Welcome back to The Rundown, our daily breakdown on comic news stories we missed from the weekend. Have a link to share? Email our team at rundown@multiversitycomics.com.
All right, so Emerald City Comic Con happened over this weekend, and there’s been plenty of news and announcements from that. Among them:
– Kodansha will be releasing a special box set for the 35th anniversary of “Akira”. All six volumes will be collected, but, maybe most exciting, the first time in English, “Akira” will be published in the unmirrored, right-to-left format, with “unaltered original art and Japanese sound effects.” It’s going to retail for $199.99, which is slightly more expensive than buying all the collections individually. (They run between $24.99 and $29.99 right now.) “Akira” was originally released when comics publishers set their manga translations in traditional Western reading formats, which meant mirroring the images and flipping the binding. I’m wondering how this reversion to the original will affect “Akira”. At the same time, I wish they would release the color versions again somewhere.
– Kodansha also announced that they’re the same day they’re dropped in Japan. Weekly titles will include “Fairy Tail,” “Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches”, and “GTO Paradise Lost,” with monthly and semiregular releases like “Attack on Titan”, “Princess Jellyfish”, and “Kiss Me, Not Him”. (I honestly don’t know what that last one is, but I dig the title.) “We’re so excited to completely cut the wait time for English-speaking manga fans,” said Chip Mosher, Senior Director of Communication for Comixology.
– Dark Horse and Boom! Studios are teaming up together for “Tarzan and the Planet of the Apes”. This five-issue series (long by Boom! standards) will be written by Tim Seeley and David F. Walker with art by Fernando Dagnino. Duncan Fegredo will provide the covers. Part of me is somewhat surprised that it took this long for these things to cross over.
– But the Dark Horse crossovers don’t end there! The publisher also announced a new series called “Predator vs. Judge Dredd vs. Aliens” written by John Layman and illustrated by Chris Mooneyham. Apparently it’s about Judge Dredd and Anderson (?) taking on a mad scientist who’s been creating his own xenomorphs, John Hammond style. “Enter Predator, left, hunting Alien and Judge alike.” It’s slated to be released at the end of July.
– This October, Dark Horse will finally release the first of their Moebius library collection. “The World of Edena” will be a deluxe 344-page hardcover collection retailing for $49.99. And if you’re balking at that price, remember that under Humonoids, it would probably go for two or three times as much (because they’re a bunch of gatekeepers). Anyway, Dark Horse will follow “The World of Edena” with “The Art of Edena”, the autobiographical four-part “Inside Moebius”, and “The Art of Moebius,” which features never before seen art and pieces from Moebius’s private collection.
– And finally, Dark Horse provided more details about Jeff Lemire and Dean Ornston’s upcoming series, “Black Hammer”. A superhero comic, it sounds a lot like Lemire is just off and doing whatever DC wouldn’t let him do, except now on his own terms.
– IDW, who’s recently had success publishing old Italian Disney comics, are branching out. Later this year, they’ll be publishing French Disney comics. Called “Mickey’s Craziest Adventures”, these will actually be collected as an oversized hardcover dropping this September. Some of these were apparently “a little too crazy to publish” in America; so I’m all aboard.
– Truthfully, I’m not sure how to react to this. I think this is the Wicket that would take down the Empire through their nightmares. NO WAIT! There’s a character in the “Campaign Podcast” who’s an Ewok bounty hunter and I feel this is probably closest to the terror that thing instills.
– So, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Black Panther” #1 (with art by Brian Starfleeze) came out last Wednesday and it was pretty solid. But this was Coates’s first time writing a comic, so he turned to a bunch of his contemporaries and friends for advice. There’s some interesting shop bits in the piece, but I think it’s fascinating seeing how all these different contributors have their own ways of bringing comic stories to life.
Continued below– On Friday we asked you which book announced at the Image Expo Spring 2016 you were most excited for, and the results are in!
At the time of this writing, the winner, with 20% of the vote, was “The Black Monday Murders,” the new Jonathan Hickman book with Tomm Coker. Shortly behind was “Moonshine” from Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso, and rounding up the top three was “Isola: Island of the Dead” by Brenden Fletcher and Karl Kerschl.
Make sure you check back Friday for our next Weekly Readers’ Poll!
