Storm Premiere HC
Eric Jerome Dickey’s mini-series gets the hardcover treatment.

Fantastic Four #542
Dwayne McDuffie’s first issue on the book is a Civil War tie-in.

Also this week:
Occult Crimes Taskforce #3 (of 4). Co-written by Rosario Dawson.
Roach #2. Story and art by Robert Roach. Resolicited.

It’s Martin Luther King Day, and Tom Spurgeon has provided a bunch of links to some relevant sites: civil rights-related toons and black cartoonists from the past.

I attended Kyle Baker’s gallery exhibit in Brooklyn yesterday. He was actually one of three artists on display there, with the common thread being that their work was all comics related. Joshua Peters does paintings of superheroes reinterpreted as people of color (best one: Batman as a brother sporting a gold chain with a gold bat logo!). Jonn Alex Gonzalez had a comic strip done on a bunch of interlocking oversized canvases.

Baker had pages from Nat Turner on display (including pages from the second half). It was, needless to say, a thrill to see his pencils up close. He uses a lot of gray tones that would be impossible to ink, and when I say gray I mean gray; there are few deep dark tones but a wide range of medium ones.

He uses a non-reproduceable blue pencil in places, but most of the time it looked like he just drew directly on the page with few guidelines, although I’m sure he plans his work out more thoroughly than that (I didn’t think to ask him).

The show was very packed; I was pleasantly surprised at the amount of people that attended. I even saw some familiar faces: Tales of the Unexpected artist Eric Battle was there, as was Aztek artist N. Steven Harris, among others. An excellent show all around. If you’re in the NYC area, make sure you stop by and see it.

In other news: There’s gonna be a new Suicide Squad mini-series as a result of the events of 52. I think it’s safe to assume Amanda Waller will be part of it in some way; how exactly we don’t know just yet.

Vin Diesel’s working on a new sci-fi film.

I’ve been telling you about the film Children of Men, which is an absolute must-see. It’s been doing fairly well awards-wise so far, too. Gotta believe an Oscar nomination or two is in its future…

Today’s the final day for submitting entries in the 2007 Glyph Comics Awards. We’ll announce the list of this year’s nominees on February 19. The awards ceremony will be May 19 during the East Coast Black Age of Comics Convention.