Jamie McKelvie is one of those guys. Your favourite comics artist’s favourite comics artist, a status cemented by the just-ended five-year marathon spent as the draftsman on award-winning pop music super-drama The Wicked + The Divine. For his next trick, he’s going full cartoonist, writing and drawing an all-new sci-fi series and he told Kotaku all about it.
One of the best comics series in the last decade came to an end last week. As you’d expect, writer Kieron Gillen and artist Jamie McKelvie have a lot of thoughts about saying goodbye to The Wicked & The Divine.
Ambush Bug needs to be in comics. Ambush Bug needs to be in movies. Ambush Bug needs to be part of TV shows. Who is Ambush Bug? Why, only the greatest character to sing karaoke with Darkseid.
Whether it’s superheroes, historical fiction, or survival horror, you can tell any kind of story in comics. More importantly, because comics require freezing specific moments in time, creators can play with expectations from moment to moment. Matador — by Devin Grayson and Brian Stelfreeze — does that exceedingly well, focusing on a police detective whose world turns inside out after meeting a contract killer thought to be an urban legend.
Because they play host to millions of living, breathing things, cities become living, breathing things themselves. Some parts of a city can wither away to almost nothing, only to get revived when new blood pumps into it. The uncomfortable truth of where that blood comes from, and what it sustains, lies at the heart of Ezra Claytan Daniels and Ben Passmore’s BTTM FDRS.
In most mainstream superhero fiction, the United States of America has superheroes. Lots of them. When France, England, China, and other countries also have their own metahumans, things can get…tense. Over the decades, many comics projects have explored what it might look like for powerful nations and superpowered people to secretly work with and against each other, but the best in the metahuman-meets-superspy genre was DC Comics’ 2006 series Checkmate.
For the last few years, a wave of legislation has been decriminalising the recreational use of marijuana all across the United States.
Cannabis advocates have long said that it should never have been illegal. The story of how the substance became outlawed in the first place combines willful ignorance, petty careerism, and good old-fashioned racial prejudice.
David Walker is busy. He’s co-writing Naomi, a new high-profile series from DC Comics, along with Brian Michael Bendis and artist Jamal Campbell. He’s also working on Image Comics’ enthusiastically received Bitter Root with co-writer Chuck Brown and artist Sanford Greene. But, despite the fact that the veteran writer has worked with one of the Big Two and the biggest outlet for creator-owned comics, Walker’s announced his gutsiest move yet: launching a self-publishing company.
Back in 1986, I subconsciously decided I liked a new Marvel Comics heroine without actually reading any of her books. Her name was Dakota North and, 32 years later, I’ve finally read her series.
The best Batman artists always do something cool with the Dark Knight’s cape. It’s a given. Norm Breyfogle did that and so much more, re-inventing almost every visual aspect of Batman’s mythos.
In the 1980s, Marvel Comics editor Denny O’Neil had a problem: superstar writer Frank Miller was leaving Daredevil, the book he turned into a runaway sales hit.
O’Neil had to find someone to write the book after Miller’s red-hot run. Ultimately, he started scripting the Man Without Fear’s book himself, turning out my favourite run on Marvel’s blind superhero.
