Summersong

In the straight news department, here's what I'm up to for the summer. This is adapted from my newsletter, which is sent out anywhere from one to three times a month, depending on what's going on. You can sign up by sending me an email at stuartcomics@mindspring.com .

And by the way: If anyone knows a good way to paste hyperlink text from Apple Mail into Blogger, please let me know, either in the comments or at the above address. I tried going through Word, TextEdit, Pages, and Safari...even looked at the source code, but I just couldn't keep the links intact.

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• June 2007: POSTCARDS: True Stories That Never Happened is a beautiful hardcover anthology from Villard/Random House, featuring work by Harvey Pekar, Matt Kindt, Phil Hester, Tom Beland, Antony Johnston, Ande Parks and Joshua Fialkov. Editor Jason Rodriguez's concept was an ingenious one: He gave each of the creative teams an actual, vintage postcard and asked us to craft stories about what the often-enigmatic messages on them might have meant.

Michael Gaydos (ALIAS) and I have contributed an eight-page story called "Tic Tac Bang Bang." It's set in 1909 and takes a very strange card into slightly absurdist territory. I don't want to give the whole thing away, but one thing I wanted to do was to try a sort of experiment in comics format, like Will Eisner used to do in THE SPIRIT and Alan Moore & Rick Veitch did occasionally in GREYSHIRT. This meant I handed Michael a ridiculous, and ridiculously detailed, layout to work from. He pulled it all off gorgeously in a beautiful greywash style -- and you can actually win a page of the original art by entering a contest here.

Jason recently did a week of interviews with POSTCARDS's contributors on Newsarama. You can find all of them through this page, or jump right to the talk with me & Michael here . Amazon's page for the book is here.

• July 4, 2007: NEW AVENGERS/TRANSFORMERS, from Marvel and IDW, is just what it says on the label. Tyler Kirkham (PHOENIX: WARSONG) and I are the team behind this insanely big-scale crossover, which pits the "classic" New Avengers (pre-CIVIL WAR) against the evil Decepticons -- and maybe against Optimus Prime and the Autobots, too. And since the action takes place in Latveria, you've got to figure a certain Marvel dictator is involved as well.

This has been a giant romp from start to...well, we're not finished yet, but start to now, anyway. And Tyler Kirkham is really doing the best work of his career; his Avengers are fiercely powerful and his Autobots are just plain cool. I don't have any of his art to show yet, but you can see Jimmy Cheung's gorgeous cover to issue #1 above or here. It features that Captain America fellow you may have heard of recently, in happier times.

Four issues, monthly. More here and here.

Around the same time, Marvel will also collect my two WOLVERINE stories, in collaboration with the very talented CP Smith, in a volume called WOLVERINE: BLOOD AND SORROW, which also features two stories by Rob Williams & Laurence Campbell, and David Lapham & David Aja. I'm very proud of these, particularly the cover story "The Package," in which Wolverine must escape from a hostile African country alive -- with a baby strapped to him. 

And if you missed my story in ANNIHILATION: HERALDS OF GALACTUS #1, it'll be re-presented in the hardcover collection ANNIHILATION: BOOK THREE, along with much goodness by Keith Giffen, Andrea DiVito, and others. Mine features the origin and fate of STARDUST, the newest Herald to Galactus the planet-eater.

• July 2007: EARTHLIGHT returns! More hard science fiction by me and Christopher Schons, presented in manga format by Tokyopop. In volume 1, we met teenager Damon Cole and his classmates at the Earthlight Academy on the first moon colony. Things took a nasty twist toward the end -- which left volume 2, out in July, spring-loaded for action. 

EARTHLIGHT v2 was one of the easiest things I've ever written; the characters just knew what they were going to do, the political situation was all set up, and the action played out beautifully. Of course, it helps to have Chris making me look good. His characters, fashions, and tech are all spot-on. 

Volume 1 was well received, and nominated for three Glyph Awards. Here's what one reviewer said about it:

"Moore's tale is a coming of age story set in a larger narrative of speculative science fiction and socio-political futurism. Moore gives Damon's trials and tribulations both poignancy and edge. His observations on technology and society are plausible and engaging -- just what sci-fi needs to make it interesting and relevant...[Mr. Schons] is a virtuoso at drawing sci-fi tech, gear, sets, and environments that are more science than they are fiction and fantasy. His character drawing is expressive and hyper dramatic, but his art can be subtle and human."
-Leroy Douresseaux, Comic Book Bin

More reviews on the Amazon page. You can pre-order volume 2 here. 

And as I write this, I'm at work on volume 3. So the saga continues. (Actually, as I write this, I'm AVOIDING working on volume 3. But you know what I mean.)

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Thank you, kind readers. We now return you to the Beer, the Meat, the Snark, and the Yankees.