“The Painted Man is a collection of coming of race memoirs that finds a dad confronted by racially charged questions posed directly by his young son and the people they come into contact with. Throughout the book father and son attempt to answer these questions organically, through experiences and interactions, or by soliciting the opinions of professionals in the fields of Early Childhood Education and Psychology.”

The Painted Man blog

LA Banks

‘Meet the Haunteds’ is a perfect set-up for social commentary on everything from race issues to family problems,’ said Carr. ‘This is another wonderful property from Platinum Studios, which is turning itself into the go-to independent comic book company.’”

This won’t even be out until next year and it’s already got a movie deal. How do these things happen?

Regardless, this better be an amazing book to overcome a premise like that.

Shadoweyes

“…Pug is the story of Jake Mahoney, a boxer who was an up-and-comer in 1956 but a down-and-outer when we meet him in 1962. He’s lost his wife, his family, and his career, and is living on the kindness of his girlfriend, a burlesque dancer with probably my favorite name I’ve ever come up with for a character: Kitten KaBoodle. Kitten’s dreaming of white picket fences with Jake, but he’s too hopelessly damaged by his past to think more than one day at a time. In a misguided effort to salvage a little of his self-respect, he starts working for a small-time loan shark, unwittingly putting himself on a collision course with the past he can’t stand to face.

“…Pug is a story I started thinking about in 1999 when I first decided I wanted to get back into comics. I call it the last of my cold-storage projects. My original concept for it was less noir-inflected, more of a minimalist Raymond Carver-type character drama, but when Greg Espinoza came on as the artist, my thinking started to go in other directions. Greg and I share an enthusiasm for hardboiled b-movies, and I began to think of Pug as a b-programmer from the late ‘50s or early ‘60s, something that would have starred somebody like Sterling Hayden. Once we had that in mind, it became a whole other thing – less Raymond Carver, more Budd Boetticher.”

Not much more than that at this point, but I’m sure we’ll get more soon.

Looks like they just conceived it. They left the writing to someone else (Peter Milligan, a very good someone else). I’m sure we’ll hear more about this in the coming weeks.

32 percent off on Amazon.

Female Force: Michelle Obama Year One

Amazon link to buy Female Force V1 TP

clip from The Simpsons (3.21.10) featuring Angela Bassett as Michelle Obama

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Also this week:

Hardware: The Man in the Machine TP

Political Power: Nelson Mandela

Star Trek Deep Space Nine: Fool’s Gold #4

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Also notable:

Green Lantern #52. Blackest Night tie-in.

Avengers: The Initiative #34, New Avengers #63. Siege tie-ins.

Animal Crackers: A Gene Yuen Lang Collection TP. The American Born Chinese creator gets a re-release of some of his older comics work.

Archie Wedding TP

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Directors Ron Clements and John Musker promote the DVD release of The Princess and the Frog.

Here are the advance solicitations for the new editions of Superman vs. Muhammad Ali. Note the differences in sizes and prices for the two different versions:

SUPERMAN VS. MUHAMMAD ALI FACSIMILE EDITION HC
Advance-solicited
On sale November 10
Facsimile edition: 80 pg, 10” x 13.25”, FC, $39.99 US
Written by DENNIS O’NEIL & NEAL ADAMS
Art by NEAL ADAMS, DICK GIORDANO & TERRY AUSTIN
Cover by NEAL ADAMS
The legendary science fiction epic that brought together The Man of Steel and The Greatest is back in two spectacular hardcover editions!
In 1978, an alien race called the Scrubb demands that Earth’s greatest champion battle their world’s own greatest fighter. Both Superman and Muhammad Ali step forward — and to determine who is truly Earth’s greatest fighter, Superman temporarily loses his powers and faces Ali in the ring. Ultimately, the duo must work together to defeat the Scrubb, with Ali taking on their champion while Superman battles their space-armada.
The facsimile edition hardcover reprints this hard–to–find title at its original size of approximately 10” wide by 13.25” high!

SUPERMAN VS. MUHAMMAD ALI DELUXE EDITION HC
Advance-solicited
On sale November 10
Deluxe edition: 96 pg, 7.0625” x 10.875”, FC, $19.99 US

The deluxe edition hardcover is printed at 7.0625” x 10.875” and features a new cover by Neal Adams, previously unpublished artwork and more!

Also advance-solicited is Mat Johnson’s Hurricane Katrina GN Dark Rain:

DARK RAIN: A NEW ORLEANS STORY HC
On sale AUGUST 18
160 pg, 2-Color, $24.99 US
MATURE READERS
Written by MAT JOHNSON
Art by SIMON GANE
Cover by NESSIM HIGSON
“DARK RAIN has the twists of The Treasure Of the Sierra Madre, the political punch of When The Levees Broke and the character interplay of The Defiant Ones.” – Reginald Hudlin, writer of Black Panther, director of Boomerang
From Mat Johnson, writer of the acclaimed INCOGNEGRO, comes a graphic novel thriller set in the days after Hurricane Katrina. Two small-time ex-cons with big dreams get the idea that this would be the perfect time to rob a bank. Catch is, the bank is in New Orleans, and they’re on parole in Houston. Now, as every sane person tries to get out of The Big Easy, Emmit and Dabny will do whatever it takes to get in.
As they journey through a tide of human suffering, Dabny wants to help, and Emmit sees only the money. But a rogue commander of the ruthless security force “Dark Rain” has his sights set on taking down the same bank. If Emmit and Dabny don’t outrace him, their last hope for a second chance could be washed away in the floodwaters – along with their lives.

The Comics Journal’s Tom Crippen discusses the potential character change, comparing it to the original incarnation of Ebony as created by the late Will Eisner:

…“attitude (sass)” is a long way off from summing up Ebony White. Yes, he’s mischievous sometimes, but he’s quixotic sometimes. He’s a lot of things: officious, greedy, tender, poetic, warm-hearted. Maybe you could put “sassy” in there, but the word isn’t his hallmark. Ebony makes noise, but the noise isn’t about himself; it’s just a byproduct of him leading his life. He isn’t staking out a place for himself, and he isn’t trying to brush people back. For a 12-year-old black kid in 1947, his position with the Spirit and Dolan, et al., is magically secure and well respected. He doesn’t have to be sassy: he can say what he thinks.

When Darwyn Cooke relaunched The Spirit a few years ago, he set it in modern times (though he kept the 40s-noir atmosphere) and made Ebony a regular kid, in both looks and dialogue. And of course, director Frank Miller did away with him altogether in his film version of The Spirit. This is different; the intent with First Wave (essentially an Elseworlds story, not unlike New Frontier) is to be faithful to the spirit of the pulp hero era. According to Azzarello in the CBR interview, he has the consent of Eisner’s estate to reinterpret the Spirit as he sees fit. Apparently this also extends to the Spirit’s supporting cast.

I’ve always had a blind spot regarding The Spirit, specifically because of Ebony. I have read Eisner Spirit strips with and without Ebony, but it’s next to impossible for me to truly enjoy them. If the purpose of First Wave is to evoke the pulp hero era, this does put Azzarello in a bind, since it’s hard to write about this time period without dealing with the prejudices inherent in that era, especially when one includes POCs in the story (First Wave will also include the Blackhawks, with a reimagined version of Asian character Chop Chop).

Granted, as Crippen says, Ebony enjoys an unusually privileged position as the Spirit’s sidekick, but it’s a fantasy, and how much one is willing to buy into this fantasy depends on how one sees the character within the context of the strip. How often does the Spirit step into Ebony’s world? How aware is he of the life Ebony would very likely live as a black male child in 1940s America? I don’t know for certain, but I suspect Eisner may not have had these questions in mind when he was creating the strip – and even if he did, it’s highly unlikely he would have been allowed to tell stories that address these issues.

Making Ebony a “brash, sassy girl,” however, may not be the best answer. The sassy black female is a greatly-overused stereotype in pop culture. It makes black women seem shrewish and unsophisticated and is almost always played for laughs. I don’t believe Azzarello would consciously feed into that stereotype, but by invoking the words “brash” and “sassy,” one cannot help but draw the correlation. And lest we forget, this would not be the first time Azzarello has written black characters with unfortunate implications, as anyone who remembers his Luke Cage mini-series will recall.

I’d rather Azzarello wrote the Ebony-Spirit relationship honestly: make them partners, make them heroes, but at the same time let each be aware of the positions each other occupies in their world as a result of their race. It’s not something that needs to be in the reader’s face every time we see them, but it needs to lurk just below the surface, ready to pop up at any time. And the same should apply to Black Canary and Chop Chop. Anything less will come across – to this reader, at least – as flawed.

Isn’t Archie a married man now?

Raven Gregory

PRODIGAL: EGG OF FIRST LIGHT #1

It’s a rough week for “retrieval specialists” Jacinto & Lennox. On Monday the Egg of First Light is stolen. On Tuesday J &L are hired to get it back. By Thursday alien magic, deadly super warriors and global Armageddon stand between them and their payday. Friday: Ka-Boom?

Ask your local Comic Shop retailer to order Prodigal: Egg of First Light #1 in the FEB issue of Previews.

DCD Item # DEC090660

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Geoffrey Thorne is a sci-fi writer who also dabbles in comics. Us Star Trek fans know him for some of the Trek novels and short stories he’s written, the most recent one being Star Trek Titan: Sword of Damocles, so I can attest to his skill as a writer. The link takes you to a preview of the entire book, and from what I can tell, it’s not bad. Light action-adventure, lively dialogue, very good art. Pretty straightforward. Let’s see how it does.

[Full disclosure: This book is being released through the publishing house of a former editor of mine.]

“So brace yourself for more sacrificial beasts than you can shake a stick at (if that’s your idea of a good time — and if you’re Jacob, it is), along with the grand characters you know and love from Genesis and the high-concept special effects of Exodus.

“It all begins with the beginning…”

Found on Facebook: this forthcoming graphic novel that reinterprets the Torah of the Judaic faith with a number of quirky flourishes. Why does it get a mention here? Because co-creator Aaron Freeman is a brother. Check out his website; the guy’s got quite a history.

Check out more pages from the book here. Looks like a winner to me.

Reuniting the original artists = EPIC WIN.

“We were looking to really focus on what was special about the series, which to us was its frontier nature… Unlike the other Trek series, which were all about exploration, ‘Deep Space Nine’ was about just the opposite: about staying in one place, making a commitment, and finding a way to make it work, in the face of adversity. And alongside people that you might not necessarily have chosen to work and live with in an ideal situation. With that in mind, we knew our story needed to be focused on the station itself in some way. So, when the station is overrun by mysterious soldiers of fortune from across the galaxy, it creates a powder keg on DS9 with a very short fuse.”

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Totally missed this, but better late than never: Mat Johnson’s next Vertigo graphic novel will be about Hurricane Katrina.