offs, “Comic Zone” this was one of the lone lights for children’s comics during the darkest days of the comics industry, and over the years published such cartoonists as Jeff Smith, Evan Dorkin, Art Adams, Christine Norrie, Rick Geary and many others. Selling ads was always a challenge however, and the slowly eroding ad market for magazines couldn’t have helped.

But it was fun while it lasted, creating the comics adventures of TailSpin, Rescue Rangers, Toy Story, Timon & Pumbaa, Pirates of the Caribbean and many others. The “DA Kids” grew up to read and buy comics and helped show that comics weren’t just for grown ups after-all.

Actual Chicago news that got us excited: continuing to serve audiences largely abandoned by current comics, DC is launching actual kids comics that aren’t directly based on cartoons. The three new books are Billy Batson and the Magic of Shazam, Tiny Titans, and Super Friends. Editor Jann Jones blabs at Newsarama:

When I moved into the role of Coordinating Editor and started doing the sign off on the kids’ books of the Johnny DC line, I saw that they were really good, solid books, but I didn’t feel like I could give them to a four year old or a five year old, or just any kid in general. Despite their connection to the animated projects, they were still dealing with the more serious issues – cases where if the heroes don’t save the day, it’s implied, or shown that people will die. I think that’s kind of heavy to put on a younger audience.

Some of them were very serious in tone as well. They were good reads, don’t get me wrong, and we had great creators working on them, but they weren’t making me laugh. Likewise, I have a very religious sister, and when she would go through my bundle of comics, there was very little that I would feel comfortable with handing her to give to my nephews to read. I wanted to make sure that there was a place for that in the DC Universe.

Also, I’ve been on the convention circuit since 1999 with DC, and I’ve met a bunch of really great people over the years that do material that is what I was looking for. So when the pieces started coming together, the first person who came to my mind was Art Baltazar, who does Patrick the Wolf Boy. His stuff is so sweet and cute, while also being fresh and funny. It’s something that you could give to a kid, and any child will pick that up and be totally amused by it, but I can read it and laugh too. That’s the kind of humor and that’s the kind of storytelling that I’m really going for here.

We’ve been hearing a bit about this book lately, and it sounds quite interesting: a kid’s book that blends fiction, art and movie stills in a form of “graphical storytelling.” PopMatters has a review:

The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick, is a children’s novel weighing in at an intimidating 533 pages, but the reader brave enough to dive headlong into its pages will find a multi-layered text that consists of not only a delightfully written tale, but rich illustrations that take over the telling of the story at regular intervals. Selznick’s creation navigates the grey area between picture book and graphic novel in what certainly constitutes a visual and narrative achievement and a truly original work.

[snip] Selznick has a number of balls in the air with this project: juggling the textual narrative, sustaining a 500 page mystery, while integrating the illustrated narrative, and a number of allusions and inspirations from classic film and 1930s Paris. While the novel largely defies categorization, it closely resembles a silent film, and fittingly so. In addition to the novel’s rich illustrations, Selznick employs photos and movie stills to enhance his storytelling, and build a cinematic mood. In the tradition of graphic narrative (or sequential art, whatever your term of choice), the illustrations play as integral a role in the overall story as the text. The use of illustrations is hardly gratuitous, for the pictures quite literally take over and carry out the narrative when the text disappears. And, really, who would care if the illustrations were gratuitous? They’re gorgeous.

Right here!

Join the Critter Kids as they come face-to-face with wild wetland creatures in the Snake Hill Swamp Sanctuary. Is the swamp safe to explore, or will the Swamp Thing get ‘em?

Who knew that school trips could be so exciting? The Critter Kids have a knack for discovering adventure and mystery as they travel with their teachers to exotic places to learn about a Native American desert preserve, an archaeological dig amid ancient ruins, a tropical coral reef, and more!

Although billed as a “graphic novel” for grades 2-5, we doubt Critter Kids creators knew there was another, much scarier Swamp Thing they might encounter.