Read Comics

Check out all the cool links on this blog-style New Frontiersman website. There’s some fun photoshoppery in there. I’m (continually) getting more excited about the movie.

According to this interesting article, WB and 20th Century fox have finally reached a settlement, and the movie should come out as scheduled (March 6th). We’ll see! (The article also contains a bunch of other interesting comic news, including DC folks getting laid off.)

Mark Waid, editor of Boom Studios is giving away issue #1 of Hexed, a new comic written by Michael Alan Nelson and drawn by Emma Rios. It’s a good read, and well worth a look (more so because it’s free!). With a hot female protagonist who has some sort of magical powers, set in a christian mythos, it was a bit reminiscent for me of Strange Girl.

Click on the cover, or click here to go to the blog post and see the full issue. You may have to scroll down some before you get to the images. There’s a video about how Boom Studios is promoting the comic above the actual comic.

(Via Boing Boing.)

I’ve only just discovered ShortPacked!, a webcomic more or less about a bunch of toystore employees. It’s pretty good stuff, and if I weren’t at work right now, I’d probably waste a few hours reading it from the beginning.

(Via MinnPost, who got permission to reprint a really great recent comic about Clark Kent in the newmedia age.)

Tonight we had Jason, Mike, Florence, Marty, and a couple of new voices: Stephanie and Konrad. We talked at unusual length about The Walking Dead. Our focus was the first TPB, (Issues #1-6), but we definitely get into details from the second TPB, and even delve a bit into what’s happening in the series now (Issues #49-53). We highly recommend reading this book before you listen to this podcast unless you don’t mind spoilers.

Listen to ReadComics.org Podcast Episode #021 (47 MB, 102 minutes)

I picked up the new Bomb Queen (issue #3 of 6) last week, having been pretty well sucked in by the first two issues in the recent series, and I have to admit that I am sort of grudgingly liking it for reasons other than the T&A, (which is certainly present, and more realistically why I like it). Normally I don’t really enjoy when the bad guys are the focus of a story, but for some reason when you dress that bad guy up in next to nothing and make sure it gets ripped off of her every once in a while… well, lets just say it changes the tone quite a bit.

Bomb Queen is essentially a really hot female super-villian who runs her own town somewhere in middle america. Apparently the authorities (ie, federal and state government) are willing to let this one town be governed by a supervillian because… it’s good for profits or something. Essentially Bomb Queen has a puppet Mayor who does whatever she asks, and she creates zones of the city that are lawless, and where the police can’t actually charge you for committing a crime. It sounds horrific, and honestly is even more horrific in the comic (rape and pedophilia are both referenced relatively frequently, if not, thankfully, shown), but it’s all done in a relatively humorous style that glosses over the horror and focuses on the hyper-sexualized Bomb Queen herself.

To be honest, Bomb Queen is a completely guilty pleasure. So much so that I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that I picked up the first four TPBs of Bomb Queen at Wizard World a few weekends ago. So after reading the latest individual issue, I went ahead and read the first TPB, Bomb Queen: Woman of Mass Destruction. In it, we are introduced to Bomb Queen, given a bit of back story, and then we get to the guts of the story where her reign is being threatened by a politician running for mayor against her puppet the incumbent. The whole thing is pretty ridiculous, and pretty much neither more or less than exactly what I expected. The TPB has some fun extras at the end of the book, including a B&W comic that all takes place from Bomb Queen’s cat’s perspective called Ashe’s Day Out.

We’ve talked a bit about Wizard World on the podcast, and I’ve mentioned it some in the various blog entries since then, but I wanted to just post this photo of us with some of the other Comic Book podcasters we met in Chicago.

From left to right this is Florence, Myself (Marty), Sean Whelan (from Raging Bullets), Chris Neseman (from Around Comics), Jim Segulin (also from Raging Bullets), Matt Kramer’s wife, Matt Kramer (from Shade’s Journal), Mike, Jason (poking his head up over Mike’s shoulder), and Susie.

There are some other photos from the trip posted on flickr.