Tag Archives: alan moore

DC goes compact with DC Compact Comics – $9.99 Graphic Novels

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DC has announced a new line in their graphic novel slate: DC Compact Comics. Featuring a 5.5″ x 8.5″ standard book trim for trade paperback novels, the new format pulls bestselling, new-reader-friendly titles from DC’s evergreen library as the first books offered in this new lineup of compact editions of adult graphic novels. Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons and All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, among others, will go on sale beginning in June 2024, retailing at $9.99 US, to launch DC’s new program.

The format is more focused on the manga crowd who are used to this format as well as casual readers like you might find at bookstores, airports, and train stations. The initiative is squarely aimed at expanding the comic market as opposed to catering to the current readership. To watch out for is the second wave of releases and if DC uses the releases to get readers to explore comic shops or DC’s own services like DC Universe.

The new line will showcase DC stories across many genres, including science fiction, thrillers, horror, fantasy, adventure, and mystery. Featured among the DC Compact Comics launch titles in 2024 are DC’s recent Hugo Award-winning sci-fi graphic novel Far Sector by N.K. Jemisin and Jamal Campbell, along with perennial classic graphic novels like Catwoman: Trail of the Catwoman, Batman: Hush, Batman: The Court of Owls, and more.

The initial DC Compact Comics launch in 2024 will offer the following titles at $9.99 US:

  • Watchmen (9781779527325) by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons
  • Batman: The Court of Owls (9781779527271) by Scott Snyder, Greg Capullo
  • All-Star Superman (9781779527257) by Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely
  • Far Sector (9781779527295) by N.K. Jemisin, Jamal Campbell
  • Wonder Woman: Earth One (9781779527332) by Grant Morrison, Yanick Paquette
  • American Vampire Book One (9781779527349) by Scott Snyder, Stephen King, Rafael Albuquerque
  • Batman: Hush (9781779527264) by Jeph Loeb, Jim Lee
  • Joker (9781779527318) by Brian Azzarello, Lee Bermejo
  • Harley Quinn & the Gotham City Sirens (9781779527301) by Paul Dini, Peter Calloway, Tony Bedard, Guillem March, Andres Guinaldo
  • Catwoman: Trail of the Catwoman (9781779527288) by Darwyn Cooke, Ed Brubaker

Cover Art, Full Story From Robin’s 1988 ‘Death in the Family’ Shine Bat-Signal on Heritage’s June Comic Art Auction

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Batman #428

Even before bidding opened for Heritage Auctions’ June 16-19 Comics & Comic Art Signature Auction, one offering made global headlines: Frank Miller and Lynn Varley’s original cover art for 1986’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns Book One, the iconic cover from one of the most important titles of the past half century. Yet that historic lightning strike is just one centerpiece among many landmark works of original comic art featured in this historic event, which includes some swinging Spider-Man art from Todd McFarlane and the entirety of one of the most influential – and infamous – Batman stories ever told, “A Death in the Family.”

Not only does this auction feature Mike Mignola’s original cover art for 1988’s Batman #438, featuring a battered Robin, but here, too, you will find the entire 22-page story contained in that issue – the one during which the Joker killed Jason Todd’s Robin with an assist from DC Comics readers and a 1-900 number. The story, written by Jim Starlin with art by Jim Aparo and Mike DeCarlo, features one of the most indelible images in Batman’s long history: The Dark Knight carrying the bloodied Boy Wonder from the wreckage.

Miller made mention of Jason Todd’s death in The Dark Knight Returns, two years before the Joker beat him up and blew him up. And though Miller (and many others at DC) loathed the publisher’s decision to put Robin’s fate to a vote – out of more than 10,000 calls, the Boy Wonder lost by a mere 72! –Starlin’s “A Death in the Family” has gone from one of the Batman Family’s most controversial tales to one of its most enduring.

Mignola’s cover art, and Aparo and DeCarlo’s iconic interiors (which feature a cameo from Superman, essentially reprising his The Dark Knight Returns role asgovernment operative), have been in a private collection since the 1990s.

This auction also includes original artwork from another 1980s Batman book that, like Dark Knight Returns and “A Death in the Family,” had profound and long-term ramifications. This event offers two pages from Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s 1988 Batman: The Killing Joke, in which the Watchman writer and his artist collaborator provided the Joker with a tragic origin story defined by a single bad day (and a red hood, which later became the disguise of a resurrected Jason Todd after his murder at the hands of the Joker). The Killing Joke, of course, is best known as the book in which The Joker shoots and paralyzes Barbara Gordon, who eventually morphed from Batgirl to the Oracle.

Iconic Batman covers abound in this auction, among them one of the earliest ever offered at auction. That would be the cover art for 1942’s Detective Comics #59, featuring Batman and Robin as drawn by their co-creator Bob Kane and his beloved Golden Age Batman collaborator Jerry Robinson. This is the first time Heritage has had the privilege and pleasure of offering a Kane cover.

Also featured is Jim Lee‘s triple gatefold variant cover for Batman #619, which wrapped the 12-part “Hush” epic that resurrected Jason Todd and established Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle as more than mere Bat and Cat chasing each other on rooftops. This is the Batman Family version of the variant, a roster that includes Batman and Catwoman, Robin and Nightwing, Oracle and her father Commissioner James Gordon, Huntress, Superman, Harvey Dent and Hush himself.

This event also features two Caped Crusader covers by illustration legends gone too soon: Batman #246 by Dave Cockrum and Neal Adams (Frank Miller’s mentor, who died April 28) and Batman #438 by George Pérez, who died only eight days after Adams.

One of the definitive artists of the 1990s was Todd McFarlane, who swung to stardom on Spider-Man’s spaghetti webbing. This auction features one of the more coveted covers McFarlane drew during tenure with the Web-Slinger –the final one, too: 1991’s Spider-Man #16, guest-starring Rob Liefeld’s X-Force. That cover is accompanied in this auction by individual pages, offered separately, from the same issue, McFarlane’s final fling with Spidey before launching Spawn at his Image Comics.

And to really tie this auction together, several Frank Miller pages will be offered – among them a page from The Dark Knight Returns Book Four, featuring Superman off to fight Batman. Now, as then, everyone wins.

Preview: Voice of the Fire 25th Anniversary Edition

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Voice of the Fire 25th Anniversary Edition

(W) Alan Moore (CA) John Coulthart
In Shops: Mar 02, 2022
SRP: $14.99

Discover the astonishing first prose novel from the legendary author of Watchmen and From Hell-an epic yet intimate portrait of a single English town across the whole span of human history. The precursor to Jerusalem. In a story full of lust, madness, and ecstasy, we meet twelve distinctive characters that lived in the same region of central England over the span of six thousand years. Their narratives are woven together in patterns of recurring events, strange traditions, and uncanny visions. First, a cave-boy loses his mother, falls in love, and learns a deadly lesson. He is followed by an extraordinary cast of characters: a murderess who impersonates her victim, a fisherman who believes he has become a different species, a Roman emissary who realizes the bitter truth about the Empire, a crippled nun who is healed miraculously by a disturbing apparition, an old crusader whose faith is destroyed by witnessing the ultimate relic, two witches, lovers, who burn at the stake. Each interconnected tale traces a path in a journey of discovery of the secrets of the land.

Throughout, the image of the fire resonates between the tales, while Moore finds a different voice for each character-though most are inherently duplicitous in some manner, leading to a further commentary on the disparity between myth and reality, and which is more likely to endure over time.

Voice of the Fire 25th Anniversary Edition

Preview: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Tempest

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The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Tempest

(W) Alan Moore (A/CA) Kevin O’Neil
In Shops: Jan 5, 2021
SRP: $19.99

Welcome to the story to end all stories. Two decades of literary League lunacy have all been building to this, the most ambitious meta-comic imaginable.

After an epic twenty-year journey through the entirety of human culture-the biggest cross-continuity ‘universe’ that is conceivable-Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill conclude both their legendary League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and their equally legendary comic-book careers with the series’ spectacular fourth and final volume, The Tempest. Tying up the slenderest of plot threads and allusions from the three preceding volumes, The Black Dossier, and the Nemo trilogy into a dazzling and ingenious bow, the world’s most accomplished and bad-tempered artist-writer team use their most stylistically adventurous outing yet to display the glories of the medium they are leaving; to demonstrate the excitement that attracted them to the field in the first place; and to analyse, critically and entertainingly, the reasons for their departure.

Opening simultaneously in the panic-stricken headquarters of British Military Intelligence, the fabled Ayesha’s lost African city of Kor and the domed citadel of “We” on the devastated Earth of the year 2,996, the dense and yet furiously-paced narrative hurtles like an express locomotive across the fictional globe from Lincoln Island to modern America to the Blazing World; from the Jacobean antiquity of Prospero’s Men to the superhero-inundated pastures of the present to the unimaginable reaches of a shimmering science-fiction future. With a cast-list that includes many of the most iconic figures from literature and pop culture, and a tempo that conveys the terrible momentum of inevitable events, this is literally and literarily the story to end all stories. Originally published as a six-issue run of unfashionable, outmoded and flimsy children’s comics that would make you appear emotionally backward if you read them on the bus, this climactic magnum opus also reprints classic English super-team publication The Seven Stars from the murky black-and-white reaches of 1964. A magnificent celebration of everything comics were, are and could be, any appreciator or student of the medium would be unwise to miss The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume IV: THE TEMPEST.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Tempest

Marvel Has Plans to Celebrate 40 Years of Miracleman

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Miracleman teaser

Though Miracleman first appeared as Marvelman in 1954, 2022 marks 40 years since the character’s revival in 1982 by writer Alan Moore and artist Garry Leach in the anthology comic Warrior. Marvel has some plans to celebrate as the character’s return was teased in the final page of this week’s Timeless.

Timeless is this year’s one-shot teasing what we can expect from Marvel in 2022 with the return of Miracleman being a big surprise that was kept under wraps.

Marvel announced in 2009 that they had purchased the rights to Marvelman though the publisher’s use of the character has been one of stops and starts since.

In June 2010, Marvel published a Marvelman Classic Primer one-shot and in July 2010 began an ongoing series reprinting material followed by hardcovers. But, there were issues behind the scenes we’ve been told that things were still up in the air and complicated.

In 2013 Marvel announced they had “solidified” their rights to Miracleman and Neil Gaiman would finish his run that had begun 25 years earlier. A “lost” story by Grant Morrison and drawn by Joe Quesada was eventually released with a new story by Peter Milligan and Mike Allred. For the most part, the releases were reprints of older material. New material was announced to be released in 2017 but was canceled due to legal hurdles which were then supposedly resolved with a publication that was supposed to begin in 2019 that including Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham‘s work.

Now, it looks like we’ll finally be getting that and possibly more. The fact this tease was within a Marvel comic as part of the story and not an ad indicates this will tie into the proper Marvel comic universe. In a recent calendar released to stores, Marvel further teased the 40th anniversary of Miracleman’s return.

What does 2022 have for us as far as this character? Could the teased “Judgement” event that involves the Avengers, X-Men, and Eternals have something to do with it? We’ll find out soon enough!

Preview: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Tempest

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The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Tempest

(W) Alan Moore (A/CA) Kevin O’Neil
In Shops: Dec 29, 2021
SRP: $19.99

Welcome to the story to end all stories. Two decades of literary League lunacy have all been building to this, the most ambitious meta-comic imaginable.

After an epic twenty-year journey through the entirety of human culture-the biggest cross-continuity ‘universe’ that is conceivable-Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill conclude both their legendary League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and their equally legendary comic-book careers with the series’ spectacular fourth and final volume, The Tempest. Tying up the slenderest of plot threads and allusions from the three preceding volumes, The Black Dossier, and the Nemo trilogy into a dazzling and ingenious bow, the world’s most accomplished and bad-tempered artist-writer team use their most stylistically adventurous outing yet to display the glories of the medium they are leaving; to demonstrate the excitement that attracted them to the field in the first place; and to analyse, critically and entertainingly, the reasons for their departure.

Opening simultaneously in the panic-stricken headquarters of British Military Intelligence, the fabled Ayesha’s lost African city of Kor and the domed citadel of “We” on the devastated Earth of the year 2,996, the dense and yet furiously-paced narrative hurtles like an express locomotive across the fictional globe from Lincoln Island to modern America to the Blazing World; from the Jacobean antiquity of Prospero’s Men to the superhero-inundated pastures of the present to the unimaginable reaches of a shimmering science-fiction future. With a cast-list that includes many of the most iconic figures from literature and pop culture, and a tempo that conveys the terrible momentum of inevitable events, this is literally and literarily the story to end all stories. Originally published as a six-issue run of unfashionable, outmoded and flimsy children’s comics that would make you appear emotionally backward if you read them on the bus, this climactic magnum opus also reprints classic English super-team publication The Seven Stars from the murky black-and-white reaches of 1964. A magnificent celebration of everything comics were, are and could be, any appreciator or student of the medium would be unwise to miss The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume IV: THE TEMPEST.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Tempest

Kent Williams, Jim Woodring, The Balbusso Twins, and Beehive Books Present Illustrated Editions of Classic Books on Kickstarter

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Award-winning painter Kent Williams, legendary Frank cartoonist Jim Woodring, and the renowned Italian illustrators known as the Balbusso Twins are collaborating with Beehive Books to create lush, new illustrated editions of literary classics and forgotten gems. Having previously released six award-winning volumes with acclaimed artists Rebekka Dunlap, Brecht Evens, Dave McKean, Paul Pope, Yuko Shimizu, and Bill Sienkiewicz, Beehive Books is returning to Kickstarter with a new campaign to crowdfund three new volumes of Illuminated Editions, the company’s distinctive line of book art editions of literary classics.   

Beehive Books’s Illuminated Editions features some of the finest talents in contemporary art, singular design sensibilities, the highest production values, and a special emphasis on comics and graphic art. Each Illuminated Edition  also features original essays from luminaries of literature, art and film, including Academy Award-winning filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Cunningham 

The three new titles run the gamut: one beloved classic Roaring Twenties tale of extravagance and excess, one chilling compendium of spectral Japanese folktales, and one unjustly obscure work of mind bending visionary science fiction.

The new books in the Illuminated Editions line are:

THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald, illustrated by the Balbusso Twins
Featuring an introduction by Nathan Robinson.

The Italian illustrators known as the Balbusso Twins are taking on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s THE GREAT GATSBY, bringing out the richness and satire and sorrow that suffuses this saga of wealth and corruption and decadence and love. Their modern illustration style highlights the incredible relevance of Fitzgerald’s story, which has only seemed to increase over time. Their illustrations bring us into Gatsby’s world ― but they also bring Gatsby into ours. 

KWAIDAN & SHADOWINGS by Lafcadio Hearn, illustrated by Kent Williams
Featuring an introduction by filmmaker Darren Aronofsky, a foreword by writer Kyoko Yoshida, and an essay by Bon Koizumi.

The great painter and multimedia artist Kent Williams is depicting the supernatural Japanese stories of Lafcadio Hearn, originally published in his books KWAIDAN and SHADOWINGS. These books are full of ghost stories, nightmares and strange tales ― of possessed forests, of monks tormented by demons and ghosts, of corpse brides, man-eating goblins, and undead samurai. 

KWAIDAN & SHADOWINGS

 A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS by David Lindsay, illustrated by Jim Woodring
Featuring an introduction by Alan Moore.

Visionary cartoonist Jim Woodring has chosen to illustrate an unclassifiable 1920 novel by the legendary British writer David Lindsay. A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS is a baffling amalgam of mysticism, science fiction, sexual politics, and outrageous fantasy, and stands as one of the greatest works of sustained, untrammeled imagination ever achieved. Woodring’s drawings capture the writhing currents of interacting forces that lie beneath the wonderfully arcane prose. 

The Illuminated Editions books come in three print editions: a slipcase hardcover, a signed and numbered edition, and a sketched and lettered edition. All nine titles in this series are available through the latest campaign and each title also comes as a DRM-free digital PDF, which is included along with every print edition.

The standard Illuminated Editions is an oversize 9×12″ hardcover, bound in sewn signatures, and housed in an elaborately embossed and debossed die-cut slipcase, silk-screened or foil-stamped with artwork. The interior is printed on creamy, acid-free heavy-weight 140gsm uncoated paper with a fine tooth, and each edition includes a minimum of ten full page illustrations, along with numerous spot drawings, illuminated letters, and special design pieces. The entire package is designed by Maëlle Doliveux with a restrained graphic boldness, and an unparalleled eye for beauty, clarity and readability. These editions have been honored with a number of awards and prizes, winning multiple Communication Arts Design Competitions, several Bronze and Silver Cubes from the Art Director’s Club, and three nominations for the Locus Awards. 

Skeletons From My Stack: League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

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The League of Extraordinary Gentleman

I’ve always been a huge fan of Swamp Thing. After reading the first few volumes of Saga of Swamp Thing, I became a huge fan of Alan Moore. I’ve since read a large chunk of Moore’s bibliography, but there’s one title I’ve shied away from. That title is The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Allow me to explain why. I don’t tend to watch movies that are adapted from specific books I’ve read and enjoyed. Conversely, if I see the movie version of something first, I rarely care to read the book it was based on. That’s what happened with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I saw the film in theaters, not knowing it was based on a comic book. I’ve since seen it again more times than I can count. I’d re-watch it every time it was on cable (which was, and probably still is, often).

So how did the graphic novel wind up on my to-read stack? I won a gift card to a local book store last year. They had a small graphic novel section, mostly Marvel and Superman trade paperbacks. Then I noticed the first volume of The League of Extraordinary and decided I’d at least buy it to add to my graphic novel collection. It’s sat on my stack for eight months. Now I’m dusting it off for this newest installment of Skeletons From My Stack.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a historical fiction comic series with steampunk elements. Writer Alan Moore fills the story with characters from classic literature. The series opens with Campion Bond, working on behalf of the mysterious Mr. M, tasking Wilhelmina Murray with recruiting a group of eccentrics and outlaws. The group, the eponymous League of Extraordinary Gentleman, is given a mission to retrieve a substance known as Cavorite before it can fall into the hands of England’s enemies. The story itself hasn’t aged well. That’s saying something considering it was originally published in 1999. There were many times where it seemed like Moore chose the most offensive bits of history even though they weren’t essential to the actual plot. It makes for a gritty story that skews closer to offensive than historically accurate.

I was surprised by the appearance of several literary figures not used in the film, including Auguste Dupin, Dick Donovan, and Mycroft Holmes. There’s also a plethora of minor references to many other works of literature, by authors such as H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Anthony Trollope, H. Rider Haggard, Russell Thorndike, Johnathan Swift, and James Fenimore Cooper. I’m an avid reader, who has perused many of the classics, so I had a great time searching for the literary Easter eggs scattered throughout the issues. The series was also much gorier than I expected, but this just made the action scenes that much more exciting. This collected edition of the first arc also includes a short story written by Moore and featuring Quartermain.

Kevin O’Neill draws the book in a rather abstract style. For a period piece, I thought the colors were a little bright. The colors fit the art style, but didn’t necessarily fit the setting and themes of the story. The Illustrations are impressively detailed, though sometimes almost to too great an extent. This makes it hard to tell what’s going on at certain times while at others the details make for gorgeously rendered scenes. The various city-scapes are especially impressive. I also liked that the line work and hatching gives the images a sense of depth and texture.

Honestly, I think The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is one of the rare examples of the film being better than the book. I did enjoy the nods to science-fiction within the book’s plot. It fits the narrative better than the standard bombing plot used in the film. I also preferred the comic’s version of Alan Quartermain over Sean Connery’s portrayal in the film adaptation. Yet of the two, the movie was all-around more enjoyable than the first volume of the comic. Having finally read The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and finding I prefer the film, it turns out this comic probably should have stayed a skeleton on my to-be-read stack.

Story: Alan Moore Art: Kevin O’Neil
Color: Benedict Dimagmaliw Letterer: Mr. William Oakley
Story: 2.5 out of 5 Art: 3 out of 5 Overall: 2.5 out of 5

Purchase: Amazon – Kindle – comiXology

Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell Gets Fully Restored and in Color with a Master Edition

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From Hell: Master Edition

Welcome to Whitechapel… as you’ve never seen it before. With the newly available From Hell: Master Edition hardcover graphic novel, readers can experience the award-winning bestseller From Hell in an astonishing new light, carefully renovated and newly colored by Eddie Campbell himself.

What is this landmark graphic novel about? Five unsolved murders. Two of the greatest creators in the history of comics: Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. One sprawling conspiracy, one metropolis on the brink of the twentieth century, and one bloody-minded Ripper ushering London into the modern age of terror. Readers will meet history’s most notorious serial killer, as well as the vast and vibrant communities of Victorian London, in a masterpiece often ranked among the greatest graphic novels of all time.

As a limited time offer, a special From Hell: Master Edition with Signed Bookplate will be available for direct order via IDW’s dedicated web store for the New York Comic Con x MCM Comic Con Metaverse virtual convention. Sold exclusively during the show’s running time of October 8th through 11th, this rarity — signed by Eddie Campbell — is available while supplies last at nycc.idwpublishing.com.

Moore and Campbell’s exhaustive investigation of the Whitechapel murders has been a critical favorite and award winner for decades. A New York Times bestseller, From Hell has won five Eisner Awards, the Angoulême International Comics Festival’s Prix de la Critique, the Harvey and Ignatz Awards for Best Graphic Novel, and the International Horror Guild Award.

Crisis on Infinite Jerry Ordway Part 2

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Listen to Part 1

Interview with comics artist/writer Jerry Ordway continues! Jerry’s been making superhero comics for DC and Marvel for 40 years. He’s the guy who made people care about Shazam and the All Star Squadron again. He inked Crisis on Infinite Earths. He’s partnered with writers like Alan Moore, Warren Ellis, Michael Moorecock, and Neil Gaiman. His essay on age discrimination in the industry put a name to a significant problem in comics http://ordstersrandomthoughts.blogspot.com/2013/03/life-over-fifty.html

In part two of our interview, we talk about why we love hand lettering, the nightmare of Superman continuity, how he approached his groundbreaking graphic novel The Power of Shazam, on working with Michael Moorecock on Tom Strong, Warren Ellis on Planetary and creating a Loki story for Neil Gaiman’s Norse mythology book!  

Whether you’re new to Jerry’s work or a long time fan you’ll learn a ton about the process of inking and drawing comics (traditional and digital), industry history, Alan Moore anecdotes and why he actually likes drawing boats and buildings (and how he does it so darn elegantly). 

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