The Platinum Age of Comics
 After 10 years as the go-to place for new comic book properties in Hollywood and breaking ground into mobile, online and merchandising, Platinum Studios has finally added a line of comics to its slate. As with all things Hollywood, it was all about timing, said founder and chairman Scott Mitchell Rosenberg. "We were never in a rush to put out [comics] because we needed them to come out at the time we were executing everything else or it doesn't really make sense," he said. That fits in with the company's motto: "Comics fueling media everywhere."
"This is the 10th anniversary of [starting] our libraries and acquiring all the things we needed to acquire in terms of properties and building up our deals with studios and creating our film slate deal," said Rosenberg. "So maybe it's our 10th, but it's also our first as well."
Platinum handles all its editorial and production in house, though distribution is handled by longtime ally Top Cow Comics. Platinum's first title, the graphic novel Cowboys & Aliens, hit in December, followed by another graphic novel, Watchdogs, and a line of comic book miniseries such as Web comic graduate Hero by Night, sci-fi title Unique and the Russian vampires tale, Blood Nation. Platinum also has an ongoing series, Kiss 4K, licensed from the rock group and set to start in June. Upcoming books include Atlantis Rising, a five-issue series that Rosenberg describes as a tentpole release; a demonic love-triangle comedy called Consumed; a martial arts adventure The Weapon; and a supernatural story about college
hazing called Ghosting.
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This nonfiction graphic novel retelling psychologist Harry Harlow's famous experiments is as disturbing as it is excellent. "We'll show you what love looks like—and what it does," says the young researcher, as he turns to TV to make his case after regular scientists reject his experiments. Harlow showed that rhesus monkeys preferred the soft, cloth stuffed-animal mother over wire surrogates, even when nursed by the wire doll. The famous images of the scary "cloth mother" and the even scarier "wire mother" has great cultural weight, but the real drama of the story Ottaviani tells is the contemporary scientists who won't admit the word "love" into their clinical language. Harlow's
journey is tinged with subtle class and immigrant issues—the big-jawed, jowly figures, drawn with meaty shadows, express these divisions wonderfully, and help give Harlow emotional weight as he simultaneously finds success and sinks into alcoholism. The repetition of the term "proximity," how scientists explained away love, is chilling, and the largely forgotten Skinner boxes and the theories behind them give the work a sense of deep foreboding as a cautionary tale of how behaviorists once tried to declare affection to be scientifically unsound. (July)
