Iron Fan – Iron Man Mini-Series Poll!

As Iron Fan Week rolls on we’ve got another chance for all you Iron Fans out there to show your support for ol’ Shell Head with an exciting new poll!

Sure, we’re all onboard with Tony Stark’s legendary exploits in the 616 Universe, but what about all those off-shot adventures and action packed mini-series?

Vote for your favorite Iron Man mini-series today then be sure to join the party over on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ this week as more Iron Fan action heads your way!

Vote Now

Iron Fan – Iron Man Armor Poll!

As Iron Fan Week continues we’re on a mission to end the timeless debut over which Iron  Man armor is the coolest!

• Prefer the rude and crude look of the Mark ! over the sleek retro fit of the Mark III? Let us know!
• Rather see Tony go toe-toe with the Mandrian in the Mark V over the sheen and shine of the Extremis armor? Vote today!
• Love the classic style of the original Silver Centurion suit? Show your support by casting your love!
• Think Hulkbuster Iron Man is the strongest there is? What are you waiting for!?

Be apart of all the action by casting your vote in our Iron Man Armor poll right here. Click on each suit for the comic it first appeared in and  join the #IronFan discussion over on Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus today! Be sure to tell your friends and keep an eye out for more Iron Man action coming your way later this week!

Which One Is Your Favorite?

Vote Now!

The Smurfs are back in new digital comic form with their own dedicated iOS App

Download The Smurfs App here http://cmxl.gy/SmurfsComics

New York, NY / July 18^th, 2011 – In celebration of the all-new Smurfs movie, Papercutz, The Smurfs graphic novel publisher since September 2010, has partnered with comiXology, the leading distributor of digital comics, to launch a dedicated Smurfs App for the iOS. The Smurfs App will initially contain seven volumes and over 450 pages of Smurftastic adventures and fun for all ages!

Papercutz proudly brings these acclaimed comics to digital format for the very first time. “I grew up with these comics, they truly are classics. It’s a shame that these books, which have been in print forever everywhere else on Earth, have been out-of-print for so long in America, which is why we decided to publish them in print and digitally,” says Terry Nantier, Papercutz’s Publisher.

“Not many people realize that the Smurfs originally appeared in comics before they were adapted to animation,” continued Mr. Nantier. “Which is why we partnered with comiXology to bring the Smurfs original graphic novel adventures to our fan base in digital form with its own iOS app.”

The Smurfs, created by Pierre Culliford, known as Peyo, became so popular when they first appeared in the series Johan et Pirlouit that soon they were awarded their own graphic novel series. After an animated movie in 1976, the Smurfs starred in their own blockbuster Saturday morning TV series on NBC starting in 1981. The hit series was responsible for creating Smurf-mania, and the Smurfs were suddenly everywhere – toys, bed sheets, breakfast cereals, and more. The Smurfs aired nine seasons, and still runs on Cartoon Network’s Boomerang channel and is now available on DVD.

“The Smurfs are such an iconic brand that Papercutz has done a great job revitalizing and this app is a testament to that,” said David Steinberger, CEO of comiXology. “Having been out of print for so long, this app will ensure that anyone who wants to enjoy Smurf comics will be able to at their convenience.”

Each Smurfs volume is full-color and in comiXology’s Guided View^TM Technology that allows you to seamlessly transition from panel to panel for only $3.99. Any Smurf comics purchased will also sync with the Comics and Comics4kids iOS apps, the Comics Android app and comics.comixology.com.

A list of all the volumes and the single issue are listed below:

• The Smurfs Vol. 1: The Purple Smurf
• The Smurfs Vol. 2: The Magic Flute
• The Smurfs Vol. 3: The Smurf King
• The Smurfs Vol. 4: Smurfette
• The Smurfs Vol. 5: The Smurfs and the Egg
• The Smurfs Vol. 6: The Smurfs and the Howlibird
• The Smurfs Vol. 7: The Astro Smurf
• The Smurfs: The Smurfnapper #1

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About comiXology

Since 2007 comiXology has been developing the technological infrastructure to bring comics into the digital mainstream and expose new audiences to the rich history and culture of the industry. Through partnerships with top comic book publishers including Marvel Comics, DC Comics, IDW Publishing, Archaia Entertainment, BOOM! Studios, Dynamite Entertainment and Image Comics as well as their own mobile and web apps which hosts over 10,000 digital titles, comiXology has become a leader in digital comic book proliferation. Also focused on creating strong ties with retail stores through its technology solutions, comiXology continues to transform the previously fragmented comic ecosystem into a vibrant and cohesive marketplace.

About Papercutz

Papercutz is dedicated to publishing the very best comics and graphic novels for audiences of all-ages, In the spring of 2005, Papercutz launched its line of graphic novels to great success, bringing Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys into comics for the first time in many years.  Papercutz has continued to grow over the years and is also publishes popular graphic novels Bioncles, Classics Illustrated, Disney Fairies, Geronimo Stilton, and Tales from the Crypt.

The two principals of Papercutz are Terry Nantier, founder of a leading literary graphic novel publishing company and pioneer in the field, and Jim Salicrup, the fan-fave editor who built up Spider-Man while at Marvel and who was Editor-in-Chief at Topps Comics, publishing X-Files and Xena comics, among others.

Contact:

Tracey Daniels

Media Masters Publicity/Papercutz

828-859-9456

tracey@mmpublicity.com

Trace Cohen

comiXology PR

516-225-7417

tcohen@ifluencepr.com

Get Ready for the Rise of The Planet of The Apes.

In preparation for the summer blockbuster comiXology is rolling out another exclusive digital comic tie-in. This time the apes are on the rise and ready to take over your digital reader device just in time for RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES.

A free online digital comic book prequel to Twentieth Century Fox’s epic motion picture RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. The comic, whose story is set before the events detailed in the film, presents an epic tale of two apes brutally taken from the wild and driven into a life of captivity and experimentation – a journey that will alter the fate of the world forever.

Acclaimed PLANET OF THE APES comic series writer Daryl Gregory and sensational artists Damian Couceiro (HAWKS OF OUTREMER) and Tony Parker (DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?) set the stage for… RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, the first live-action film in the history of movies to star and be told from the point of view of a sentient animal – a character with human-like qualities, who can strategize, organize and ultimately lead a revolution, and with whom audiences will experience a real emotional bond. The film was impossible to make until the technology, invented for Avatar and now advanced to a new dimension, caught up to the idea behind the movie. A new free five page RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES digital comic book story debuts each Wednesday until the final 10 page epic conclusion on August 3rd, two days before the film’s release!

Keep an eye out over the coming weeks for the additional prequel chapters to find out what happens before the film hits theaters! Plus don’t forget to check back often for more upcoming new releases from Boom! Studios and other great publishers. This summer the apes are on the rise, and it all starts right here on comiXology.

True Grit: Mean Business read the dime novel for FREE!

Rooster Cogburn rides again, and while it’s anyone’s guess just how far the Coen Brothers recent box office hit will go this award season, comic fans can get a head start on the all the gunslinging suspense with a brand new comic adaptation True Grit: Mean Business.

Just in time for the new  film True Grit: Mean Business is a dime novel in comic book form. Adapted by indie comic sensation Christian Wildgoose this new take on the classic novel by Charles Portis makes for an enthralling read for fans of the western genre and comics alike.

When a small squad of U.S. Marshals  have to escort a caravan of prisoners across the rural american west they cross path’s with a young boy with despairing news. Setting off a chain of events that leads to a riveting trial and the perfect starting point for the film.

Read True Grit: Mean Business in the comiXology web store or download it directly from the app. Both of which feature the book for FREE!

Second Helpings: The Return of Bruce Wayne #5

Grant Morrison’s The Return of Bruce Wayne has been one of the more critically lauded superhero runs of the year. Despite this, one dogged attack on the book (and of Morrison as a writer) still haunts me; namely complains of Morrison’s experimentations with the bat legacy and his free use of continuity. Morrison has taken Bruce Wayne from his genesis as Batman through to death and back again. As if death was not enough, The Return of Bruce has seen our hero take on the Batman mantle throughout the ages, finding new contexts for his vigilantism in various historical Gothams.

The latest issue finds Batman in a …ehhhh… post Martha and Thomas Wayne Gotham? Temporal specificity is a damning trick here. When the hell were Bruce Wayne’s parents killed?  Batman’s original Detective Comics origin story came to the public in 1939. Does this suggest then that they were killed in the 1920’s? Being a hero in a continuous prime, his origin is unset.

This fifth issue of The Return of Bruce Wayne summons up period detail but refuses to align itself with a single period.The world Bruce finds himself in this latest issue is a rough noir sketch of the world Batman originally entered in the Detective Comics of the late 30s and early 40s. We’ve got an obliging hardboiled intro narration and Bruce even makes a one off joke about being given a pinstripe ‘gangster’ suit. This temporal color plays out nicely until we see Morrison fixture (and  forties Detective Comics relic) Prof. Carter Nichols enter the story wearing the quintessentially 70s ‘Have a Nice Day’ shirt, replete with giant smiley. This detail has been a contentious one for readers. It seems to be a glaring anachronism. But how are we meant to date this period in Batman’s personal history? If he is permanently in his prime, shouldn’t the death of his parents be fluid, continuously shifting back twenty years, give or take. This admixture of times seem appropriate for Morrison’s aims. He has tried to synthesize the character, bringing an understanding to the entirety of his history. It was easy to intellectualize his choice but I wasn’t sure how I felt about it in practice.

Flash forward to this weekend. I am channel browsing and happen upon the heaping brilliance of asynchronicity that is Tim Burton’s Batman. I hadn’t seen the film in a few years. What I saw in the 15 minutes I watched it was a free melding of time and tone. The film shifts from noir, to slapstick, to over-produced gothic blockbuster and back again. For backdrops we’ve got post-Regan urban squalor and parodies of old Hollywood soundstages. Instead of Heath Ledger’s reliably insane Joker we’ve got Jack Nicholson’s swaggering. He plays the part like the bastard son of Fred Astraire and Jack Torrance, camping it up in one dancey moment only to be utterly menacing the next. Oh, and the film has got Prince. Despite (or because of) its free use of continuity, the 1989 Batman film became a huge blockbuster and a primer for superhero adaptations to come.

While this self-aware Batman has been replaced by the grittiness of the Nolan Batman films, its initial success should be a reminder for readers of Return. While Morrison might be renowned as a alien abductee, doper, or high priest of metaphysics, he is just as concerned with spinning a damn entertaining yarn and is not afraid to play with boundaries to get there.

Watch this space: Hack/Slash gets a new image

Ross Campbell's variant cover for Hack/Slash #6

Tim Seeley’s horror movie homage Hack/Slash (read over 40 Hack/Slash digital comics online, or on your iPhone/iPad) has grown rapidly, since its debut in 2004, from curiosity to cult hit to contender, with its move from Devil’s Due to Image, a stage play, and film in the works with Megan Fox reportedly covetous of the lead role. But with horror comics’ heyday so deep in the distance, what makes this title special enough to succeed on this level? The story centers on suburban high school nobody Cassandra Hack, whose life goes from bad to worse when her overprotective mother serial kills Cassie’s bullying classmates – and after death, her murderous maternal instincts bring her back from the grave to finish the job. Being your basic good girl, Cassie puts her mom back in the grave, and goes on the lam stalking a series of slasher film-worthy bad guys from state to state. Cassie’s world is a carefully engineered conglomeration of clichés native to the horror films Seeley obviously loves; fatness and ugliness are invariably sings of inner evil, every living female under 50 walks around nearly naked regardless of city and season, and the stringent social mores of the small towns are violently reinforced by the teen-eating demons that haunt them. It is all fairly familiar territory, despite the geysers of gore and the exuberantly elaborate kills, lovingly rendered by Seeley himself.

Read over 40 Hack/Slash digital comics online, or on your iPhone/iPad

Cassie Hack in a Betty Page moment.

Among the most obvious hallmarks of horror filmdom here is the selection of a heroine rather than a hero. Horror is one of the few male-targeted genres that routinely favors a female survivor – usually a sole survivor, the so-called “final girl”. This girl usually lives to see the light of day, as in the case of HALLOWEEN’s Jamie Lee Curtis, by virtue of, er, her virtue, while her vivacious, self-possessed, sex-conscious friends die screaming. This is the one unworn path that Hack/Slash travels, and this is possibly the key to its appeal; that Cassie Hack is a brainy, bespectacled badass is unremarkable. It’s that she’s a sexually provocative, heavily made-up, fishnet-clad teenage girl — a Suicide Girl even — whose transgressions go unpunished. That alone is somewhat revolutionary, without even mentioning the fact that she triumphs over evil with a talent for murder that routinely outstrips the killers she hunts. True, Cassie is also a declared virgin, so she has a ways to go before achieving full-on liberation, but she’s still a step ahead of deliberately dowdy Jamie Lee and company. In the case that the reader’s curiosity is peaked, it’s time for a little shameless self-promotion. Hack/Slash’s adoption by Image has necessitated a jumping-on point for new followers, and Cassie’s first adventure has been reprinted in the miniseries My First Maniac. If you are one of the unlucky folks who missed these issues in print, watch the ComiXology app for My First Maniac’s digital edition, coming soon to your mobile device.

Read over 40 Hack/Slash digital comics online, or on your iPhone/iPad)

Scott Pilgrim’s precious little fight

For many of us (that is, us children of the 80s), the much-anticipated release of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World felt like the “Movie of Our Lives” had finally found distribution. However, Edgar Wright’s hyperkinetic, surprisingly dense retelling of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s video game-fueled comic series isn’t quite making it across the generation gap. From generalized accusations of shallowness and puerility, to the incredible assumptions of fusty old curmudgeons that the eponymous hero is named for a certain Vonnegut protagonist, the comic and the movie are each attracting unwarranted ire, even from O’Malley’s contemporaries. It seems that there is some confusion about what the film’s central struggle – and its assorted mini-melees – really means.

O’Malley’s comic about a young nobody literally fighting for the love of his dream girl seduces the viewer with kawaii cartooning and 8-bit evocations of Mega Man-like miniboss fights, but it’s always a bait-and-switch, as every face-off is invariably a metaphor for the far less exciting arena of one’s own insecurities, which often take on the appearance of subjects of our envy. As with any real world relationship, you go for the fun, and stay for the brooding, difficult self-evaluation. Some critics seem to feel that Edgar Wright’s screen version focuses far too much on a “two-fisted” version of coming of age, a fairer examination of the print and projected Scott Pilgrims shows that any similarities to cave-clearing alpha male antics end where you realize that Scott’s literal battles with Ramona’s evil exes are just an easy cipher for anybody’s fears about his own inadequacies. Each ex seems to have something over on Scott, whether it’s strength, looks, talent, cash, or – as we shall discuss shortly – deviation from heteronormative sexuality. If we’re to relate this story to real life experiences at all, then the inevitable conclusion is that every fight is Scott Pilgrim vs. himself.

When speaking of the comic and the movie together, it’s worth bringing up the 2008 San Diego Comic Con release “Scott Pilgrim: Full-Color Odds & Ends”. This vibrantly beautiful Oni Press floppy is the source of one of the film’s key scenes – Ramona Flowers’s puppet mastery of Scott Pilgrim, who is too shy about battering women to take down her evil ex-girlfriend Roxy Richter. The stand-alone story in the now-rare SDCC comic, in which Scott pummels a pack of preteen pop starlets with Ramona’s help, would be unfamiliar to the casual comics reader (as opposed to the savvy ComiXology reader), but contributes substantially to the movie’s problem solving, so it’s worth a word or two.

The aforementioned issue of male aggression only gets really creepy when applied to girl versus girl scenarios. In volume 4 of O’Malley’s opus, Scott’s ultimate battle with Roxy Richter is marked by a politeness lacking in the series’ other conflicts; the opponents enter a duel with long swords, prohibiting any sort direct bodily contact, and ending with a cut-slide so that the violence is stylized to the point of impossibility. Roxy splits (literally!), and Scott is finally free to use the L-word with Ramona (not “lesbians”). Wright’s film weds this print version of the fight to the SDCC girl fight described above and concludes it by making Scott a lover and not a fighter. The SDCC comic, while deftly side-stepping any real shades of domestic violence, does call attention to its own awkwardness.

When Scott is mysteriously assailed by a set of holographic Hannah Montana stand-ins, It’s Ramona to the rescue, as the film-goers know, controlling Scott like an 8-bit avatar and winning him the fight. It saves Scott from having to actually hit a girl – and saves the reader from being complicit in that spectacle as entertainment. At the close of the comic, O’Malley apologizes thusly for any possible Freudian slippage:

It’s a little clunky, for sure, and moreover it’s as weird and uncomfortable as anything else in the series. However, it’s necessary in a comic about the battle of the sexes, published in a cultural moment where masses of people laugh shamelessly at the sight of a diminutive female getting her lights punched out by an intoxicated tower of meat in a boardwalk bar. It’s little moments like this that, in all their too-close-to-the-truth clumsiness, remind the reader that Scott Pilgrim has, in its hip little heart, seeds of the real.

Scott Pilgrim vs the $10,000,000 question

Pardon me for invoking Leonard Maltin, but I have to get this off my chest.

<Leonard Maltinism>

Scott Pilgrim is in for a world of hurt in box office coinage, though making for a K.O. of a movie.

</Leonard Maltinism>

But seriously folks.  This movie was awesome.  It was faithful (enough) to the books, and with Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead; Spaced) taking the helm, it really nailed the visual gags and was just an all around great time.  It was watchable to me TWICE.

Apparently my multiple theater visits over the weekend, though, weren’t a good gauge of how the sales were going to go, the film only making $10 million over the whole weekend (and it was made for 6 times that at least).

The movie was advertised like crazy.  Facebook posts, tons of posters, lots of publicity stunts from the cast, a game, a comic book (wait…that came first).  What went wrong?

Here are a few of the conjectures we can….conject….

1). Either Michael Cera doesn’t sell or you have to show your star’s face in the posters. There is something about Michael Cera that is calming and sweet, but he’s still not big enough of a star to sell.  But the main posters that were being shown everywhere were the one’s of him rocking out, hiding his face.  Now if they really wanted to play on the star power of the cast, they should have shown the evil ex-boyfriend poster.  It was more eye catching anyway.

2.) August isn’t a good month to show movies. Summer is so hot in the city.  Worst of all, school is out in the summer, and people have hot children (I MEAN TEMPERATURE!!!).  So where do they go to cool off when all the pools are full and they need to distract the kids for a few hours?  The cinema.  On the hottest days here in NYC, I saw the Joan Rivers documentary sell out just because of the heat.  This August hasn’t been too warm so far, though.  Not only that but the kids have spent all their summer money AND are going back to school, so that cuts out a major percentage of that demographic.

3.) Do not underestimate the power of stupid action films. Expendables had advertised like crazy.  Facebook posts, tons of posters, lots of publicity stunts from the cast, a game, a comic book (wait…this sounds familiar…).  But they flexed their star power muscles a bit better.  Perhaps the execs over at Universal forgot how powerful the testosterone drive could be.

In all actuality, though, the DVD sales for Scott Pilgrim will probably help it break even and help set its place as a cult classic with long legs…the movie, that is, not Michael Cera.  This movie is far from turning into dust….for the cleaning lady on Monday.