Sequential art.

So, 2000AD is bringing John Smith and Chris Weston's Indigo Prime back.  And thank god Gary Erskine* isn't drawing it! It's the lovely Edmund Bagwell instead!

Scary Go Round's John Allison does the Hulk.

*Gotcha!

Final word on that THOR trailer.

Yeah, so as I said, THOR is the grand-daddy of Superhero Fight Comics so the THOR movie should be the grand-daddy of Superhero Fight Movies. And in another, better, dimension, it will be... 

Wham! Punchy half-wit Thor fights a load of Frost Giants after being manipulated into it by his dick foster-bro Loki, and fucks them right up. Zoom! Thor is cast out of Asgard by Pirate Tony Hopkins for starting a war with the Frosties. "I'm not angry, just disappointed" he screams as he punches his son in the face. Ouch! Thor crashes on Earth in 1103, reborn as a scrawny limping physicist. Trippy! He is reborn in this way, over and over again, working on being humble and shit, until it's 2011, and he's Dr Donald Blake, the humblest fucker anyone's ever met.  Meanwhile!  The war against the Frosties isn't going well. 900+ years of fighting gigantic freezing bastards has changed Asgard from an Olivier Coipel-lookin' medieval utopia to a Kirby/Simonson lookin' Death Star. Everyone is dressed in crazy EXCALIBUR-lookin' armour with Bryan Hitch-lookin' neon bits.  Oh Shit! Loki realises Pirate Tony Hopkins is on the verge of forgiving now-humble foster-bro and recalling him to the fray, so he puts his foster-da out of the game before anyone else can figure shit out. Double shit!  It looks like Donnie Blake is about to find the hammer, which has conveniently just turned up under his waiting room and shit.  Loki sends the Destroyer to fuck shit up. Etc! Cue fight after glorious fight, The Wrecking Crew! The Warriors Three! Ulik! Mangog! as Loki sends every bastard between Asgard and New Mexico to slow down Newly Restored Hitch-lookin' Thor, as he inexorably heads up the Rainbow Bridge (yeah, you heard, the fucking Rainbow Bridge, what of it?) to fuck up his snidey shit of a foster-bro, end the war with the Frosties by being incredibly humble and polite, and restore his aul' da Pirate Tony Hopkins, who was played by Brian Blessed all along. The fucking end! Music by Jimmy fucking Page.

Tomer Hanuka's FATHER: ENCOUNTER ON DAGOBAH.

Tomer Hanuka in an EMPIRE state of mind.

Via /Film.

More Parker on its way soon.

"After evening the score with those who betrayed him, and recovering the money he was cheated out of from the syndicate, Parker is riding high, living in swank hotels and enjoying the finer things in life again. Until, that is, hes fingered by a squealer who rats him out to the Outfit for the price they put on his head... and they find out too late that if you push Parker, it better be all the way into the grave!"

In the immortal words of James Newell Osterberg Jr - well, alright!

(via Newsarama)

Chris Bachalo draws a Valkyrie with a big chuffing sword.

The SDCC trailer for THOR

(via io9)

I've been thinking recently about my irrational attachment to Marvel's Thor. As a young 'un, my first exposure to the superhero milieu was Marvel UK's SPIDER-MAN WEEKLY, where the Stan Lee/John Romita lead was backed up with reprints of the Lee/Jack Kirby run on the series, so there's a childhood indoctrination response going on. My earliest memory of Thor is of the issue where the Destroyer thoroughly kicks his arse, so yeah, the movie trailer tickles the tummy of my inner toddler.

The original Lee/Kirby issues of THE MIGHTY THOR is the Robert Johnson of Fight Comics. It's Kirby writing the rules of one of the four main strands of the modern superhero playbook (the other three being that team's simultaneous work on FANTASTIC FOUR, and Lee/Steve Ditko's SPIDER-MAN and DOCTOR STRANGE runs). It's the same strand that Kirby perfected at DC with his Fourth World titles: social and political issues explored in metaphor by smashing gaudily-coloured cyphers into each other and seeing where the pieces fall, and all the while drawing them beautifully.

So yeah, I'm a Pavlov's Dog who'll buy any well-drawn Thor comic.  Sometimes, I can even defend those purchases - Walter Simonson's run on the series was legitimately great (when it wasn't being hijacked by editorial mandate to tie-in to dodgy crap like SECRET WARS 2).  John Romita Jr's looked great, as did Olivier Coipel's, even if I was never entirely convinced by their writing partners during those periods of the comic.  This trailer seems to fit Kirby's Thor into the movie Marvel universe rather well: like Robert Downey Jr's Iron Man, a synthesis of the traditional Marvel and Ultimate Marvel iterations of the character, designed to appeal to the blockbuster-attending masses rather than just nostalgic old gits. And I may be a nostalgic old git, but the non-lizard parts of my brain rather agree with this guy instead.

She's got a CGI on me.

See, the thing about videos like this and this is they both show us how superhero movies and cartoons have the capacity to be so much better than anything the genre has given us so far; yet when those two clips are themselves analyzed on any level beyond their great visuals, you realise just how badly written they are. So, if you could somehow combine the kineticism and ambition of these two videos, with some decent writing, you could presumably conquer the universe.

A little bit of various in the morning II

Dunno who this is by - anyone? Jason Garrattley writes: it's "by a guy called Tyler Edlin"

Bruce Timm does Red Sonja getting done by an octopus. Lifted from CAF.

Dan Hipp's Miss Punisher.

Things I've liked recently.

Jon Haward's Tales Of The Buddha blog. Always found it amusing and telling that the guys who do mainstream comics in the UK often have simultaneous careers in the UK's underground comix scene (Alan Grant, Jamie Grant, Frank Quitely, Haward).

Jason Garrattley's "WHO novelisations in the style of vintage Penguins".

Stan Lee taking a dump on Odin's throne.

Slowly, surely, some art leaks out of SDCC

Mignola gets back to Rocket Raccoon, and draws Kirby's big ol' Groot while he's at it. And even I'd buy a comic for that Grampa cover.

(Art heisted from CBR)

Odin is God

After this demonstration, cosplayers are alright by me.

Oh, and more along these lines over here.

Mo' Shaky

Dunno why this appealed to me.

(via Wrong Side Of The Art)

Cop a load of Freakish Kid's test footage for a ROGUE TROOPER cartoon...

...and man is it faithful to Dave The Gibbon's work.

Also: JUDGE DREDD movie news.

It's a crash course for the ravers...

Just saw this at Down The Tubes and started thinking: how come Grant Morrison and Alan Moore can talk at length about necking loads of psychedelics, performing magick rituals, then meeting and communicating with gods, and still get taken very seriously indeed; while poor old Barry Windsor Smith slips one alien abduction anecdote out and gets roundly pilloried? 

I am a cider drinker, I drink cider all day: Kek-W's cider label contest

One of my favourite 2000AD irregulars, Kek-W, is having a contest to design a label for some (he says) non-existent Somerset cider. Details here.  If I was producing industrial quantities of mind-altering cyborg mindfuck, I'd claim it didn't really exist, too.

From 1973: Guido Crepax's BELINDA...

... operating heavily under the influence of Guy Peellaert, but with flashes of his future brilliance cutting through.

The lads at Bantha Skull make the case that the upcoming AT-AT is the best STAR WARS toy ever...

 ...with a video clearly designed to bring a goofy smile to the face of men my age.

Harvey Pekar RIP

I've never written about Pekar here, though I think I may have ran one or two AMERICAN SPLENDOR covers over the years. He was a man who was easy to love, despite him spending a lot of time and energy trying to convince us all otherwise. In tribute, here's WJC's sketch of the grumpy old sod.

Colin Lorimer displays typical good taste.

Junior Angel may be a pig-drokking son-of-a-bitch, but he's got great taste in Brown Ale.

Dan McDaid's HOW THE WEST WAS DOOMED.

Rather good, that.

Joe, I second that emotion.

Bless aul' Joe Ackerman for reminding me of this great page from ROGAN GOSH.

Johnny Cash singing Neil Young's Pocahontas.

Rick Rubin does a nice, kinda-Beatlesy, production on this, reminiscent of some of the work he did with Tom Petty. Ignore the awful fannish video nicked off YouTube, though, and just enjoy the track.

Paul Pope covers ABBEY ROAD

First glimpse of Mick McMahon's CARIOCA art escapes into the wild.

Many, many, many, many, MANY moons ago I asked Alan Martin to send along any previews of CARIOCA, the Tank Girl mini he's working on with Mick "Mike" McMahon. Then this landed in my inbox this morning:

Alan also sent me a link to a tantalising glimpse of the Tank Girl sculpt the 3A folks are working on. Great quote there from Al: "the figure will be given away free with the world's most expensive comic book"!  Here's the sneaky peaky:

That's a damned fine boot.

The big ol' robots of Pat Mills.

Just noticed that Pat Mills' sweetest, most heartfelt stories always feature giant robots. Wassatallabaht?

I was tempted to throw in a Kev O'Neill Metalzoic piece here but I don't remember it as being that sweet or heartfelt.

Take home Dean Trippe's delightful Batman/Doctor Who team-up.

You may well have seen and loved Dean Trippe's Batman/Doctor Who piece that was going gangbusters all over the internet last week: well, it's now available as a print, too. Perfect for sticking over that unsightly crack on your bedroom wall.

Phil Bond's WONDER WOMAN redesign is much better than Jim Lee's.

And for a load of other Wonder Woman redesigns, all better than Jim Lee's, look over here.