It was teased yesterday, but now IDW has released an official press release about the upcoming graphic noel adaptation of Donald Westlake’s Parker novel, Slayground by Eisner Award winning creator, Darwyn Cooke.
Official Release:
Darwyn Cooke’s Newest Adaptation Coming In December
San Diego, CA (July 20, 2013) – Darwyn Cooke’s acclaimed Parker series from IDW continues to expand with the classic Slayground. In this newest graphic novel, Parker is put to the test against crooked cops and sleazy gangsters after a heist goes south and he finds himself trapped in an amusement park closed for the winter, and embroiled in a deadly game of cat and mouse… a game that slowly starts to favor the mouse.
“A boarded up amusement park was an inspired setting for Parker,” said writer/artist Darwyn Cooke, “and Westlake made the most of it. A great story that I’m enjoying the hell out of adapting.”
Based on the influential novels by Richard Stark, AKA, Donald Westlake, Parker is a coldly calculating master criminal, one with a very rigid code. The IDW adaptations by Darwyn Cooke of The Hunter and The Outfit have received multiple Eisner and Harvey awards. The Score, released last year, is nominated for an Eisner Award at this week’s San Diego Comic-Con International. Slayground will be the fourth Parker adaptation in the popular and much lauded series.
Darwyn Cooke’s distinct style has made him a premier writer and artist in the comic book industry. A former animator, Cooke entered mainstream comics in 2000 with his critical hit Batman: Ego for DC Comics.
Donald Westlake, writing as Richard Stark, was the acclaimed author of the Parker series. He was a three-time Edgar Award winner, as well as being named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, that prestigious societies highest honor.
Mainstream Comics (read: The Big Two) have begun to remind me of that much-mocked TV commercial with the old woman screaming “Help! I’ve fallen but I can’t get up!”
That business seems to me to be in freefall, and only gaming the numbers so as not to scare the horses maintains the status quo, with ongoing monthlies somehow being considered successes with four-digit sell-through estimates that, as few as 10 years ago, would’ve gotten a title canceled long before things got that desperate. And the “top-selling” titles, you’ll note, are all brand extensions – all variations on, or team-ups with, batmen, wolverines, and other tried-and-trues.
Which presents a thorny dilemma.
Neither of the “Big” Two’s corporate parents wants to be in the business of putting ink on dead trees, which – though ComiXology might claim otherwise – is still the major comics delivery-system. And publishing’s a low-margin biz, and low margins are as crucifixes to Count Disnela and Baron Von Warner. But they’ve been persuaded not to drive a stake through the comics divisions’ hearts by being sold on the dubious proposition that comics are low-cost R&D for blockbuster movie and TV development.
Yet not one of the tentpole franchises from the Big Two’s studio daddies has been based on anything created more recently than 50 years ago (the 40-year old Bladebeing neither tentpole nor generated by Marvel Entertainment). If you’re going to be a stickler and say, for example, that X-Men’s success owes more to the ‘80s reboot than the Lee-Kirby original, okay – 30 years ago. So far the closest Hollywood has come to building a discrete film around a newer character is the alleged Deadpool movie. Since the New Mutants and X-Force titles that whelped the character are both X-Men spinoffs, however, Deadpool doesn’t really count as something that isn’t a brand extension. If Jeff Robinov’s successors don’t share his aversion to making a Lobo film, maybe then I’ll sit up and take notice.
To make matters worse, the comics themselves are not being used as a development lab, since most, if not all, of the new titles in recent years have themselves been brand extensions. (And, when films like RedandThe Loserstank, the incentive to look to newer “original” Big Two titles as source material dies with them.)
If the Big Two can’t be profit centers from publishing alone, the only way Pub Ops can truthfully be a development lab is if the publishers increasingly take back control of the creative development of their comics, which they’ve completely outsourced. This, to control new product development focused less on selling comics and more on creating potential movies and TV shows. But they probably can’t do this – at least, not easily.
For one thing, The Big Two seem to be under pressure to roll back the kinds of deals that used to give Creatives limited profit participation in new characters. And in this Brave New World of self-publishing, it’s hard to find strong, seasoned talent willing to let their new ideas be Wholly Owned by the Big Two.
So how much longer can the Big Floppymeisters justify their existence? Especially when they’re completely reliant on the freelance talent … because they no longer have editors who can control the process credibly, even if their bosses were willing to redefine the role of the editor. Few, if any, of them have the chops to pick up a pencil, graphics tablet or keyboard and make the product themselves (and show the newbies how it’s done) – the way the Infantinos, Orlandos, Lees, Romitas, O’Neils, Weins, and Shooters did when they were running things.
More in the third and final installment of this rant, written from the San Diego Comic-Con, where I’ll be looking for signs of a forced-change in Talent Relations – if any – and reporting back from my maybe not-so-uniquely skewed perspective.
Almost thirty years after his critically acclaimed Blood & Judgment series, fan-Favorite writer/artist Howard Chaykin returns to The Shadow for a new Dynamite Entertainment mini series, The Shadow: Midnight in Moscow.
Official Press Release:
Dynamite is proud to announce that legendary writer/artist Howard Chaykin will write his first new tale of The Shadow in nearly thirty years. The Shadow: Midnight in Moscow will take place three decades prior to the events of his critically acclaimed Blood & Judgment series. Chaykin will reprise his creative role both as writer and artist for this new venture.
“I’m delighted and grateful to Dynamite for the opportunity to work once again on so legendary a character as The Shadow,” says Chaykin. “My new miniseries, The Shadow: Midnight in Moscow, tells the secret story behind the Shadow’s disappearance in 1949.” While this new series marks his return to Shadow storytelling, he hasn’t strayed far from the character in recent years, contributing gorgeous cover artwork for Dynamite’s variety of Shadow series.
Blood and Judgement
“The Shadow: Blood & Judgment is one of my favorite comic series of all time,” says Nick Barrucci, CEO and Publisher of Dynamite. “It absolutely blows my mind, still to this day. I can’t even begin to express how much this means to me as the publisher of the series and how much as a fan of Howard’s series. Howard Chaykin’s return to the character is going to be phenomenal. And in a move that will certainly keep his fans on their toes, he’s setting Midnight in Moscow up not as a direct sequel to his earlier work, but years and years beforehand, at an exciting and critical moment in the Shadow’s history. I have such tremendous respect for Howard as a storyteller, a true modern master of the comic book medium.”
Howard Chaykin is a modern legend in the comics industry, with an exceptionally respected body of work spanning four decades. He is perhaps best known for American Flagg!, a series published by First Comics in 1982. Chaykin wrote and illustrated the first twelve issues exclusively, and was praised by critics and readers alike. In 1985, Chaykin wrote and drew The Shadow for DC Comics, the acclaimed run that would later be collected by Dynamite as The Shadow: Blood & Judgment. He is the recipient of Inkpot and Eisner Awards. His extensive library of comics work includes such titles as Star Wars, Black Kiss, American Century, Challengers of the Unknown, Blackhawk, Hawkgirl, Blade, Punisher War Journal, and Satellite Sam. He was also executive script consultant for The Flash television series on CBS, and later worked on action-adventure programs such as Viper, Earth: Final Conflict, and Mutant X.
Blood and Judgement
The Shadow began its existence in 1930 as a narrative voice on the Street and Smith radio program Detective Story Hour. The audience thrilled to the serialized adventures of this mysterious figure, whose mythos expanded to include Occidental mysticism, hypnotic powers over weak criminal minds, and twin .45 caliber handguns. With a keen intellect and relentless drive, The Shadow hunted criminals without mercy in an era when gumshoe detectives and bootlegging mobsters was a thrilling yet fearsome reality. The character’s popularity has endured for over 80 years, bolstered by appearances in radio serials, novels, comic books, films, and more. In recent years, Dynamite published a groundbreaking and well-received Shadow series launched by comic writer Garth Ennis (Preacher), with further tales crafted by Victor Gischler and Chris Roberson. Lamont Cranston’s grim alter-ego has also appeared in such related series as The Shadow: Year One, Masks, and The Shadow / Green Hornet: Dark Nights.
Blood and Judgement
About Dynamite Entertainment: Dynamite was founded in 2004 and is home to several best-selling comic book titles and properties, including The Boys, The Shadow, Vampirella, Warlord of Mars, Bionic Man, A Game of Thrones, and more. Dynamite owns and controls an extensive library with over 3,000 characters (which includes the Harris Comics and Chaos Comics properties), such as Vampirella, Pantha, Evil Ernie, Smiley the Psychotic Button, Chastity, Purgatori, and Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt. In addition to their critically-acclaimed titles and bestselling comics, Dynamite works with some of the most high profile creators in comics and entertainment, including Kevin Smith, Alex Ross, John Cassaday, Garth Ennis, Jae Lee, Marc Guggenheim, Mike Carey, Jim Krueger, Greg Pak, Brett Matthews, Matt Wagner, and a host of up-and-coming new talent. Dynamite is consistently ranked in the upper tiers of comic book publishers and several of their titles – including Alex Ross and Jim Krueger’s Project Superpowers – have debuted in the Top Ten lists produced by Diamond Comics Distributors. In 2005, Diamond awarded the company a GEM award for Best New Publisher and another GEM in 2006 for Comics Publisher of the Year (under 5%) and again in 2011. The company has also been nominated for and won several industry awards, including the prestigious Harvey and Eisner Awards.
Milestone was the idea of Denys Cowan. Denys, Dwayne McDuffie, Derek Dingle, Christopher Priest and I sat in a room (a few rooms actually, sometimes at someone’s home, sometimes at a dive restaurant a lot of times in a dive diner) and we sat and planed for weeks creating the original universe of Milestone main characters Icon, Rocket, Static, Hardware and Blood Syndicate.
Priest left right before we signed our publishing & distribution deal with DC. For a very long time Priest was the Pete Best of Milestone. Pete Best’s claim to fame is that he was the original Beatles drummer before Ringo. Pete left to get a real job. That’s pretty much it. His music career amounts to little but a trivia question.
Christopher Priest, on the other hand…
That mofo did just fine without Milestone. He’s writing movies, novels and just about anything he else he wants to write. However, for a very long time Priest was our trivia question. Few people knew he had anything to do with the Dakota Universe.
Now, few people think the original Milestone partners were just four, most fans and all the industry know that Priest was there at the start.
Most people are aware that Derek Dingle was there from the start of Milestone, few people know and even fewer believe Derek Dingle was a major co-creator on the original universe of Milestone main characters.
Translation, Derek came up with many ideas that made it into the Milestone Bible his contribution was just as valued as anyone sitting at the creative table.
I remember how much Derek Dingle had to do with creating Static’s powers and costume. I remember that very clearly because I wrote the Static Bible (meaning I created his family, backstory, supporting characters, etc.) I ran many an idea passed Mr. Dingle for as long as I could.
It’s easy to understand how Derek was casted in non-creator role by the fans. As Milestone went from idea to business plan to universe bible to joint venture with DC Comics, Derek’s visibility as a creator became less and less.
We were all equal partners but we all had separate roles in the company. Derek’s role was President of Milestone. You wouldn’t call the President of Milestone at 4 in the morning to run possible names of Static’s dog sidekick pass him.
Well you wouldn’t… but you know me…
Oh, you didn’t know that Static had a dog sidekick? Well he did for about 35 seconds until the genius that thought it was a good idea was laughed out of the room.
Who’s bad Idea was it?
I’ll never tell, unless at SDCC I’m asked during the Q&A session of the Milestone panel, Friday July 19th Room 5AB (Shameless Plug!) 11:30-12:30!
Ask me then and I’ll spill like a drunken gossip columnist on TMZ.
Look, all of the Milestone partners had horrible ideas at one time or the other. Sometime a bad idea becomes a terrible idea when the person who’s idea it was starts to defend the idea. Trust me, that’s never pretty.
There were plenty of heated exchanges at Milestone but I’d have to say the one person who always kept his cool was Derek. In fact, the only time I ever saw Derek lose his cool was not over anything creative or corporate.
It was over a Kitty.
Kitty was her name and she was (is) one beautiful woman or as we say in the hood, she’s Super Fine. How fine is she? Stevie Wonder could see how fine Kitty is.
One day I was having lunch with Kitty so I had her meet me at Milestone. That was the only time I saw Derek a bit rattled. When I introduced Kitty I swear it took him a full hour before he could say ‘hi’ Kitty is that fine.
OK, it wasn’t an hour his hesitation was maybe 2-4 seconds and wasn’t really noticed by anyone but me, but a 2-4 second delay from Mr. Cool-As-Ice Dingle is rare and you know me, give me an inch…
So, to recap, Derek Dingle was just as involved, I’ll say it again, Derek Dingle was just as involved as anyone in the creation of the core Milestone Universe. Since the day Milestone began there has been reams of wrong information, misinformation and outright bullshit about our company. Believe it or not that continues to this day.
It’s Milestone’s 20th Anniversary and our fans, which I sincerely believe are the greatest and most loyal fans in the history of comics; deserve to celebrate with the truth.
I hope to see many of you in San Diego. As a guest this year I’ll have a space in Artists Alley thanks to the kind people at SDCC!
If you come by and I’m not there someone should be there to tell you when I’d be back. As much as I’d like to hang out there all day, I’ll be a weeeee bit busy expanding my media empire… and scoping out Asian girl cos players.
Come on by! I’ll be more than happy talk to you about my ComicMix columns and upcoming novels. Yeah, I’ll be talking about writing in Artists Alley.
That Michael Davis, what a rebel!
If you miss me at the booth you can catch me here:
The Black Panel Room 5AB 10-11:30 am Friday July 19th
The Milestone 20th Anniversary Panel 11:30-12:30 am Friday July 19th
*The Milestone 20th Anniversary Party Friday 9pm July 19th
*You need an invite for the party I’ll have a few on me during the Milestone Panel and if you mention ComicMix and hit me up before they are gone I’ll hook you up.
Lastly, Derek I’m keeping you to your promise. This is your moment my friend, enjoy it! No work! Have fun!
The final ballot for the 2013 Harvey Awards is now available. Named in honor of the late Harvey Kurtzman, one of the industry’s most innovative talents, the Harvey Awards recognize outstanding work in comics and sequential art. The 26th Annual Harvey Awards will be presented Saturday, September 7th, 2013 as part of the Baltimore Comic-Con.
If you are a comics professional, you can vote online at harveyawards.org/2013-final-ballot/. This will enable easier and faster methods for the professional community to submit their nominees. Ballots are due by Monday, August 19, 2013.
I’m a big fan of crowdsourcing — for comics and graphic novels on sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. So far I’ve only watched from a distance, calling attention to special projects and generally being a cheerleader for the ambitious creatives involved in these passion projects.
That was until DC Comics asked me to participate in their crowdsourced We Can Be Heroes fund-raiser — part of their ongoing initiative to raise money for and awareness of the plight of the hungry in the Horn of Africa.
My “bosses” gathered a veritable Who’s Who of some of DC and Warner Bros. most talented creators and said I could hang out with them and help a worthy cause in the process. We’re signing super exclusive and limited run graphic novels, animated movies, caps, T-shirts, prints and other assorted products (Did I mention you can have yourself written into a DC Comic? Or that none other than Jim Lee will come to your town and paint a mural on your wall?) with all the money going to fight something far more destructive than anything Lex Luthor has ever come up with on his worst day.
The best part about this campaign? It really does give the fans the opportunity be the hero here: every dollar you commit goes directly to International Rescue Committee, Mercy Corps and Save the Children to help fund their efforts on the ground in the Horn of Africa. Every donation, no matter how small, helps.
In this particular case the goal is to raise $100,000… and we’re halfway there!
So please, take a moment – -watch the video — find one of the multitude of special incentives from the likes of Scott Snyder, David Goyer, Greg Pak, Kenneth Rocafort, Jim Lee, Geoff Johns, James Tucker, Mike Carlin… and some guy named Scott Lobdell!
If I quit my day job, I just might possibly keep up with the output from TwoMorrows Publishing. Sundry regularly published magazines (Alter-Ego, Back Issue, Draw!, etc.), trade paperback and hardcover profiles of significant creators, publishing lines, eras and events – I can’t begin to list them all here. Well, I could, but they do a better job on their own website.
Did I mention they do everything up in both hardcopy and digital? Well, they do, and they’ve made many an otherwise tedious commute into Manhattan a lot more palatable.
I only get to bring to your attention a small fraction of their books. I’m still pissed that travel and work schedules didn’t allow me to review their MattBaker: The Art of Glamour. So, to paraphrase the great Jack Kirby (and, yeah, they also publish The Jack Kirby Collector), just buy it.
Dan Spiegle is a proper legend. As a kid I missed most of his “early” work because I didn’t like westerns (aside from Maverick; lucky for me, Dan drew the comic version) or teevee tie-in comics. Therefore, I missed out on his beautiful Hopalong Cassidy newspaper strip and his work on Lost In Space and other Dell/Gold Key titles. I did latch onto his work in Korak, Green Hornet and Doctor Solar, but he met me more than half-way when he started working at DC Comics in the 1980s (Jonah Hex, Teen Titans, Unknown Soldier). The work he and Mark Evanier did on Blackhawk single-handedly justifies the overworked and overwrought concept of rebooting. He and Evanier (who wrote the introduction to this book) also did one of my all-time favorites of the era: Crossfire, published by Eclipse Comics during the Great Independent Age of Comics.
Dan Spiegle: A Life In Comic Art contains everything you would expect in such a volume: history, index, interviews. It is lavishly illustrated, and, yes, it’s okay to just look at the pictures (yeah; just try that!). There’s eight color pages reprinting some of his watercolors; most of us haven’t seen them before and, damn, are they worth the wait. There’s at least four of them that I would steal if I was clever and fast enough to get away with it.
The Star*Reach Companion is a long-overdue analysis of and tribute to Mike Friedrich’s classic anthology comic. Mike thought it was a great idea to get some of the best people doing comics at the time to create, writer and/or draw stuff that was of a more mature nature – and I don’t necessarily mean salacious – and there “some of the best” includes Neal Adams, Frank Brunner, Howard Chaykin, Steve Ditko, Michael T. Gilbert, Dick Giordano, Steve Leialoha, Marshall Rogers, P. Craig Russell, Dave Sim, Walter Simonson, Ken Steacy, Dave Stevens, Mike Vosburg, Barry Windsor-Smith, John Workman …you get the idea. I’m hard-pressed to think of an anthology series with a better line-up.
Not that a lot of folks didn’t try, and a great many of them were quite, quite good. The Star*Reach Companion covers most of these publications as well, and here it serves an important historical function.
The problem with books like these is that, if they are successful, they leave the reader with a thirst they can never quench. Sure, we can pick up the back issues and the reprint books – and after reading these two, I’ll bet you wind up doing at least a bit of that. If you don’t, you’re missing something.
In fact, this is why I implore comic book stores with large back issue inventories to stock TwoMorrows’ books and magazines. They publish the true comics Who’s Who of What’s What.
Word on the street is Warner Bros has announced a new venture, DC Nasty.
“DC Nasty is an adult film company created because Warner Bros sees an opportunity to fill a gap, plug a hole and make a big splash in a vastly underserved audience, grown fan boys who rent or buy porn almost 600 times more than video games or comics.”
This, from the Warner Bros Press release.
A recent ComicMix poll showed 92% of grown fan boys do not have wives or girlfriends, 80% make 5-6 figure incomes and in what was alarming to this reporter, 70-100% go blind by the time they are 50.
Rumors are flying as to who will head up the new venture. A high level unnamed source at DC thinks that a former DC executive who recently returned to the freelance ranks will run the new company.
An announcement is anticipated to be made at this years’ San Diego Comic Con. Expected to be among the first wave of projects are Sgt. Rock, Deathstoke, Elongated Man, Man of Steel and Swamp Thing.
It seems that the industry has realized that Warner may be on to something.
There are reports that Marvel is also thinking about getting their hands into porn by creating a division called Marvel Masturbation. Projects include the Hulk, Mr. Fantastic, the Thing and the Black Avengers.
An unnamed source from Marvel said they wanted to create as much tie-in with the comics as possible. With that in mind, Make Mine Masturbation isbeing considered as the slogan of the new venture.
Fan boys are certainly already doing that. The question is will they pay DC and Marvel to supply them with their reason for doing so?
Will this new venture let DC, Marvel and their fans share a happy ending?
It’s a TV series about a woman who dies and is brought back into a totally new life, so how ironic that DROP DEAD DIVA was cancelled after four seasons, then revived for a fifth on Lifetime. We talk to the shell shocked cast and creator about where they are going from here. Plus GHOST RIDER back in court, Roger Corman decides to share and SONS OF ANARCHY gets a comic,
There is a lot riding on MAN OF STEEL – ranging from making Superman a successful movie franchise to starting the path to a line of DC superhero films. So with so much at stake, you might be shocked to hear who decided to follow the path of there character from TV & comics, and who did not. We’ve got the confessions from Henry Cavill to Russell Crowe to Amy Adams. Plus more on SyFy‘s second season of CONTINIUUM and who really will be the new DOCTOR WHO?
