Comic-Con 09: other comic news

My highlights of Comic-Con news continues. Not being able to attend myself, I’m relying on Newsarama and Comic Book Resources. Here’s the best of the rest.

Dark Horse

• DH announced a series of horror comics, including ones with dogs (normal, not anthropomorphic) investigating haunted happenings. I really don’t follow horror, though.
• I’ve wanted to get into Usagi Yojimbo, but I haven’t come across it. Perhaps I’ll find the original graphic novel (a first for creator/writer/artist Stan Sakai’s samurai rabbit series) they announced, or the collections of earlier series.
• Unbound Saga, a story of a comic book character who turns on his creator, will be getting a Playstation Portable (PSP) game downloadable on the Playstation Network.
• Star Wars.com will debut a new comic series by Dark Horse called Invasion, set in the post movie Expanded Universe. (I’m still not getting a return to the Droids series, however. 😦 )
• There will also be an online comic based on the online version of the fan favorite Knights of the Old Republic game, available at Star Wars Old Republic.
• Lastly in Star Wars news is a series of “Adventures” digests, which they describe as “parent-friendly”, due to the stigma of “all ages” (which I tend to prefer, frankly). They’ve promised not to “dumb down” the stories for the kiddies, and it will be set during the original trilogy.

IDW Publishing

• The classic comic strip Bloom County will be collected for a series of hardcover books.
• Actor Michael Chiklis (Fantastic Four, The Shield, The Commish) is co-creating a series called Olympus, featuring a modern day battle between Zeus and “daddy” Chronus.
• IDW is actually going to do an ongoing series? Yes, featuring Doctor Who. Like the TV Series and the audio dramas (on BBC7, which I catch online when they air as part of “The 7th Dimension”), the stories will be presented in the seasonal style, which I assume means a set of stand alone stories within an overall arc ending in a finale. It will feature original companions, due to image rights concerns (The Forgotten was a special situation). The best news, however, is the writer: The Forgotten‘s writer, and occasional drive-by commenter to this very blog, Tony Lee! And they’re releasing it in July! It’s like IDW is giving me a birthday present! (Hopefully next July they’ll get me what I really want over at Transformers: a Bumblebee/Swoop buddy story! 😀 )
• Speaking of my favorite mechanoids in cognito, announced was Transformers: Coda, which is set between Maximum Dinobots and the current All Hail Megatron. AHM was originally a “What If” style story that became the new direction for IDW’s G1verse, so this should fill in the remaning gaps between the two directions.
• Also announced were Spotlight comics featuring Jazz, Metroplex, and IDW original character Drift, who may or may not be getting his own figure. There’s some debate in the fandom, based on what was or wasn’t on an Australian toy site.
• In the vein of Marvel’s Super Hero Squad comic strip, IDW will do “Hero” comics based on both Transformers and GI Joe. The “Hero” figurines started with Transformers (although there were Hero figures first based on Star Wars), and Hasbro does them for their Marvel license and GI Joe line.
• Speaking of TF and GI Joe, there are no plans to do a crossover (such as Marvel and Dreamwave/Devil’s Due did in the past, as well as this fansite) of the two licenses until IDW has properly established their individual series. However, there are plans for Beast Wars and Beast Machines comics sometime in the future. No actual projects at this time.

Image Comics

Note that normally I don’t care about Image, as…let’s just say their style doesn’t groove with mine. However, there are some things that needed noting.

• Robert Kirkman and Todd McFarlane are co-producing a comic series called Haunt. Maybe I just read the article too fast, but I have no idea what it’s about. However, with the Spider-Man-ish cover and the fact that Rob Liefeld is producing a Hulk knockoff called Smash, I can jump to conclusions and take a few guesses on the basics.
• John Howard is bringing his cult series Dead @ 17 to Image. Never heard of it.
• Chris Giarrusso, writer of the Mini-Marvels strips for Marvel Comics, will bring his style to Image with a series of G-Man digests. Wait, an Image comic I may want to read? Somebody check Nostradamus’s diary. That has to be in there somewhere.

in other news:

• A third volume of Kurt Busiek’s Astro City series The Dark Ages will be released by Wildstorm. I was only able to get one issue of the first series, and I do like it on a conceptual level.
• In addition to their Disney imprint (which will include re-imaginings of Disney’s live action movies–a thought that scares me considering Hollywood’s re-imaginings), Boom Studios announced Mark Waid will work on a super hero goes bad series called Irredeemable. They also announced a supernatural detective series (if I read it right) called The Unknown, about a detective trying to solve the mystery of death. This bears no resemblence to the comic idea of the same name I had back in the 90’s. How come nobody has heard of these comic names, but everyone keep using them? Now if they’d just steal the core concept as well, I could make some money.

• Among Dynamite’s announcements are a Sherlock Holmes series, Blackbeard, and more Project: Superpowers. Plus they added to their feud with Bruce Campbell over the Army of Darkness series.

And that ends all the comic news that grabbed my attention at this year’s Comic Con. There’s still TV and video game news, which I’ll get to in due time.