A Comic Book Convention In Chicago?

By | Monday, June 30, 2008 2 comments
I have to admit to being extremely surprised at Wizard World Chicago this past weekend. Although you probably won't hear similar comments from the standard "comic" news sources, there was actually a comic book convention at WWC... it was just hidden in the back, far behind the Marvel and DC booths and the throngs of people dressed up as Spider-Man and the Joker.

Let me hit a couple of high points off the bat, and I'll try to make a more detailed post later in the day...
  • Jeremy Bastian's Cursed Pirate Girl is coming out as a 6-issue mini series this fall from Image. Absolutely stunning artwork. Even more stunning is that he draws his books at actual size and inks them entirely with a brush! (He's also made himself near-sighted by doing this.)
  • Christopher Schons is still working on Earthlight for Tokyopop. He was already part-way through drawing the third volume when news began to hit about some of the problems they're running into. Tokyopop still wants him to finish the 100 or so pages he has left, but it will be published only on their web site sometime in the fall. He's working on another project for them as well, that will ALSO be published exclusively online. It seems that Tokyopop still has hopes in retaining good talent and viable properties, so they're only cutting back on production costs.
  • Lorenzo Lizana is in discussions with Ape Entertainment to print his Scarab: Agent of Isis and get it out of the self-published realm.
  • Taki Soma and Michael Avon Oeming have a top secret project coming out later this year from a "major publisher" that will be formally announced in San Diego. An NDA prevented them from disclosing any real details at this time.
I also discovered several new creators and comics that look/sound quite interesting. I'll post some notes about them later as I go through some of the promo materials I picked. I've also got a few anecdotes from the show that I'll try to post later today.

But the upshot was that there WAS indeed a bona fide comic book convention going on, despite all the hoopla about Secret Invasions and whatnot. Who knew?
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You know, you could save yourself some typing if you just copy and paste this a few times:

"Hey everyone! I stopped reading superhero comics! I'm a comics snob now too! Have I mentioned I no longer read superhero comics? They're so beneath me."

mmmmm. said...

It's especially tragic because there's really no one else covering superhero comics at Wizard World. GODDAMN YOU KLEEFELD.