Table of contents for 28 in Comic Heroes

Hello you, and welcome back. (Or, if you’re reading us for the first time thanks to our “Total Film Presents” promotion, it’s great to have you with us. Like many of you, I’m sure, I was shocked and saddened to hear of the passing of the artist and writer Darwyn Cooke back in May. I first read Darwyn’s work in DC’s The New Frontier and was blown away by its elegance and beauty, but also the warmth and love for the material that it conveyed. It’s so easy to be cynical in this world (especially in a year that seems determined to rob us of our heroes), but Cooke’s art had a magical way of smashing down the walls of adulthood and making you feel like a kid again. I’m…

HELL PIG We didn’t see this one coming. Cerebus, Dave Sim’s long-running aardvark adventure series is due to return in a September one-shot. Cerebus In Hell picks up after the titular character’s death. Sim is no longer able to draw, so the art will be a collage made with the assistance of Sandeep Atwal. NEW FABLES SPINOFF Vertigo’s Fables ended last year, but a new monthly spy thriller spinoff is on its way. Everafter: From The Pages Of Fables is written by Matthew Sturges and Dave Justus, with art by Travis Moore and Tula Lotay on covers. RIVERDALE EXPANDS Archie are further populating their New Riverdale universe with two new books. Betty & Veronica is written and drawn by Adam Hughes and Josie & The Pussycats by Marguerite Bennett and…

DOG GETS COMIC Boo, the so-called world’s cutest dog, is set to star in his own comic. The beetle-eyed menace will be making his four colour debut in September from Dynamite. No word on the creative team yet. MORE TANK GIRL Alan Martin and Brett Parson’s revived Tank Girl will be returning for the second instalment in a “trilogy” of mini-series. Tank Girl: Gold debuts in September from Titan. FINE YOUNG ANIMAL Doom Patrol, Mother Panic, Shade The Changing Girl and Cave Carson Has A Cybernetic Eye are the four initial titles to be released from DC’s “hang on, doesn’t this sound a bit like Vertigo?” imprint Young Animal later this year. QUANTUM LEAPER Meet Morris Sackett, a new Inhuman set to debut in a Marvel ongoing series from the…

“For stories to live on, they must fracture, multiply, change and grow, become archetypes” ABOUT LEAH Leah Moore is a writer of comics, prose and journalism, as well as the co-founder of the revolutionary Electricomics. She has written for Albion, Wild Girls, Tom Strong and more. Follow her on Twitter at @leahmoore. When a book is created, it escapes the minds of its creators and is set free into the world, to touch its readers and affect them, shape them, and find its place in the vast meta-library that is our collective consciousness. At the Fall of Nineveh, in seventh century BC Assyria, the Library of Ashurbanipal was razed to the ground with a fire “so intense that clay tablets bubbled and melted like hot glass”. Thousands of stories. Billions…

Comic Heroes: Are you pleased with the success of the Faith mini-series? Jody Houser: It’s been very gratifying. I don’t think you necessarily expect this kind of response when working on any project, let alone when it’s a book you’re doing to see if there really was an audience for this character. I fell in love with Faith reading Harbinger, but I didn’t know how much of a fan favourite she was among Valiant fans, and with so many amazing comics out there competing for readers’ attention, you’re never quite sure if the book you’re working on will find its audience. Luckily, it was never a problem for Faith. CH: What appeals to you most about Faith as a character? JH: Faith’s optimism and geekiness are what stand out the…

Although superheroes dominate the big screen these days, few such box-office champions were created in the last three decades. For every Deadpool there are 20 of Marvel’s Avengers, most of whom you can trace at least as far back as the 1970s. And when you take DC’s film output into account, there are even fewer newcomers. One child of the ’90s, however, has seen her fame rise as high as that of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. DC co-publisher Jim Lee calls her “the fourth pillar.” And yet if you were to inform Harley Quinn of just how popular she is, she’d most likely laugh in your face... before popping her bubblegum in it. Most fans who grew up with Harley know that she started conquering contemporary pop culture with…

Comic Heroes: The new comic debuts around the same time as the film. Are you taking any leads from the movie? Rob Williams: We felt it would be prudent to use the core Squad from the movie. They’re the characters people are going to expect to see, though we have a few wrinkles, as you’ll see, including one really big one. Our book is very much its own story, but if you love the movie you’ll see a similar tone. Aside from that we’re following our own punkish path. CH: Harley Quinn is one of DC’s breakout stars of the past few years, and is in this book. Will you be taking a more humorous approach than previous runs? RW: Harley’s inherently funny but the thing that elevates her is…

“In the autumn, IDW are staging a comics event – Revolution – a five-part mini-series that brings a variety of their other Hasbro properties into the Transformers universe. I think the idea is that G.I. Joe has always been part of it, but we will learn that M.A.S.K., Rom, Micronauts and Action Man – also co-exist. “As far as the story of the Lost Light and the quest is concerned, that’s going to continue pretty much unchanged, because a lot of these characters and scenarios are Earth-based, so they don’t necessarily connect. But there will definitely be scope for some of the space-based creations, like Rom, to crossover.” Stop press! IDW has just confirmed that, as part of Revolution, MTMTE will cease with issue 57, to be succeeded by a…

WE’RE USING EACH REBIRTH ISSUE AS AN OPPORTUNITY TO START AGAIN Designed to hark back to the company’s colourful past while telling new stories, DC Rebirth is the company’s latest revamp. The controversial New 52 relaunch in 2011 wiped out decades of continuity and reset most titles to issue one in the name of freeing up creators and making the comics more accessible. Critics, however, suggested that DC had thrown the super-baby out with the bathwater. Something had to change. This time, however, it feels different. DC are once again acknowledging their history with long-standing titles like Action Comics and Detective Comics reverting to their original numbering, with #957 and #934 respectively. Meanwhile other popular characters like Green Lantern and Wonder Woman have received their own Rebirth issues, which will…

As the book is called Batgirl and the Birds of Prey, does Barbara Gordon take a lead role? In the first arc, Batgirl definitely has taken it upon herself to take the reins of the Birds of Prey. Someone is profiting off of her old moniker, Oracle, which is like a personal attack to Barbara. So, it falls on her to not only take down this “faux-racle” but recruit a group to help her do so. She starts by seeking out her good friend and former Birds of Prey colleague Dinah Lance. So who are the other Birds of Prey? The fun part of the Birds is how much they differ in opinion even though they are all part of a team. Barbara is a by the book vigilante, unwilling…

Literary types can still be a bit sniffy about comic books and graphic novels, especially in the English-speaking world. Not so in France and Belgium, however. Here, thanks to the long-established tradition of Franco-Belgian comics, fans of fiction switch seamlessly between reading novels and reading comic books (or bandes dessinées). This helps explain why so many classic French novels have been adapted into graphic form. Albert Camus, Marcel Proust, Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo… some of the most famous stories in the language translate brilliantly to panel layout. There have been plenty of English-language literary adaptations, as we’ll see shortly, but let’s begin on the other side of the Channel. One much-loved writer who is now getting the comic-book treatment is Marcel Pagnol. During the early and mid-1900s, he…

hantal Montellier is a true rarity, and not just in French bandes dessinées. She brings strong principles, political and personal, left-wing and feminist, to her work and her life, as well as an uncompromising clarity and impact to her engaged and engaging narratives. An innovator since the ’70s, she was a pioneering creator in tackling dystopian sci-fi and darkly topical tales of criminals and cops, genres seldom handled by women creators. The Paris-based pioneer looks back at more than four decades on the frontlines of the medium. COMIC HEROES: How did your childhood influence your life and principles? CHANTAL MONTELLIER: My childhood was affected a lot by my mother’s epilepsy, caused by an abortion too late in her pregnancy and the overly strong anaesthetic she was given for it. Due…

Reviewed: Issues 1-3 Writer: Amancay Nahuelpan Artist: Amancay Nahuelpan Publisher: Black Mask Format: 6-part series Created, written, illustrated and lettered by Young Terrorists’ artist Amancay Nahuelpan, Clandestino is the story of a bad man in a bad country. General Kapala has taken over Tairona and while guerrilla organisations have formed to oppose him, they lack a leader. Enter Clandestino... Nahuelpan’s story is a clear paean to old-school, bloody-knuckled action movies. You can almost see the film scratch and jump on some of the burly but deceptively careful action sequences. There’s the same energy, the same brutality and the same focus on one bad man, doing bad things for good reasons. If that was all there was to it then Clandestino…

Writer: Tom King Artist: Gabriel Hernandez Walta Colourist: Jordie Bellaire Publisher: Marvel Format: Ongoing Reviewed: Issues 1-6 Marvel’s friendly neighbourhood synthezoid has never exactly been its most compelling character. He’s the Pinocchio at the back of the Avengers line-up – lovable but largely one-note. Which is why this new series is such a surprise and a delight. Vision has built himself a ready-made family – wife Virginia and twin teenage children Viv and Vin – and moved to the suburbs. While he goes to work for the President, his family are left to struggle with fitting in with normal life, even though they’ve barely begun to grasp what it means to be alive. Across the first six-issue arc, a series of escalating incidents leave villains and townspeople (and pets) dead,…

“A CONFIDENT MERGING OF SOME OF HANNABARBERA’S OLDEST CHARACTERS ” You have to wonder who thought Wacky Raceland was a good idea. A silly children’s cartoon turned into a gory post-apocalyptic borefest that can’t decide whether it wants to copy Death Race or Mad Max more. Some pretty flat dialogue and characterisation aside, there are at least moments to savour, including the fact each racer’s car is sentient, adding an intriguing Knight Rider spin to proceedings, and some interesting glimpses of cataclysms that preceded the races. Likewise, it’s hard to know just who DC is aiming for with Scooby Apocalypse #1, an attempt to reboot the mystery solving troupe straight into 2016. Misjudged character redesigns aside (come on, even Jim Lee drops the ball sometimes), the…

Writer: Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss Artist: Jay Publisher: Titan Format: Mini-series Reviewed: Issue 1 File under odd, if interesting. The BBC’s 21st century Sherlock may seem like a peculiar choice to transfer to manga, but it works fairly well here. Jay’s art elegantly revisits John and Sherlock’s debut adventure, “A Study In Pink”, rendering Watson’s Afghanistan flashback in jagged, blood-spattered panels before concisely summing up his now empty life. And the dialogue is exceptional – but then it would be, it appears to be a word-for-word transcription of Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’ original script. And therein lies the fundamental problem. In directly moving the TV show to the printed page it can’t help but feel rather redundant. Fans have the episodes, so why read them? There’s the opportunity…

PART FOUR: PRINTING & SELLING AT CONS In this instalment we’ll cover the ins and outs of printing your comic, as well as some advice for selling your comic at conventions. The three main things to consider when printing your comic are: how many comics do you need printed? How quickly do you need them? And what format is your comic going to take? Printing can be (and in most cases is) extremely expensive. Deciding on the size of your print run and how long you intend to sell your comic for will play a major part in all of these questions. There are a lot of factors to consider and many of these will come down to preference and what works best for you financially. There is no set…

“The cheapest might not necessarily be the best. Printing is expensive. Ideally become friends with a printer. Invite them to come on a caravan holiday or to be best man at your wedding. Anything to bring the price down.” – Jimmy Furlong After you’ve got a rough idea of what format your comic is going to take and how many copies you’re going to want printed, it’s time to approach some printers. You can easily find printers by performing a quick Google search – get a few names and phone, email or both. You may well find that prices vary massively between different printers. Sometimes by opening a dialogue with a printer and asking them directly how you can take the cost down, you can save a lot of money.…

THE FIRST COMIC I EVER READ That was Roy Of The Rovers. The adventures of Roy Race and Melchester Rovers F.C.! I had it delivered and I’d leap down the stairs all excited when it dropped through the letterbox every week! Me and my friends were mad about football. We’d swap the bubble-gum stickers, all that fun school playground stuff. Then I discovered 2000 AD and war comics like Commando. THE FIRST INFLUENCE ON MY WORK I used to love a lot of the ’70s fantasy painters like Boris Vallejo, Chris Foss and Frank Frazetta, and I can’t leave out Derek Riggs’s album covers for Iron Maiden. He’d put so much detail into those images, so I would sit there listening to the LP and staring at his paintings. MY…

“ I WAS INTRIGUED BY THIS EX-ROMAN SOLDIER, WHO THINKS DIFFERENTLY FROM HIS CONTEMPORARIES ” Britannia is set at a time when this country was on the very edge of the so-called civilised world. Written by Peter Milligan, with art by Juan Jose Ryp, it centres around Antonius Axia, the world’s first “detectioner,” who is sent by the Emperor Nero on a perilous mission to British shores. “I had this idea, and I thought it would be a good fit for Valiant,” says Milligan, who believes that the four-issue mini-series is closer in tone to the Eternal Warrior series he penned for Valiant than his stint on Shadowman. “Britannia is a bit darker. As we’re rooting so much of it in history – although we do stray into pure fiction…

Creating the Crystal Labyrinth Alan Quah (artist): When George suggested the Crystal Labyrinth environment, my initial research was leaning towards Dark Souls’ crystal cave but at the same time I wanted to make it a little different with the colour scheme. This being a vast landscape, my reference came after how crystal reacts to light and how it creates multiple colours. The rest is pretty much designing structures to make them look like they were chiselled but at the same time look raw. George Mann (writer): With the Crystal Labyrinth I was trying to do two things, really – to give Alan a strange, twisted, angular environment to draw (and something that felt deeply fantastical, but in a Dark Souls sort of way, and not a typical “high fantasy” landscape),…

Comic Heroes: What’s the premise of Second Sight ? David Hine: Ray Pilgrim has the ability to see through the eyes of the most violent psychopaths when they commit their crimes. The story is told in two time periods. Twenty years ago Al the Chemist turned Ray on to a very special species of magic mushroom that triggered those visions. For a while he became a celebrity as he brought two of UK’s worst serial killers to justice. But then he got inside the head of a killer and things began to go horribly wrong. In the present he has been forgotten by the public and ignored by the media until his daughter Toni begins to investigate a suspected group of paedophiles... CH: The book has quite…

Will Harley Quinn differ significantly under DC Rebirth compared to previous runs? At its core, no, because DC is happy with what Amanda and I are doing so they’ve told us to just continue. The supporting cast will be more involved in the series and we will be seeing a lot more Poison Ivy and Powergirl, as well as the Joker, as the year goes on. What do you attribute Harley’s huge popularity to? Timing, as well as taking the character in a direction where she steps out on her own. We’ve taken the time to define who she is outside of the Joker’s relationship with her. We have developed her personality, her sexuality, and created a new supporting cast that compliments the character. She’s almost become DC’s Deadpool, and…

Here is a comic that explores issues of identity, ideology, fidelity and sexuality – and it reads like one of those epic, writer-room-fuelled US TV serials. At turns it can be hilarious, moving, gruelling and thrilling. And it’s certainly one of the best series currently being published. But it’s also a toy tie-in, featuring the Hasbro-owned robots who change shape into muscle cars and monster trucks. The comic in question is IDW’s Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye by British writer James Roberts. Although he’s an old-school fan of the characters – who cites Marvel UK’s weekly Transformers comic (1984-91) as a formative influence – even he admits the brand can come between him and potential readers. “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t frustrated at the way Transformers…

Author Joe Hill has a secret he wants to share. His new novel The Fireman , a post-apocalyptic epic which entered the New York Times bestseller list with a very hot bullet at number one, is actually about superheroes. It might not seem like that on the face of it. The Fireman concerns the last days of the world as we know it thanks to a nasty little spore called Draco incendia trychophyton, known colloquially as Dragonscale. One of the more aesthetically-pleasing aspects of contracting this plague is that the carriers end up with ornate, tattoo-like markings on their body. But that’s nothing to the real damage Dragonscale does: at any moment, the infected are likely to spontaneously burst into flame, taking with…

Have you put a lot of yourself into Kenan Kong? Each of my characters reflects some part of me. Kenan’s a bit of a jerk, and while I wasn’t nearly as brash and outspoken as he is, I’ve definitely had my jerk-ish moments. Does New Super-Man represent the best that we can be, like the original Kal-El Supes? Throughout the decades, one of the core themes of Superman is bullying. If you read Superman comics from the very beginning, from the ’30s to the ’40s, you’ll see that he started off as a bully. As the years went on, he slowly evolved into the role model he know today, and Kenan is going to go through a similar evolution. How does Kenan come to gain his super powers? Kenan comes…

Is Rebirth a completely fresh jumping-on point or does it refer back to previous Green Lantern stories? It’s both. We aren’t starting out with origin stories for our cast, but that isn’t the mission statement of Rebirth. Rebirth is about making everything accessible for a new reader, but also honouring everything that has come before in the long and storied histories of these characters. John Stewart and Guy Gardner are also part of your cast. Are they very different characters to Hal? John is the most natural leader, as he’s intelligent, thoughtful, and measured. He thinks every situation through and comes up with the best solution, so the Corps is lucky to have him holding the reins. Guy is the Green Lantern with the biggest chip on his shoulder. He’s…

“FOR ONE PAYMENT A MONTH YOU CAN READ AS MANY COMICS AS YOU LIKE” Take almost any modern form of entertainment and you can chart the different and evolving ways in which we consume it. Literature, music and movies have followed a very similar path in recent years: at first, you owned a physical artefact, whether it was a book, a CD or a box-set; then came the revolution which saw us downloading digital versions of these to our tablets, phones and smart TVs. Now there is a newer – and sometimes contentious – way for us to consume our popular culture, one which doesn’t see us owning a product at all, whether physical or digital: subscription streaming. And it would seem that more of us are moving towards reading…

“ONE OF THOSE GAME-CHANGERS NO ONE SEES COMING” Quite possibly the most memorable story arc featuring the Children of the Atom outside of the flagship Uncanny X-Men, Bill Sienkiewicz and longtime X-scribe Chris Claremont’s run on New Mutants still seems bold and innovative more than three decades after its original publication in 1984. Now the arc – which encompasses 14 issues of New Mutants, from #18 to #31 – is receiving the attention it deserves and being reprinted (along with a story from 2003’s X-Men Unlimited #43) in an oversized hardcover in IDW’s Marvel Artist Select Series. “When Bill and I were working on New Mutants,” Claremont told Comic Heroes, “it was one of the most exciting, delightful and unexpected experiences I have ever had in comics, and I’ve been…

“NOT A REBOOT OR EVEN A RETCON BUT A RETURN TO GLORY” DC’s Rebirth was greeted with a certain amount of cynicism by fans when it was announced, with questions lighting up forum boards. Why was DC relaunching again so swiftly after 2011’s New 52 reboot took every key character back to #1? How would Batman, Superman and the rest be rebranded this time? But one thing was clear: with DC’s sales at their lowest for decades, the reboot had to work. And with pre-release leaks giving away key twists that seemed insane out of context, the signs didn’t look good. Then Geoff Johns’ DC Universe: Rebirth #1 hit the shelves, and fans’ worries vanished faster than Superman’s pants from his 2011 costume. As Johns’ story…

Writer: Nick Spencer Artist: Steve Lieber Colourist: Ryan Hill Publisher: Image Format: Ongoing Reviewed: Issues 1-3 Remember The Shield ? No, not the patriotic superhero, the TV show with Michael Chiklis. It was brilliant. For seven seasons we followed the adventures of Vic Mackey as his team of corrupt cops bent the law way past breaking point. The Fix is, essentially, The Shield played for dark laughs. The story follows Roy and Mac – two crooks who realise that the best way to get ahead as criminals is to have day jobs as cops. Gleefully unrepentant, they use this cover to con and steal their way through life. Their actions haven’t gone unnoticed, however, and they owe money to some very bad people... Nick Spencer’s script walks…

Writers: Lauren Beukes, Dave Halvorsen Artist: Ryan Kelly Colourist: Eve De La Cruz Publisher: DC Vertigo Format: 9-issue series Reviewed: Issues 1-9 This short-lived horror feels like a cousin of the similarly ’80s-indebted Cabin In The Woods . In 1987 a group of youngsters individually faced terrible supernatural forces and survived. In the present day, they gather together to form the titular club to try and understand what happened to them, but their problems still haunt them – quite literally in some cases. This premise allows Beukes and Halvorsen to have fun playing with various horror tropes. Chenzira encountered a deadly video game; Simon is the survivor of an Amityville-style incident, now famous thanks to movie adaptations; Kiri is haunted by a Ring-style spectre. And there’s something…

Writer: Alan Martin Artist: Brett Parson Publisher: Titan Format: Mini-series Reviewed: Issues 1-2 Where last year’s 21st Century Tank Girl was good fun, it was also rather bitty and disjointed thanks to it’s multitude of creators. “Two Girls, One Tank”, on the other hand, is a much more substantial affair – a longer story with a suitably insane plot. Tank Girl has had her tank stolen by art collector Magnolia Jones. While she searches for a replacement, something strange happens to the nefarious thief. She feels compelled to shave her head, change her clothes and, for all intents and purposes, become another Tank Girl. The original, naturally, is hopping mad about losing her home, but a trap forces the two to work together. The title sets…

NUMBER OF PAGES Unless your comic is perfect-bound (like a TPB or a hardcover) – and often even then – the page count must be a multiple of four, and depending on your page size, you may find that working to multiples of eight pages gives you even more bang for your buck. You can confirm this with your printer. SIZE OF PAGES Most comics are US comic size, but that doesn’t mean yours has to be. If you opt for a different size, just make sure the size isn’t prohibitive to the reader. Certain sizes may work out more cost effective, too, as there’s less trimming or wasted paper for the printer. Check this with your printer before you begin. INTERIOR PAGES Black-and-white/greyscale is cheaper than colour, but generally…

“Treat conventions as a way to interact with your readers and fellow creators. Prepare and practise your elevator pitch, be prepared to talk about normal life, and then chat with as many creators as you can. They’ve been where you are and have invaluable advice as well as nearly always being bloody nice people.” – Jon Laight CHOOSING THE RIGHT SHOW It’s important to bear in mind what type of comics you make, because that dictates what con would work for you. Each show attracts a different audience. A good way to gauge a show (apart from the obvious: attend it) is to look at who else is confirmed – is there a big comic presence? What about indie stuff? Is it TV or film heavy? All of these things…

Handily coinciding with the 150th Anniversary of HG Wells’s birth, Ian Edginton and Matt ‘D’Israeli’ Brooker’s The War of the Worlds- inspired Scarlet Traces is coming to the pages of 2000 AD . “Matt and I had been discussing doing more Scarlet Traces for a few years now,” says Edginton, of the series which was originally published by Dark Horse in 2002, and followed by a sequel and an adaptation of Wells’s original novel. “Because we’d done so much work for 2000 AD, it seemed like the perfect fit.” With Edginton describing War of the Worlds as “a thrilling alien invasion story that’s also a meditation on the arrogance of empire,” its themes appear more relevant than ever. “At…

In the words of Cullen Bunn, what’s really cool about Revolution is that “it’s not a superhero crossover, although there’s still something pretty ‘super’ about these characters.” Co-written by Bunn and John Barber, with art by Fico Ossio, the five-issue event brings together not only Transformers and G.I. Joe but also Rom, Micronauts, M.A.S.K. and Action Man for an event which encompasses all of IDW’s various Hasbro properties. “I’ve always maintained that it’s great if the Transformers and G.I. Joe comics take place in the same world, as I love shared universes,” says Barber. “There’s a lot of exciting stuff that can grow out of the opportunities that are created when characters bump into each other.” Intriguingly, the series springs out of a plot detail from the Simon Furmanscripted Transformers…

The beauty of Darwyn Cooke’s art was that it never lost its sense of optimism. Just look at his DC covers from 2014: Catwoman grinning as she whizzes down a highway; Superman saving a speechless child from a train; Alfred covering an exhausted Bruce Wayne in a blanket. Within his playful pages Cooke immortalised hope and wonder, joy and romance, in a style informed by the past but never enslaved by it. It stood strong and distinct, serving as a reminder of what superheroes can and should be. On 14 May 2016, at the age of 53, he died of cancer – leaving behind a world that’s now just that little less bright. Cooke began his comic book career in 2000, with the sharp, perceptive character study Batman: Ego. Yet…

Comic Heroes: Are you a long-time comics fan? Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: I started where most kids start with Batman, Superman and Flash. But in the early ’60s with the explosion of Marvel heroes like Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four and the X-Men, a whole new universe of possibilities opened up. It was easy to relate to a teenager like Spider-Man with all the same problems I faced at school. CH: Are you still a Marvel fan? What are your favourite comic books at the present time? KAJ: My favourites now are Y: The Last Man and Saga by Brian K. Vaughn and Pia Guerra; Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons; Kingdom Come by Mark Waid and Alex Ross; Garth Ennis’s The Punisher, Preacher and Hitman; and anything by Matt Fraction and…

Comic Heroes: Why are you drawn to the pulpy characters in comics? Matt Wagner: It’s actually a variety of factors. For one, I like the very human scale of these kinda tales... Nothing cosmic or earth-shattering, just extraordinary heroes battling against villainous adversaries. I also like that most of these characters predate the comic-book tropes that have become, I feel, a bit overcooked. I feel the same way about early Golden-Age comics. They were generated by creators who weren’t schooled and steeped in comics narratives and so it all feels fresh and unbridled; what both the comics and the pulps lack in finesse is more than made up for by their chutzpah and vigour. CH: So as a creator what gives The Shadow its appeal for you? MW: Well, like…

“I love that James refuses to treat More Than Meets The Eye as anything other than a compelling character-led comic book that always seems to be reaching outwards, becoming grander in scale and scope and ‘big’ ideas, while never losing the focus on the smaller, more personal trials and tribulations that we can all relate to. “Back in the day, we took pains not to write about robots, but rather about the unique individuals that made up the cast, with all their flaws, eccentricities and quirks, and James has very much kept up that tradition. But whereas we were largely channelling our love of other comic books and properties, James is of the generation that grew up with the original line of Transformer characters and has a broad knowledge base…

“I’M VERY PROUD OF STAR TREK/APES, BUT THERE’S STUFF I’D GO BACK AND REDRAW” Earlier this year, comic book artist Rachael Stott got a piece of fan mail through the post. It was a drawing of Doctor Who walking among the stars, with a touching message telling her “what an incredible artist you are.” “I opened it up,” she tells us, “and my housemate was like, ‘Are you... alright?’ I just turned and screamed, ‘I think I’ve just got something from Peter Capaldi!’” And for good reason. Despite only two years in the industry, Stott has made a formidable name for herself as an artist on Titan’s Doctor Who range, especially when it comes to Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor. She got her big break at London’s Super Comic Con in 2014,…

Is Rebirth a completely fresh start for Batgirl? Batgirl is a direct continuation of the previous arcs written by Brendan Fletcher and Cameron Stewart, and drawn by Babs Tarr. That said, it is an easy jumping-on point because it’s a self-contained story outside of Batgirl’s usual stomping grounds. Is Barbara Gordon the best Batgirl – she is the original incarnation after all? I love Barbara because I find her relatable, or at least as relatable as a beautiful genius superhero can be! She’s young, her life is continually in the process of coming together and falling apart again, and she’s a little bit goofy and awkward in her non-Batgirl life. She’s a lot of fun to write. The first storyline sees Barbara traveling to Asia. Is it fun taking Batgirl…

“I MISSED THE ‘WHAT HAPPENS NEXT’ ASPECT OF SERIES” After he quit Marvel Comics in 2013 to pursue his own creator-owned work, you wouldn’t have thought there’d be much that Ed Brubaker missed about the continuous grind of monthly comics. But then he and British artist Sean Phillips embarked on gruelling runs on Fatale and The Fade Out at Image Comics, and now the long-time artistic partners-in-crime are teaming up once again next month to launch their first ongoing series, Kill Or Be Killed . “With Kill Or Be Killed, it’s partly because it’s an idea that leaves room to explore a lot of different things, and partly because I missed the kind of ‘what happens next?’ aspect of…

With the box office success of Deadpool and X-Men: Apocalypse, 20th Century-Fox’s cinematic X-world is set to expand even further, with The Fault In Our Stars director Josh Boone currently developing a New Mutants film and Game of Thrones’ Maisie Williams being tipped to star as Scottish mutant werewolf Rahne “Wolfsbane” Sinclair. “There’s also rumours that Sophie Turner, who was Jean Grey in X-Men: Apocalypse, wants to be in the film as well, so who knows, it could be a New Mutants gathering of Westeros,” laughs Chris Claremont, who believes that his and Bill Sienkiewicz’s opening three-parter is the obvious choice for the main plotline. “If I were looking to make a film based on a concept that was both exciting and visually challenging as source material, as well as…

“MIGNOLA INDULGES HIMSELF BY DRAWING ALL HE LIKES TO DRAW” Reviewed: Issues 1-10 Writer: Mike Mignola Artist: Mike Mignola Publisher: Dark Horse Format: 10-issue series So Hellboy’s long, strange journey through the Underworld comes to an end, and with it goes our last chance to see Mike Mignola illustrate as well as write the character (probably). After ten issues Hellboy in Hell delivers a swansong that’s melancholy and valedictory, our hero finally, resignedly accepting a destiny which he has been unable to avoid even in death. The afterlife has obliged Hellboy to deal with various vengeful family members, along with other enemies both old and new, including a spiritual parasite slowly leeching the soul from him. Now Hell is his for the taking, or the harrowing if he so chooses.…

Writer: Neil Gaiman Artists: Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá Publisher: Dark Horse Format: Graphic novel Adapting a prose work into graphic form is a tricky business. It’s important to retain as much of the original’s flavour as possible while making the end result read as though it was meant to be a comic. Brazilian twin brothers Moon and Bá have done a creditable job striking that balance with this version of a Neil Gaiman short story first published in his 2006 collection Fragile Things. Their loose, lush artwork is a treat – every element of every panel seems to be in motion, and watercolour washes add delicacy and drama. The tale itself is whisper-slight and inconclusive. Teenage buddies Enn and Vic go to a party where the girls are as…

Setting the size of your print run is very important. Order too many copies of your comic and you might never shift them. Order too few and you’ll have a high cost per unit (meaning that each individual comic will cost you more), and you’ll miss out on potential sales while you’re waiting for the next print run to arrive. Print runs are expensive, but the bigger your run, the cheaper the cost of each individual comic will be. For example printing 10,000 issues means that you’ll potentially make a lot of profit per individual issue sold, but the likelihood is that you’ll end up with the majority of your stock (probably between 8,000 to 10,000 issues) unsold, which would give you a big loss overall (as 10,000 copies would…

IT GIRL Story & Art by Jessica Martin officialjessicamartin.com Actress and impressionist Jessica Martin’s first pen-and-ink effort is a whirlwind biography of movie starlet Clara Bow’s Hollywood ascendance through the silent era and beyond. With a giddying fragility, the tale is a monochromatic snapshot portrait of success through resilience and grit. Elegiac excellence. Of the whole experience, Martin remarks, “Formatting and getting the pages aligned and in the right size and resolution was the niggly part of self-publishing. But then there was the supreme satisfaction of seeing your creation in print form and sitting on the shelves of comic and book shops after all the hard work was done. Even if I never self-published again I would never regret the experience gained from seeing it all through from conception to…