Vampirella is being rebooted and recostumed again! Dynamite has announced that they will be rebooting the comic for the second time in recent years, with a new creative team and another new direction. Paul Cornell and Jimmy Broxton (Knight and Squire, Saucer County) will be taking over the book and delivering a Vampirella for a…
Previously On Comics: Wonder Woman at the UN, Campbell’s Riri Cover, and the Check, Please! Kickstarter
Hello again! Kate here to catch you up with the news you might have missed from last week. The top story last week was, of course, Wonder Woman’s 75th anniversary. There were a number of exciting things that happened, including Wonder Woman being named a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador. That’s a real thing!! And DC Comics…
And Then They Died: Sean Poppe’s Cackling Horror Comics
Disclaimer: This review is based on a review copy provided by the cartoonist. Short horror fiction has perhaps the widest reach of all genres. Campfires, midnight radio, parody advertisements, pulp fiction for eight-year-olds, and anthology television all boast a firm ground in the genre-format. Readers and viewers alike love the twist in the tale that so…
Cover Girl: Why Doesn’t Riri Williams Look 15?
This J. Scott Campbell Midtown Comics variant cover for Invincible Iron Man depicts 15 year old Riri Williams in the same outfit as she wore on the cover that introduced her to us. She has the same hairstyle, the same earrings. Instead of the ghost of Stark’s past in the background, there’s an industrial robotic…
Those RiRi Williams Variant Covers are Why Comics Will Never Grow Up
Society’s prevailing view of the comic book industry is of manbabies who have never seen a woman. There. I said it.
Inspiring Women in Comics: Publisher Edition
Meg Lemke here… Who do I admire? Thank you for asking. I’m going insider baseball/book publishing industry with this, which is only a short-list of all the women I’ve looked up to in my comics career thus far. If we get into artists, this is going to go on all day. Also, full and hopefully obvious disclosure:…
Dear Scott Adams, Rhetoric is Not Reliable Camouflage
Well, Dilbert Man has struck again. He’s a cartoonist, he’s got reach, he’s a silly and unpleasant misogynist. He’s bad. We’d have said something sooner, but as he himself boasts women hardly pay attention to him — your honours, we did not know. Scott Adams is the man behind long-running and (sub-ironically?) mainstreamed cartoon strip Dilbert….
Unicorns and Chocolate Chips: Heather Einhorn’s Epic Cookies
When I interviewed Adam Staffaroni about finding the kids comics market, I did not expect to end up chatting about cookies and unicorns. Staffaroni, who is the Chief Creative Officer at Einhorn’s Epic Productions, went on to introduce me to his wife Heather Einhorn, Founder and CEO of a company that calls back to the read-and-pass-along comics culture…
Who Does Marvel Care About: J. Scott Campbell’s Sexualization of 15yo Riri Williams
Those of us who have been in comics a long time know the deal with variant covers: They exist to inflate, I mean, increase sales numbers, and their target audience is people who actually know about variant covers and will pre-order them. So they’re for the fans who truly committed to and entrenched in the…
Matt Furie Wants to #SavePepe and Fight His Nightmares
When the Anti-Defamation League named Pepe the Frog a hate symbol, the character’s creator, cartoonist Matt Furie, didn’t seem to know quite what to say or do about the transformation of his character from “frog everyman” to beloved avatar of 4chan trolls and the white supremacist alt-right. In an interview with the Washington Post he…
“Sisterhood is Powerful”: Subverting Tropes in VAMPS
VAMPS Written by: Elaine Lee Art by: William Simpson Colours by: Stuart Chaifetz Lettering by: Clem Robins Vertigo Comics, 1994 Vampires have always been about sex. You’ll see articles popping up from time to time questioning this fact, or trying to blame the phenomenon on Twilight, or Buffy, or Anne Rice, and the list goes…
Jack Chick’s Unhappy Halloween
On his website, the notorious fundamentalist Christian cartoonist Jack Chick keeps his comic tracts neatly categorised. At a glance, we can see a number of the topics that cause him the most ire: Roman Catholicism, homosexuality, Islam, the theory of evolution… and Halloween. Every year, Chick mounts a marketing push at Halloween. “Don’t hide in…
