Marvel’s “Guardians Team-Up” #1. Bound to have universal appeal.OMG – Oh My Guardians…
OK, I admit it. From the first “ooga chaka” in the teaser trailer for Guardians of the Galaxy I was hooked. It just seemed like the film would deliver a fun romp with the totally left of center – even for Marvel – ragtag group of deep space adventurers. As we now know it delivered and then some, making the unlikely duo of a snarky raccoon and a monosyllable arborial giant big screen stars.
Hot on the heals of that latest franchise film the Marvel comic book gang has announced a new title pulling together the company’s two biggest movie franchises, The Avengers and The Guardians and beyond.
Guardians Team-Up #1 pairs two Eisner Award winners. Brian Michael Bendis (New Avengers, Ultimate Spiderman, Secret Invasion) will write the series with interior and cover illustration handled by Art Adams. In addition to work for DC and Marvel, Adams brought the much loved series Monkey Man and O’Brien to fruition via the Dark Horse Comics creator-owned imprint Legend.
Guardians Team-Up Editor Katie Kubert says, “By taking the most fun toys in the sandbox and pairing them together, be prepared to see something completely different, told by some of the best and brightest writers and artists in the business. And, like the nature of the team-ups themselves, both old and new creative faces to Marvel.” Guardians Rocket and Groot in their beautiful Disney Infinity 2.0 toy incarnations.SkeletonPete Says…
Issue #1 is due to hit comic shops and newsstands in February 2015. Want to get a jump on the team-up? Grab yourself one of Toy Insider’s 2014 “Hot Top 20 Toys”Disney Infinity’s 2.0 Marvel Superheroes toy-based video game, and put those heroes into action with adventures of your own making using the Toy Box 2.0 software.
Thanks to Ken, Editor of the PiercingMetal website, for passing along the original Marvel press release.
Popular Skullture: The Skull Motif in Pulps, Paperbacks and Comics
Monte Beauchamp, Editor and Designer
Forward by Steven Heller
Release Date: November 05, 2014
Format: Full Color, 176 pages; Hard Cover, 5 3/8″ x 7 3/4″
Price: $19.99
It’s a clear no-brainer (ahem!) for SkeletonPete to LOVE Popular Skullture a new book from Dark Horse Comics’ Kitchen Sink imprint. Set for release on November 5, 2014 – just a smidgen past Halloween and Dia De Los Muertes – this compendium packs scads of illustrations of creepy crania between its covers.
Steven Heller’s introduction tracks the historical context of skull imagery and Editor Monte Beauchamp’s preface recounts the genesis of the project. Beauchamp also gives readers a study of each style of book (comics, pulps and paperbacks) the images are derived from. He lists publishers, publication dates, and artists where they are known. A Personal Favorite Image
The book is a fun visual roller-coaster with dozens of artists works from 1930’s-1950’s represented. The cover styles run from the subtle to gobsmacking.
It’s particularly interesting to see covers from early 1950’s EC comics competitors like Farrell Publications, Superior,AGC and others. One can imagine newsstands filled with these lurid enticements as the catalyst for government pressure and the ultimate formation the comics industry’s self regulatory code. We encounter a skull faced Cleopatra on the cover of VooDoo #8 (April 1953), Haunted Thrills #6 sports a top hat wearing skull tossing “snake-eyes” on a pair of dice (right up my alley), while another favorite, Superior’s Strange Mysteries #12 (July 1953), features pallbearer skeletons dragging a coffin from the mouth of a gigantic skull.
On the classier side, the skull and rose art for Ian Fleming’s James Bond novel Goldfinger (1959,) female skull and orchid motif on the 1944 Avon paperback edition of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and George Rosen’s painting of a nattily clad cadaver fronting the July 1942 issue of The Shadow are beautifully rendered revelations. SkeletonPete Says..
If boney brain boxes are your thing or you’re looking for inspiration for that next tattoo or band logo, collect pulp illustration, this full color title will suit you just fine. $19.99 puts this hardcover on your bookshelf.
If you are looking for even more skull-tural edification I suggest Dover Publications recent A Century of Skeletons. Published to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the passing of José Guadalupe Posada, Mexico’s preeminant artist of the calavera, it makes a great visual companion to Popular Skullture.
A picture’s worth a thousand words. You get the point, so will the Archie gang.
As New York Comic Con 2014 rolls to the end of its second day, the news blasts are coming fast and furious from our friends at Dark Horse Comics. The latest communique alerts us to a totally loony franchise collision that puts extraterrestrial horror hounds, the Predators, dogging the trail of the Archie Comics crew. Hey, my favorite Universal Monster film is Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, so I’m there.
Slash and (Sun) Burn…
April 2015 brings the first issue of Archie Meets Predator a 4 part Alex de Campi (Grindhouse) and Fernando Ruiz saga set during spring break in Costa Rico. I haven’t seen a preview but I’m thinking Betty and Veronica camouflaged in spa mud. If that’s a spoiler, I’m clairvoyant. If it’s not, I’m a twelve year old.
Author de Campi promises the whole Archie crew in tow. His interview with USAToday is here.
Ponder “Spirits of the Dead,” Dark Horse’s curious volume of forgotten lore Hell On Wheels…
In October of 1977, just in time for Halloween, record store racks were graced with the amazing cover art of Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell album. The vivid, now iconic, scene of a motorcycle rider blasting his way out of the grave was at the time an irresistible lure to purchase the album. To those of us involved in comic fandom the work was instantly recognizable as that of Richard Corben.
Corben emerged from the comix underground in the early 1970’s to contribute work to James Warren’s horror books Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella. He was also a regular in the pages of Heavy Metal Magazine, most notably with the serialized sword and sorcery feature “Den.”
Poe, Poe, Pitiful Me…
With the release of Spirits of the Dead on October 1 Dark Horse Comics will similarly enlist Corben to get the 2014 Halloween season firmly in flight. The hardcover anthology will ensnare the artist’s entire Edgar Allan Poe corpus into one voluminous tome. Dark Horse has in the last two years published several outstanding single story issues of Corben’s Poe adaptations and now pulls them all together with earlier works.
Throughout Spirits of the Dead we are treated to all manner of morbid machinations served up via Corben’s one of a kind style which lends itself so well to the gothic, grisly and gruesome. His penchant for gnarly characterizations inspected in and panel by panel close-ups prove a fitting visual analog for the psychological horror that Poe is noted for.
Presented within the book’s over 200 pages are 14 adaptations in chronological order as written by Poe not illustrated by Corben. We’re offered a mix of the familiar and the less celebrated, ranging from visual tone poems based on “The Sleeper” and “Alone” through mid-book magnum opus, the nearly 50 page “The Fall of the House of Usher,” to end with “The Cask of Amontillado.” Along the way “Masque of the Red Death” and “Murders in the Rue Morgue” are stand out personal favorites. “Masque” for Corben’s imaginative, madly colored, visions of the reveler’s costumes, and “Rue Morgue” for its unfettered depiction of the savage protagonist.
None of Corben’s Poe pieces are slavish to their source material. The word adaptation should be taken literally, and that’s part of the fun. This is especially true of the artist’s interpolation of the poetic works as Professor M. Thomas Inge (The Incredible Mr. Poe: Comic Book Adaptations of the Works of Edgar Allan Poe) points out in his introduction. Often injected into the stories is narrator, “Mag The Hag.” The hulking hooded and eye patched witch finds rye humor in almost every unpleasant situation and denouement, sometimes as a framing mechanism and others as a participant in the narrative.
SkeletonPete Says…
I suspect I’m not alone in having a Halloween section in my personal library. A nice handful of books that help conjure the season. Ray Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree rightfully tops the list, but there are plenty of others including last year’s The Halloween Legion.
I expect that Spirits of the Dead will find a comfy niche in that group alongside the recently published Poe and the Visual Arts in which author Barbara Cantalupo shows how Poe’s verbiage was influenced by the illustrative arts of his time.
Writers: For an informative treatise on The Philosophy of Composition by Poe himself follow this link to his discourse on the gestation of The Raven.
Dark Horse Comic’s “Fire and Stone” books will present a massive Alien and Predator universe excursion. Oops, You Blinked…
Congratulations to the Dark Horse Comics team whose inaugural issue of Fire and Stone: Prometheus sold out in the wink of an eye. It’s an exceptional start to a series that promises to eclipse even Dark Horse’s long running Stars Wars books. The F&S series represents a massive franchise culling, century hopping, set of tales which are bound to keep followers of the Alien and Predator mythos enthralled and fandom discussion boards thriving.
Four By Four Plus One…
They’ll be four issues in each Fire and Stone series, Prometheus, Aliens, Predator, and Aliens Vs. Predators (AVP,) with a final standalone story produced to pull the whole shebang together. I think it’s easy to predict the final works being offered in one nifty Dark Horse hard cover edition down the road.
(Xeno) More 4 U…
Be forewarned the first issue of Fire and Stone: Aliens, arriving on September 24th, is likely to disappear into space just as fast and no one will hear you scream. The first issue features xenomorphs up the wazoo in a tale hinted at in the first issue of F&S:Prometheus. The second printing of Prometheus #1 is expected on October 8, 2014, the same day that Aliens Vs Predators: Fire and Stone #1 drops. Fire and Stone: Aliens #1 variant cover art by Fiona Staples.
