Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan is a 2008 book published by Pantheon Books, subsidiary of Random House, in the United States. The book was designed by Chip Kidd with the assistance of photographer Geoff Spear. It collects a Japanese shōnen manga adaptation of the American comic book series Batman by Jiro Kuwata simply entitled Batman (バットマン Battoman) and also includes photographs of vintage Batman toys from Japan. The Batman manga included in Bat-Manga! was created during a Batman craze in Japan, being serialized from April 1966 to May 1967; the series ended when the craze ended. The manga was released in paperback and at the same time a limited hardcover was released on October 28, 2008, with an additional manhua bootleg and an extra Batman story by the creator.
Batwoman #17, available from DC Comics in print and digital versions today, the openly gay heroine Batwoman (aka Katherine “Kate” Kane) proposes to her girlfriend, police detective Maggie Sawyer. While we don’t yet know the answer, if all goes well they’ll presumably be getting hitched, bringing same-sex marriage squarely into the center of a mainstream comic.
Charles Burns’ long-running series Black Hole is the peak of the artist’s great career in horror comics. Burns has a knack for locating pathos and unsettling emotions in horror scenarios, and this story about a sexually transmitted plague among small-town teenagers is no exception. The series ran throughout much of the 90s, but since Burns finally published the last few installments and the collected book after the turn of the millennium, presenting it in its long-awaited definitive form, it seems appropriate to count it among the best books of the 2000s. Burns’ noirish style is well-suited to this unsettling story, in which teenage anxiety about sexuality is externalized in the form of various mutations that turn affected teens into monstrous creatures, their sexual anguish etched into their bodies as scales, boils, rashes and new appendages. Few books do a better job of capturing the fear, and the excitement, of nascent desire and adolescent longing, as these diseased teens are driven mad by hormones and embarrassment. (via)
The Swamp Thing television series lasted for three seasons. Kind of incredible if you think about it; I don’t think he ever left the swamp.
Two strangers, both reading the same novel, share a fleeting glance between passing subway cars. A bookstore owner locks eyes with a neighbor as she receives an Amazon package. Strangers are united by circumstance as they wait on the subway stairs for a summer storm to pass.
New York Drawings by Adrian Tomine
A Wu-Tang comic book that was based on the clan’s Wu-Massacre album featuring Method Man, Ghostface Killah and Raekwon. It was never published and never released, until now. The characters were co-created by art director/designer Alex Haldi and comic book illustrator legend Chris Bachalo. (via)
La fièvre d’Urbicande…the story of a strange cube/structure which grows.
After a devastating plague ends World War I, Europe is suddenly flooded with vampires. Lord Henry Baltimore, a soldier determined to wipe out the monsters, fights his way through bloody battlefields, ruined plague ships, exploding zeppelins, and submarine graveyards, on the hunt for the creature who’s become his obsession.
Why was the dinosaur there again?
