Brain Bleach: Kenneth Rocafort Ruins Lobo

Take a good long look at the picture of the Main Man, Lobo, over there to the left. Drink it in, because the artist who teamed up with Scott Lobdell to help ruin the launch of Red Hood And The Outlaws in DC’s new 52 is at it again. Cheesecake master extraordinaire Kenneth Rocafort has redesigned indestructible space antihero Lobo for Marguerite Bennett’s take on the character in upcoming Justice League #23.2: Lobo. Gone will be the over muscled, heavy metal biker look that has been the character’s hallmark for decades. Instead, Rocafort will be giving us an athletic-looking, sanitized Lobo with the vapid features of a plastic surgery victim. Indeed, Lobo seems to be getting the full PG-13 makeover, as was similarly inflicted on John Constantine with the demise of Hellblazer. Huzzah for mediocrity! Check it out, after the jump.

Don’t Go Back To Nahant: Boston Comic Con 2013’s Locke & Key Panel Full Report

Editor’s Note: If this writeup of Sunday’s Locke & Key panel sounds fun, you can see a bunch of video from the panel, with a lot of additional information that didn’t make this report, right here.

If Boston Comic Con had a single event that no other convention, regardless of size or location, could reproduce in 2013, it was the Locke & Key panel, because it featured all the main players in the production of the book: writer Joe Hill, artist Gabriel Rodriguez, and IDW Editor-in-Chief Chris Ryall. And considering that the book is coming to a conclusion in just a few months, and therefore all of these guys will be moving on to other projects, if you ever wanted to see these three guys interact and talk about Locke & Key while it’s an ongoing concern, the only place to be was the Waterfront Room at the Seaport World Trade Center at 2 p.m. on Sunday.

The one thing that that panel didn’t have was a hell of a lot in the way of actual news, but who the hell expected that? We all know the comic is closing up shop (minus the odd rumored one-shot, which wasn’t something that was addressed at the panel), we all know that the Fox pilot for a TV series is two years dead, and the Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (of Star Trek reboot fame)-produced Locke & Key movie is only a month and a half into its existence, and there’s no way in hell that they would allow any hard information to be released in a function room full of people wearing t-shirts reading, “Yankees Suck!”

So these guys were not facing a crowd that was rabid for any new information (beyond maybe how, and who will make, Dodge eventually suck the pipe, but even that was a low-key questions; after all, the final issue is just about on its way), which meant that tensions were low for the panel, and it showed. The panel unofficially started with Hill looking at his phone at the stroke of 2 p.m., grabbing a microphone, and saying, “Guys, this just in: the BBC just announced that the next Doctor will be Jason Statham!”

And when the crowd groaned, Hill said, “It would be awesome, and you know it!”

Yeah, this panel looked to just be a good time. And it was.

Closing The Door: Video From Joe Hill’s and Gabriel Rodriguez’s Locke & Key Panel At Boston Comic Con 2013

Boston Comic Con is now over, and it certainly has one thing over the San Diego Comic-Con: getting back to the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office from Boston Comic Con only took 20 minutes and cost $2.50 on the Massachusetts Turnpike.

Boston Comic Con might well have been a pleasant surprise and an exciting jump from a little regional convention to one that feels more and more like one of the bigger boys, but it certainly wasn’t perfect. In the coming day or two, either Amanda or I will be addressing the truly deficient methods this convention had for dealing with crowds both attempting to enter the convention and trying to attend the panels (for now, let’s leave it with the stark reality that, if someone tried to clear a convention room at SDCC in between panels, that effort would start with bemused laughter and end with a truly epic riot), but Boston provided some experiences that were indistinguishable from some of the biggest and best conventions in the world.

And one of those experiences is exhaustion. We are wiped out. And unlike when we attend San Diego, we don’t have a long flight and several vacation days with which we can recover; we’re right back to our daily lives tomorrow morning.

So while we will be publishing that general Boston Comic Con postmortem, as well as detailed coverage of Joe Hill’s, Gabriel Rodriguez’s, and IDW Editor-in-Chief Chris Ryall’s panel on Locke & Key (which, since Locke & Key is concluding, realistically marks the final time these creators will probably be in the same room at the same time), we didn’t want to leave you hanging while we weakly sip beer and appreciate our art purchases (Amanda picked up a J. O’Barr original sketch of Iggy Pop that is as awesome as it is an off-kilter work by the creator of The Crow) while yawning.

So in that spirit, here is a series of short videos we took of Hill and Rodriguez at the Locke & Key panel. And I gotta tell you: if you get a chance to see either of these guys at a convention panel, take it. Rodriguez is clearly enthusiastic about the work he does, and Hill is just plain old laugh-out-loud funny to see speak.

But don’t take my word for it; you can get a taste, straight from our YouTube Channel, right after the jump.

SDCC 2013 Odds And Sods, Part 2: The Avengers, X-Men, Dr. Strange and Sgt. Fury 50th Anniversary Panel

And finally, here is the last of it. The last panel we attended at San Diego Comic-Con on Sunday, July 21st, before the convention-closing screening of Buffy The Vampire Slayer‘s musical episode, Once More With Feeling: The Avengers, X-Men, Dr. Strange and Sgt. Fury 50th Anniversary panel, featuring classic Marvel writer Roy Thomas, current writer Brian Michael Bendis, and artist John Romita, Jr.

There wasn’t anything revealed that you could particularly call “news” at this panel. Hell, there wasn’t even a hell of a lot of information about the creations of The Avengers, The X-Men, or any of the rest (although we did learn that Thomas made The Vision an android because hey! Stan Lee says stuff sometimes!). But what we did get were some cool and inspirational stories of what it was like to be at Marvel right around the time when Fantastic Four was breaking, what it was like to grow up around one of the premier Spider-Man artists of the late 60s, early 70s, and what it was like to grow up in Brian Michael Bendis’s broken home! Well, I guess some stories are inspirational only in their aftermath.

But even if the panel didn’t have anything new to say about the modern world of comics, I can think of worse ways to close out the convention than to hear about what the world of comics was like when legends were being created every month, when characters who would literally change some of our lives were being spitballed to meet a deadline on a Sunday afternoon, and when a man could get a gig writing some of the most legendary books in Marvel history by filling out a workbook on his lunch break.

And even if you weren’t there, you can check some of it out right here. We have a few videos of some of the cooler stories – not the best videos we’ve ever shot, but you can see who’s talking and get the whole stories – right here after the jump.

SDCC 2013 Odds And Sods, Part One: DC’s Meet The Publishers Panel

We are coming up on the final bits and pieces of coverage we took from this year’s San Diego Comic-Con – yes, I know the convention ended eight days ago, but it turns out we had a lot of video to sort through, and a significant percentage of that video needed extensive processing on an actual computer in order to make it into something that YouTube would recognize as a video file, as opposed to some form of data wad, or perhaps a Word file detailing our manifesto and list of demands.

But the computer has done its work and dinged like a toaster oven (as we all know computers do), so we are finally proud to present a series of videos from DC Comics’s Meet The Publishers panel, held on Sunday, July 21st and featuring Co-Publishers Jim Lee and Dan DiDio. And you can say what you want about, say, DiDio (God knows we do, repeatedly), but there is no denying that the guy runs an entertaining panel with an infectious enthusiasm, which even Lee gets caught up in.

This was a fun panel, and we’re happy to bring you, a day late and a buck short, a small piece of it, along with some art that was shown to crowd at the panel. You can check them out after the jump.

Monkeys Are Funny: New Pinocchio: Vampire Slayer Story Forthcoming

Editor’s Note, 7/29/2013, 8:30 a.m.: Article updated with quotes from Pinocchio: Vampire Slayer writer Van Jensen, and we thank him for his comments.

In addition, we originally reported that original Pinocchio: Vampire Slayer publisher Slave Labor Graphics was publishing the omnibus. Instead, the publisher is Top Shelf Productions. We regret the error, and have updated the piece to reflect the changes.

It’s been a little under about a year since the final chapter of Pinocchio: Vampire Slayer by writer Van Jensen and artist Dusty Higgins, Of Wood And Blood, was released in trade paperback and digital comics formats. And while that book was a blast, that seemed to be pretty much it. Trilogy completed, Jensen moved on to write Green Lantern Corps for DC Comics, and Higgins seems to be working on a children’s book based on stories told to him by his daughter.

So that’s it, right? All Jensen’s and Higgins’s Pinocchio stories told, correct?

Yeah, no. Apparently they have at least one more story left in them, if not more. Robot 6 is reporting that Slave Labor Graphics has announced that Jensen and Higgins are planning to release a short story prequel to the trilogy, based on that one panel in the original where they talk about Pinocchio fighting a vampire gorilla. Remember that?

Yeah, me neither (What do you want from me? I read it ten months ago). So here’s the panel:

No Extinction: Avatar Press SDCC 2013 Panel

And here we are: our final article covering San Diego Comic-Con 2013 (except for a bunch of video that my high-toned, dedicated video camera seems to have mangled, unless my actual computer here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office can do anything to salvage them), five days after the convention ended and more than a week after the actual panel occurred. But what the hell; given my crippling hangover and intestinal issues born from the fried chicken sandwich and fries I washed down with five black IPAs at a bar last night, it feels like I’m still at SDCC. So let’s just plow ahead, shall we?

The Avatar Press panel on Thursday morning, July 18th, with Avatar Founder and Editor-In-Chief William Christensen and World War Z and Extinction Parade writer Max Brooks, was the first panel we hit during SDCC 2013, and in some ways it set the tone for the whole convention. The room wasn’t full, but there was a healthy crowd for a comic book related panel on the most off day of the convention. Not that there are any off days at SDCC anymore, but if there is a day that qualifies, it’s this mid-week opening to the full-blown festivities. Unlike Preview Night, the whole convention center is open, and cosplayers are more plentiful, all of which draws people off the floor and makes it at least tolerable to move around; there’s nothing like a set of jugs in a spandex Power Girl suit to peel off the rubes so you can get where you’re going.

But where we were going was a panel, and we were going there later than we should. Which meant we could get a seat up front and to the side… right in front of the projector many panels use to put up new art for display. Which meant that, as a six foot tall gentleman, I spent the panel hunched over like Frankenstein’s delivery boy to stay out of the projector light, scribbling notes almost on my side as if trying to write “I am having a stroke” for the paramedics, just in case Christensen and Brooks put some new art up on the screen.

Which they did not. Every table at every panel at Comic-Con has a posted sign for presenters, reminding them that members of the crowd might be younger than 18. And every fan of Avatar comics knows that there is very little art that they could project that would be appropriate for children. There is very little Avatar art that would not make children long for the sweet release of death, or at least blindness, to tell you the truth. Avatar books are for adults, and that is on purpose.

“I just do books I want to read,” Christensen said. “It will always be intense work for adults.”

It’s The End Of The World As We Know It: Marvel’s SDCC 2013 Ultimate Universe Panel

So yes: the Marvel Ultimate Universe panel, held on Friday, July 19th at the San Diego Comic-Con. I’ve mentioned it a few times over the past few days, not because there were any Earth-shattering revelations at the panel (you know, beyond the question as to whether the Ultimate Universe has any future at all beyond the next few months), but as an example of how difficult it can be to truly cover any of these panels direct from the convention. When you get back to the hotel from a long day on the floor, and you’re staring at four pages of handwritten notes, one bar of $15-a-night WiFi, and your eyes look like you’ve been on a three-day meth jag in a smoke-filled room, it’s hard to sit in front a a keyboard and whip together anything that makes any sense at all.

But from the comfort of the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office, it seems, in my opinion, like the subtext of the panel is that Marvel intends to kick the living shit out of the Ultimate Universe for a while, blowing some stuff up really good, before either spiking the concept of the Ultimate Universe as a whole and somehow folding it into the 616, or at least finally and officially turning it into some kind of a defacto Earth 2 for the Marvel Universe, with people traveling back and forth just as often as they did in the DC Universe back in the 60s and 70s.

So in short: it looks like Marvel intends to totally fuck up the Ultimate Universe. Must be a year with a San Diego Comic-Con.

Turbulence: SDCC 2013 Skybound Comics Panel

It is getting late in San Diego Comic-Con, and the true fatigue hysteria is beginning to set in. I personally have not slept longer than six hours in the past four nights, and considering my diet in that time has varied wildly from gourmet triple-creme brie to greasy patty melts to tater tots, washed down with everything from Starbucks iced coffee to Stone IPA to hotel room self-brewed coffee to Coors Light, I am beginning to break down physically. And considering I am writing this with only about two hours to spare before I have to haul my shattered carcass to the convention floor to attempt to obtain some Goddamned thing called a Plush Zerg for contributor Lance Manion (and knowing Lance, this “convention exclusive” can only be obtained in the third stall of the mezzanine men’s room), I am staring goggle-eyed at a notebook full of details from yesterday’s Skybound Comics panel.

Skybound is, if you are not familiar, the personal publishing imprint at Image Comics for creator of The Walking Dead Robert Kirkman. Meaning that, if you have picked up one of Kirkman’s comics – The Walking Dead, Invincible, or Super Dinosaur, off the top of my head – it was a Skybound book. But it is not a vanity imprint by any stretch of the imagination; Kirkman has been bringing other creators into the fold to release books, including the recent Thief of Thieves. And based on what we were told in the panel yesterday, there are a variety of other books on the way, covering genres from westerns to horror to 70s grindhoue-style revenge flicks, indicating that if we wait long enough, we will eventually see the Skybound bullet on a romance comics, if not some form of furry yiff-tacular.

Jesus, I’m tired.

Joe’s Comics. And Joe’s Movies. And Joe’s TV Shows: SDCC 2013’s Spotlight On J. Michael Straczynski

We attended several panels yesterday, and will be writing up more extensive write-ups of at least one of them later or tomorrow (Robert Kirkman’s Skybound panel in particular was interesting), but in the meantime, I wanted to put up something that was interesting, but not particularly comics newsworthy.

Every year of the eight we have attended San Diego Comic-Con, J. Michael Straczynski has hosted a Spotlight panel, where he talks about some of the stuff that he’s working on, but mostly spends his time answering any and all questions posed to him. Be they inquiries about the infamous “Spider-Man Sells His Soul To The Devil To Get Younger Poontang” story in One More Day, or the reasoning behind taking on the controversial Before Watchmen books, to whether or not he liked The Hobbit, he will answer any question… provided it isn’t posed by some naive foreigner.

And you can see this for yourself, as we took video of big chunks of Straczynski’s panel this year, and have included those videos here. But now, a disclaimer: some of these videos may or may not have minor hitches in them. I’m seeing them on my two-year-old tablet via shitty hotel WiFi, but then again, on this rotten, overloaded connection (that only cost me $14.95! For 24 whole hours! And, due to the three hours it took to upload a handful of minute-long video clips, prevented me from publishing this last night as originally intended!), Web pages chug when I try to load them in Lynx. So your mileage on a wired connection may vary. If you find them distracting, I apologize.

Either way, you can check them out (and learn his criticisms of The Bible’s literary merit) after the jump.