This came out a couple weeks ago, and I actually saw it when I saw Terminator Salvation, but here’s a link to the trailer for The Surrogates, an adaptation of the graphic novel by Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele, courtesy of Top Shelf Productions. If you don’t want to click (lazy!), you can press play on the video below. I can’t decide if this trailer or the trailer for the movie that had Mike Tyson singing (what was that called?) was the best part of Terminator: Salvation (ka-zing!).

The Best of Simon and Kirby
Joe Simon & Jack Kirby, edited by Steve Saffel
240 pages, 9″x12 1/4″

Titan Books

I’m a Kirby fan.

It’s obvious if you know me, I think. I love the Captain America & the Falcon stuff he did, I love the New Gods, and I think that his character design is top notch. Of course, all of my favorite Kirby work was created after he’d become Jack “King” Kirby. This was late era Kirby, if you go by the length of his career.

Early Kirby, the raw stuff from the beginning of his career, is mostly a mystery to me. I have one of Marvel’s Visionaries hardcovers that collects a lot of it, like the Two-Gun Kid stuff, and it’s pretty fascinating. A lot of what made Kirby Kirby was there in the text, though in an unpolished form.

Titan Books recently released The Best of Simon and Kirby, a volume collecting a lot of those issues that I’ve never seen. I’ve got to say that they did a stellar job with it. It’s oversized (essentially a coffee table book), printed on non-glossy paper, and a real work of art. The extra size really lets you get into the art, which is part of the point of this book.

Joe Simon and Jack Kirby were a team for years, and worked in a variety of genres. This volume collects stories featuring superheroes, criminals, and (the deep, dark secret of Kirby & Simon) stories from the original romance book, Young Romance. I’d known that Kirby had a hand in popularizing romance comics, and it’s nice to finally get a chance to read them.

The Best of Simon and Kirby also reprints a couple of titles from DC and Marvel. Captain America, The Vision (the old one), Sandman, and a Boy Commandos tale wrap up the Big Two work in this book.

I really, really like this book. It’s a historical collection, but the way it’s presented is as more of a conversation piece. Each genre gets a chapter break in the form of a short essay that also doubles as a biography of the careers of each man. It’s conversational in tone, and detailed enough to educate you about a time you rarely hear about. It makes it easy to burn through the book, too, since it provides an easy stopping point for each genre. I spent a couple of days knocking out a series of stories before bed.

The most striking thing about this book, I think, is how un-Kirby a lot of it looks. The thick lines and insane layouts that dominated Kirby’s later work are present in the occasional story here, but most of the work isn’t as undeniably “Kirby” as, say, the Fourth World volumes. My first thought is to say that it was Joe Simon’s inking that makes it look so different, but something I keep forgetting is that a lot of these stories were over twenty years old before Kirby put pen to paper on Fantastic Four #1. Over the course of twenty or thirty years, anyone’s style would, and should, change around a little bit.

The Best of Simon and Kirby is forty bucks, which is a little pricey, but worth every penny to Kirby and Simon fans, or even people interested in comics history.

The Fresh Air Fund has, as its header states, been “serving children since 1877.” They do charity work, essentially, and they have a great drive going on this month. Any gift given between now and June 30th will be matched dollar-for-dollar. So, if you donate ten, the needy get twenty. If you donate one hundred, that’s two hundred in the pot.

Click through and give them a look. Their about page has fact sheets and all for you to go over so that you can see what they’re all about. If you feel led to give, give.

One of my favorite games, from both a story and a gameplay standpoint, is Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. I played through it on either Xbox or PS2, I forget which, but it was a great time. The gameplay combined platforming mechanics and traditional combat to create a kind of gameplay that was extremely fun. The enemies provided a way for the Prince to make his platforming easier, turning creatively acrobatic combat into a crucial gameplay component.

Where the game really shined for me, however, was the story. Shortly before the end of the game, you find out that the game you’ve just played, deaths and all, was not a game– it was a story that the Prince was telling Princess Farah, the daughter of the Maharajah. There are a number of twists involved, but what it boils down to is that, due to an error, the princess died. The Prince reversed time, and now he must convince her of what happened and save her life. So, he told her the story of his adventure.

This wasn’t exactly out of the blue. The Prince narrates the game, and every time you died, he’d say something to the effect of, “No, that’s not how it happened,” and begin again from just before your death. It turned the story of the game into a story within the game, and it’s a plot twist that I greatly appreciated. If anything, it heightened my love for the game and hooked me for life.

First Second Books released a Prince of Persia graphic novel late last year. I picked it up and read it a couple months after release, but never really got around to talking about it on here.

Rather than do a straight adaptation of any of the handful of Prince of Persia titles, writers Jordan Mechner and AB Sina and artists LeUyen Pham, Alex Pulvilland, and Hilary Sycamore instead told a tale that spanned two timelines under the loose umbrella of being about a “prince of Persia.” There is a nice nod early in the novel to the way that the Prince of Persia series has changed over the years. A king calls for his son, the prince, but all three of his children, two sons and a daughter, come together, rather than the prince he wanted. When quizzed about why they all came, they respond, “For I am the prince!”

In a way, I enjoyed Prince of Persia more due to Sands of Time. They both showed a deft way of telling their story in a way that I didn’t expect at the time. The story takes place over two timelines, and they tend to blend in and out of each other as the book goes on. It can be confusing, but not in an off-putting manner. It simply gives the book a different tone than I’d expected. It’s much more whimsical, or fairy tale-like, in tone than a straight up adventure novel. It isn’t quite magical realism. Everything that happens fits within the story and is perfectly believable. However, there is a definite dream-like quality to the story.
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Click through, this is basically the best swine flu joke out there.

-We’ve got a few entries in our Uncharted 2 multiplayer beta code contest. Click over and check it out if you’re interested in getting into the beta!

-If you haven’t listened to the first Fourcast!, click here to go its page or here to subscribe in iTunes. To those of you who’ve listened– thanks!

-Speaking of podcasts, we’re recording the second Fourcast! this Saturday. We’re soliciting ideas and questions for the show. Is there something you want us to talk about? Some question you’re dying to ask? Some obscure trivia you want to test us on or whatever? Want to call me out on the carpet for saying that Hal Jordan has a dumb-looking face? Post it down in the comments and we’ll try to work it into the show.

–Emily Warren, colorist for Marvel and other companies (I know she’s done some work for Zenescope) has a sketch blog. She’s not just a colorist, of course– she has a few pages of sketches and finished pieces up there to check out. Go look.

from vertigo’s sentences, words by percy “mf grimm” carey, art by ron wimberly

(word to cheryl lynn)

Lone Wolf and Cub volume 2: The Gateless Barrier
Writer: Kazuo Koike
Artist: Goseki Kojima
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
ISBN: 1569715033
304 pages

I completely missed this last time around, but so far, the titles of each volume of Lone Wolf & Cub are very specific references to events in the book. The Assassin’s Road, obviously, is the path that Ogami and Daigoro walk. It’s filled with senseless slaughter and cruelty, and leads directly to meifumado, the Buddhist hell and home to demons and damnation. The Gateless Barrier, as explained in this volume, is mumon-seki, walking alone between heaven and earth. The assassin’s road is all there is, and nothing exists outside of it. You become mumon-seki of the assassin’s road.

This volume is a grab bag of stories. There are five of them this time, chapters ten through fourteen. “Red Cat,” “The Coming of the Cold,” “Tragic O-Sue,” “The Gateless Barrier,” and “Winter Flower” brings up the rear. The stories this time around are a good deal longer than before, giving Kojima more time to play with the storytelling of individual scenes and Koike more time to establish a setting. In “Winter Flower,” for example, Ogami appears on-panel for maybe six pages. His voice appears for more often, but he spends most of the story locked in a house. In “Tragic O-Sue,” Daigoro essentially stars for most of the story, up until the end.

Ogami remains just as invulnerable as he was in the first volume. The first story, “Red Cat,” features a tale that should be familiar to fans of The Punisher. Ogami allows himself to be captured and taken to jail to fulfill a job. When he gets there, he’s hassled by the prisoners. They sing a song to intimidate him (no, really). When that doesn’t work, they attack him. Just as in “Wings to the Birds, Fangs to the Beasts” in the last volume, he doesn’t even acknowledge their existence. He takes the beating, not even bothering to grunt. This just pisses them off more. When he finally speaks, it’s to ask where a man is. Once he finds out that the man is on death row, Ogami murders a lot of them. The guards come and he’s taken to death row, to be executed tomorrow with his target.

He finds his man on death row, and they speak briefly. The target is an arsonist, and indirectly caused the death of the warden of the prison. Last time he was arrested, he’d started a fire in his cell, forcing the prison to evacuate. Rather than returning to jail after being temporarily freed, he ran. The warden took his own life out of shame.

Ogami reveals that at some point before getting arrested, he’d fired an arrow into an alcove in the cell (which raises the question of the point of the song and dance earlier). Ogami engineers a situation in which the arsonist and the man who hired him in the first place die, complete with a brief remark to send the latter off. After that, since prisoners must be freed in case of a fire, Ogami walks right out and the chapter closes.

After that, though, we get right into the child abuse.
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HEAT worked. It took ten years, but they finally got back their totally awesome better-than-everybody-else forever-and-ever-amen hero back.

All the others, though– Girl-Wonder (at least regarding Stephanie Brown), whoever it is that wants Ted Kord/The Question/Firestorm back, and various other comics movements– have any of those ever worked? I can’t think of one.

My problem with most comic book apparel is that it’s ugly. It’s all ugly faces, awkward logos, faux faded, and completely lacking in any real design sense. Graphitti Designs is a tremendous offender in this respect. It looks like kid clothes.

Freshness Mag posted about a neat bit of comics apparel yesterday. From their site:

Italian comic strip creator, Hugo Pratt, swept the world in 1967 with the Corto Maltese comic series, featuring an eponymous adventurer-sailor, Corto Maltese. Tying in with the current exhibition at Musée National De La Marine, Colette replicated two models (court and length) of sailor jackets donned by protagonist, Corto Maltese. These sailor jackets are included in the Fall/ Winter 09 Hugo Pratt Corto Maltese collection which is on preview at Colette from May 25 to May 31.

The wool sailor jackets are exact replicas of the coats that Maltese wore, in a vintage faded black. The forearm is adorned by a navy and gold ribbon pipping and the underside of the collar has Corto Maltese’s name embroidered in cursive. On the inside, a patch featuring Maltese’s profile portrait is sewn to the coat. The nautical inspired winter jacket is tailored and smart, and there are more styles to choose from the collection. Other items include a longer wool sailors coat, a bomber-inspired jacket and a t-shirt. The pieces are now available online at Colette.

A couple of images:

This is the kind of thing I prefer to something that just says “HEY WORLD I READ COMICS LOOK AT ME AIN’T HAL JORDAN AWESOME?” I hate it, but I’d rather see someone wearing a jacket designed like Hal Jordan’s Dad’s Bomber Jacket That He Almost Died In rather than a shirt with Hal Jordan in a circle. A gym shirt that says “PROPERTY OF XAVIER’S” is much better than something with the ’90s-era X-Men logo on it, or any X-Men logo, really.

I don’t know that I’d ever wear this jacket, but it’s nice to see some comic fashion that actually tries to be fashion, instead of a twenty dollar t-shirt with a logo on it.

Colette’s site is here.