Welcome back to The Rundown, our daily breakdown on comic news stories we missed from the previous day. Have a link to share? Email our team at rundown@multiversitycomics.com.
In case you missed it, Titan announced a “Cowboy Bebop” comic based on the upcoming Netflix series.
– Per Publishers Weekly, HarperAlley will publish Ignatz Award-winning artist Ariel Slamet Ries’s young adult graphic novel “Strange Bedfellows.” The book will follow protagonist Oberon as he recovers from a public breakdown, and discovers he has the power to manifest his dreams in real life — including a facsimile of his high school crush. It is set for Summer 2024, with a follow-up due in Summer 2026. You can read more from Ries on the project, which marks their first non-webcomic, here.
– Scholastic/Graphix has acquired two standalone middle-grade graphic novels by Megan Wagner Lloyd and Michelle Mee Nutter (“Allergic”), “Luna” and “Ouch.” “Luna” will follow a 12-year old girl after she moves to her late mother’s hometown, and studies the naturalist notebooks she left behind; “Ouch,” meanwhile, will follow 11-year old adventurer River as she recovers from a car accident that has left her with a broken pelvis in the hospital. “Luna” will be released first in 2025.
– Eerdmans will publish “The Miracle Seed” by Martin Lemelman, a middle-grade science graphic novel about the Judean date palm, the extinct tree that scientists resurrected in 2005 with a preserved, 2000-year old seed. It will be released in English in Spring 2023. Furthermore, First Second has bought a new, middle-grade take on “The Odyssey” by writer Rey Terciero and artist Joe Casanova, which will follow a mouse on their journey back home to Odysseus’s kingdom of Ithaca. Publication is set for Fall 2025.
– Via ICv2, Last Gasp will publish “Barefoot Gen” creator Keiji Nakazawa’s prose memoir (the English title of which is currently translated as Barefoot Gen Can’t Forget), and a new edition of his autobiographical 1972 manga “I Saw It: The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima: A Survivor’s True Story.” Nakazawa, who died in 2012, survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima when he was six years old, and similarly channeled his experiences into the 1973-1987 manga “Barefoot Gen.” The memoir and the reprint will be published next year.
– Deadline reports Netflix has added ten regular cast members to Wednesday, the upcoming Addams Family spin-off series directed by Tim Burton. The show, which will star Jenna Ortega as Wednesday Addams, will also include Thora Birch (Ghost World), Riki Lindhome (Knives Out), Jamie McShane (Mank), Hunter Doohan (Your Honor), Georgie Farmer (Treadstone), Moosa Mostafa (Nativity Rocks!), Emma Myers (Girl in the Basement), Naomi J. Ogawa (Skylin3s), Joy Sunday (Dear White People) and Percy Hynes White (The Gifted). Catherine Zeta-Jones and Luis Guzmán will also appear in the series as Wednesday’s parents, Morticia and Gomez Addams.
– Variety states Marvel Studios are planning a Halloween special with a Latino lead actor for Disney+. It is unknown who the main character would be, but the casting search and theme suggests it may be Werewolf by Night, a Hopi incarnation of whom, Jake Gomez, was introduced in last year’s miniseries by co-writers Taboo (of the Black Eyed Peas) & Benjamin Jackendoff, and artist Scot Eaton. Marvel’s Disney+ slate also includes a Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, which will release in December 2022, before Vol. 3 hits theaters on May 5, 2023.
– Facebook has reportedly removed a 2018 post by Bill Sienkiewicz that spoke out against the harassment group ComicsGate. Sienkiewicz stated, “Apparently my 2018 open letter to the Comicsgate crowd has received renewed attention… It also now violates FB’s community standards against profanity and bullying. I REALLY think they missed the point.” You can read the artist’s original denouncement of the “whiny misunderstood victims bitching bout favoritism, intolerance, and sexism” at CBR.
– Finally, Emmy Award-winning actor Ed Asner passed away on Sunday morning, aged 91. Best known for playing Lou Grant on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and its spin-off Lou Grant, Asner was also a veteran voice actor, whose credits included Carl Fredricksen in Pixar’s Up; Granny Goodness in the DC Animated Universe; J. Jonah Jameson on the ’90s Spider-Man series; Hudson on Disney’s Gargoyles; and Sgt. Mike Cosgrove on Freakazoid! He was married twice (and twice divorced), and is survived by four children. Asner was politically and professionally active until his death, and will posthumously appear as Carl Fredricksen on the Disney+ short series Dug Days.
