Tagged: Dark Horse

WWC Interview: John Jackson Miller on ‘Star Wars’ and Webcomics

WWC Interview: John Jackson Miller on ‘Star Wars’ and Webcomics

Writer and comics authority John Jackson Miller probably has one of the most enviable jobs in comics today. Starting off in the early ’90s as editor of Comics Retailer magazine, Miller went on to edit various other publications including Scrye and the Comics Buyer’s Guide. Later, stints on Marvel’s Crimson Dynamo and Iron Man led to his working for Dark Horse comics.

Once at Dark Horse, Miller helped re-launch the company’s Star Wars comics with his work on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Recently, he also wrote the comic book adaptation of the Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull film and launched his own webcomic called Sword & Sarcasm. I caught up with Miller at Wizard World Chicago to discuss Star Wars comics, webcomics and the first time he ever saw Star Wars.

COMICMIX: John, thanks for your time. Having a good show?

JOHN JACKSON MILLER: Yes, a wonderful Chicago con as always.

CMix: So, tell me about why you’re here?

JJM: Well, I’m here to sign and talk about Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, our ongoing series now at issue 30 and still going strong. It’s a big year for us because we had the "Vector" crossover. We’ve also had some major events with Zayne Carrick, our figitive Jedi who’s finally getting his taste of justice with a big showdown about to come up.

Those big events will take us through issue 33 at least. It should be pretty interesting what happens.

It may not be the big showdown that people expect because we also want to make sure we keep people guessing a bit and not always do what people might be expecting. We don’t want readers to get too comfortable with what’s going on and we want to keep it interesting.

CMix: Excellent. You also involved with Wizards of the Coast on some projects as well, right?

JJM: Yes. They are coming out with a series of minatures for the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic board game. I helped design some of those characters because several of them are from the comic. I was also a co-author of the Campaign Guide for the game as well, which contains information from all the comics and the two videogames.

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Happy Birthday: Shawn McManus

Happy Birthday: Shawn McManus

Born in Brookline, Massachusetts in 1958, Shawn McManus got his comic book start in the early 1980s, working for Heavy Metal. He illustrated two issues of the Alan Moore run on Swamp Thing, then went on to draw most of the "A Game of You" storyline in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman.

McManus also drew issues of Omega Men, Batman, Doctor Fate, and the Thessaly limited series in The Sandman Presents. He has done work for Marvel Comics (Peter Parker Spider-Man and Daredevil), Dark Horse (Cheval Noir), First Comics (GrimJack), Image (Supreme), America’s Best Comics (Tom Strong), and others.

In 1985 he was nominated for a Jack Kirby Award for Swamp Thing #32.

 

Happy Birthday: Butch Guice

Happy Birthday: Butch Guice

Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1961, Jackson “Butch” Guice started out drawing for fanzines and designing patches and emblems for a company in North Carolina.

In 1982 he ghosted some artwork for Pat Broderick on the Rom annual, and drew the first two issues of the independent comic book Southern Knights. Then Marvel editor Al Milgrom offered him a chance to draw Micronauts #48. Guice penciled Micronauts until its cancellation with #58 and did other titles for Marvel as well, including work on X-Men, Dazzler, The New Mutants, and X-Factor.

In 1987 Guice teamed with Mike Baron on several projects for First Comics (Badger, Nexus, and The Chronicles of Corum) and DC (including the second Flash series). Guce has continued to work for both Marvel and DC since, and also did books for Dark Horse, Valiant, CrossGen, and Acclaim.

In July 2007 he signed an exclusive contract with Marvel, where he is currently drawing Captain America and Ultimate Origins.

 

‘EZ Street’ Nominated for Harvey Award

‘EZ Street’ Nominated for Harvey Award

The 2008 Harvey Award nominations are out, and ComicMix is proud to have EZ Street nominated for "Best Online Comic." Congratulations to Robert Tinnell and Mark Wheatley!

Sure, EZ Street is up against some tough competition — Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Penny Arcade, Perry Bible Fellowship, and The Surreal Adventures of Edgar Allan Poo — but we think it will do okay.

This year’s Harvey Awards will be handed out at the Baltimore Comic-Con, held September 27-28, 2008.  Convention hours are Saturday, 10 AM to 6 PM, and Sunday, 10 AM to 5 PM.  The ceremony and banquet for the 2008 Harvey Awards will be held Saturday night, September 27, hosted once again by Kyle Baker.

If you are a comics creative professional and would like to vote, you can download the .pdf Final Ballot or download .txt Final Ballot (for email) and send it to pjcjmc3 [at] sbcglobal.net. Final ballots are due to the Harvey Awards by Friday, August 15, 2008.  Full details for submission of completed ballots can be found on the final ballot.  Voting is open to anyone involved in a creative capacity within the comics field.  Those without Internet access may request that paper ballots be sent to them via mail or fax by calling the Baltimore Comic-Con (410-526-7410) or e-mailing baltimorecomicccon [at] yahoo.com.

The full list of nominees is after the jump.

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Happy Birthday: Hilary Barta

Happy Birthday: Hilary Barta

Born in 1957, Hilary Barta began his comic book career in 1982 when he was hired at Marvel to help ink The Defenders #108. In 1984 he moved to First Comics to ink Warp, and slowly graduated to penciling as well. In 1988, after work for Eclipse, Marvel, and First, Barta launched both Marvel’s What The—?! and DC’s Plastic Man.

He has penciled and inked many other books for Marvel, DC, Malibu Comics, Image Comics, Bongo Comics, Dark Horse, and others. He’s best known for his slightly surreal, humorous style, which you’ll be seeing on several upcoming Munden’s Bar stories!

Casper The Old Ghost

Casper The Old Ghost

Sixty years ago next year, the remnants of the Fleischer Studio teamed up with the folks at St. John Comics (Tor, Three Stooges, and the original 3-D comics) to create Casper The Friendly Ghost #1. It lasted five issues. Paramount, owners of the Fleischer operation, took the license over to Harvey Comics and a legend floated off the ground.

While children’s comics have been largely ignored in the American marketplace for the past decade or two, Casper stayed alive in movies and on DVD. His present owner, Classics Media, has big plans for the ghost’s 60th.

They’ve got a major Halloween push coming this fall, including clothing and music and games and toys and greeting cards and tattoos.

They’ve also got a new teevee show which already has been sold in 60 markets, including France, Britain, and Japan.

As for comics, well, Dark Horse recently released a nifty reprint anthology, mostly in black-and-white but still a great value.

Not bad for a small child who’s been dead for 60 years.

 

 

 

Interview: Scott Allie on Shepherd Book’s ‘Serenity’ Spin-Off and ‘Solomon Kane’

Interview: Scott Allie on Shepherd Book’s ‘Serenity’ Spin-Off and ‘Solomon Kane’

Previously on ComicMix, I spoke with Dark Horse Comics’ Editor Scott Allie about a variety of subjects including Buffy: Season Eight, Joss Whedon, the Dark Horse/MySpace Comics project and the rise of digital media.

This time around, we revisit a few old topics (because there’s always something new going on with Dark Horse projects in the Joss Whedon universe), discuss who might be handling the Serenity spin-offs and talk a bit about the origin of Shepherd Book.

COMICMIX: Okay, Scott, we talked about Serenity spin-offs before, like the one featuring Shepherd Book. Will it be old Buffy and Serenity writers on that one or…

SCOTT ALLIE: No. Joss [Whedon] will still have his role as co-writer, plotter, all that, but the rest of this is changing up. This one is such a different thing. It’s a flashback with a single character, before the television show, so we figured it was an opportunity to go in a real different direction.

CMix: There’s a story about the Shepherd Book comic’s origin, right? Something about Ron Glass (who plays the character in both the tevelvision series and feature film) going on a cruise?

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Happy Birthday: Charles Vess

Happy Birthday: Charles Vess

Born in Lynchburg, Virginia in 1951, Charles Dana Vess fell in love with comic books and art while still a child—he drew his first full-length comic when he was ten years old.

He attended Virginia Commonwealth University and graduated with a BFA in 1974, then went to work as a commercial animator for Candy Apple Productions in Richmond. In 1976, Vess moved to New York City to try his hand as a freelance illustrator. In 1980, he joined Parsons School of Design as an art instructor.

He was getting regular comic book work, and drew books for Dark Horse, Marvel, Epic, and DC, but it was in 1989 that Vess became truly well-known in the field. He collaborated with Neil Gaiman on one of the issues of the original Books of Magic mini-series and also drew three issues of Gaiman’s Sandman series for Vertigo. One of those issues, #19 (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) won the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story.

In 1994, Vess moved back to Virginia and organized The Dreamweavers, a traveling exhibition of 15 fantasy artists. Since then he has had many other showings and worked on many other comic books.

Another Vess-Gaiman collaboration, Stardust, won an Alex Award from the American Library Association, a Mythopoeic Award, and a World Fantasy Award for Best Artist. Vess has won a Will Eisner Comics Industry Award three times. He has also won a Comic Creators’ Guild award, a Silver Award, and an Ink Pot. He has won numerous children’s book awards as well, primarily for his collaborations with Charles de Lint.

Interview: John Arcudi Talks ‘B.P.R.D.’ Summer Series

This summer is a big one for Hellboy fans, and not just because Hellboy II: The Golden Army hits theaters on July 11. Dark Horse is releasing several comics from Mike Mignola’s Hellboy world.

The co-author on several Hellboy and B.P.R.D. books, John Arcudi recently chatted with me and gave some sneak peaks at B.P.R.D.: War on Frogs, B.P.R.D.: The Warning and the B.P.R.D.: Ectoplasmic Man one shot.

Dire times are coming to the B.P.R.D. crew, Arcudi warned, and no one is safe.

COMICMIX: What can you tell me about these new series, War on Frogs and The Warning? They take place before and after Killing Ground, respectively, right?

JOHN ARCUDI: WoF takes place in the past, back in 2005 during the era of the Black Flame, while The Warning picks up about a week after the end of Killing Ground and will kick off the large three-part arc that brings the Memnan Saa storyline to its conclusion.

CMix: The Warning sounds like it’ll be focusing on Liz quite a lot. What can we expect for her? What are the big issues she’s facing?

JA: Well, she thinks she’s finally free of Memnan Saa’s control and so she’s in a hurry to kick some butt. His butt. Liz is interesting in that she seems to always be looking for an authority figure, for someone to point out the direction in life she should follow – due, undoubtedly to the premature deaths of her parents (at her hands, no less). If you go back to Hollow Earth, you see Liz leaving the B.P.R.D. to find herself in some temple at the top of the world. She doesn’t go and ride a motorcycle across the country, she goes and asks somebody else for help. This may be what made her susceptible to Saa’s thrall in the first place. And that is the personal story nugget at the core of this very far-reaching, cataclysmic epic tale.

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Review: Two Grendel Hardcovers – Devil Child & Devil Quest

Review: Two Grendel Hardcovers – Devil Child & Devil Quest

It’s generally not a good sign when a series turns from telling stories at the far end of its timeline to filling in the gaps in earlier stories and explaining all the backstory — do I need to mention George Lucas here? — so these two new collections filled me with some trepidation. They’re both reprints of older material — older even than I thought, from 1999 and 1994-95 — but were explicitly returns to even earlier stories.

Matt Wagner’s series of [[[Grendel]]] stories started in 1982, and the main sequence ran from 1986 through 1992 (with a gap near the end caused by the collapse of Wagner’s then-publisher Comico). They started as the story of a near-future crimelord named Hunter Rose who used a mask and electrified pitchfork to terrorize…well, everyone, really. After Wagner wrote the story of Hunter’s inevitable demise, he rethought “Grendel” as a force of evil and aggression that possessed various people through a long future history. With various collaborators (and a number of stories entirely by other hands) and a great diversity of storytelling styles, the Grendel stories all had something in common: a deep, central notion that people are full of evil and corruption, and that life is inevitably nasty, brutish, and short.

Grendel: Devil Child
By Diana Schutz, Tim Sale, and Teddy Kristiansen
Dark Horse, May 2008, $17.95

Stacy Palumbo was the (adopted) daughter of the first Grendel, Hunter Rose, and the mother of the second, Christine Spar. She was a serious but lovable girl in Hunter’s story, and dead by the time of Christine’s. Her unpleasant life in between was backstory in the Christine Spar stories, but here it’s dramatized to wring maximum pathos.

(Think “maximum pathos” is too much? Try this line from the back cover of [[[Devil Child]]] — “The ugly world has no shelter for frightened Stacy, the pivotal link in a chain of evil that extends to the limits of time.” The limits of time, huh? Okay, if you say so.)

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