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News

• Stitches: Peering into a Dark Past
  A newcomer to the world of graphic novels, David Small has already captured the attention of the industry and  readers. The Caldecott-winning artist is a veteran illustrator of children’s books. His first graphic novel, Stitches: A Memoir, was one of the hits of BEA, and has been making the rounds of the blogs leading up to its publication on September 8.
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• San Diego Media-Con: One Big Size Fits All
  Originally founded as a kind of fan-fest and back-issues swap meet for comic book, science fiction fans and retailers, the just concluded San Diego Comic-Con has grown to become an international platform for popular culture, servicing the fans that love it as well as the artists and publishers that create and distribute it. But with the book industry openly questioning the usefulness of a strictly trade show like BEA, has the San Diego Comic-Con become a possible model for publishing/media conventions?
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• Miyazaki Receives Triumphant Welcome in US
  Hayao Miyazaki, who is known for his feature length animation movies such as Princess Mononoke, Porco Rosso, Howl’s Moving Castle, and his 2003 Academy Award winner, Spirited Away, visited California as part of the effort to welcome and promote his new movie, Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea. It was also a chance for Americans to honor the revered director.
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• To Japan and Back: Cirque du Freak Travels the World
  Darren Shan's Cirque du Freak is a story with legs: originally an Irish young adult novel, it was licensed in Japan and proved so popular there that it was adapted into a manga with art by Takahiro Arai. It's the story of a boy who takes a flyer for a mysterious circus only to find it has a cast of ghoulish performers. Now U.S. graphic novel publisher Yen Press is translating the manga into English, with an initial print run of 65,000 copies for volume 1.
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Life in Comics

• Life in Comics: The Shape of the Industry
  In March, the New York Times inaugurated its Graphic Books best seller list, just in time to acknowledge the runaway sales of Watchmen, as the trade paperback reaped the benefits of movie hype. ("Comics have finally joined the mainstream,” wrote George Gene Gustines in the NYT's Arts Beat Blog.)
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Q&A

• The Legendary Stan Lee Talks Manga and Ultimo
  The legendary Stan Lee was on hand at Comic-con this year to promote Ultimo, a new manga series he is working on for Viz Media in collaboration with the noted manga-ka Hiroyuki Takei, creator of the bestselling manga series Shaman King. Originally conceived for the Japanese market, Ultimo the story of two mysterious and powerful mechanized figures—one good; the other evil—created by a mysterious scientist/shaman figure that looks suspiciously like Stan Lee himself.
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Reviews

• From Wonderland with Love: Danish Comics in the Third Millennium
  VARIOUS. Fantagraphics, $29.99 paper (176p) ISBN 978-1-60699-325-5
  An eye-opening cornucopia of visual storytelling styles traversing a wide variety of narrative avenues, this anthology gives a strong representation of contemporary Danish comics as a thriving comics culture. Largely surreal, the work is tough to nail down, but much of it is lighthearted even when dealing with very dark issues; it's devoid of the self-conscious self-referentialism that so often dogs American comics both genre and literary. The artists here are drawing for love and passion and it shows.
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• Flight Volume Six
  EDITED BY KAZUO KIBUISHI. Villard, $25 paper (288p) ISBN 978-0-345-50590-3
  The latest installment of this comics anthology collects the work of 17 up-and-coming comic creators in one glossy volume, cramming in a dizzying variety of works. The book opens with Michael Gagne's beautiful and deeply alien "The Saga of Rex—Soulmates," in which two small, foxlike creatures, deeply in love, follow each other through a series of increasingly strange and symbolic transformations; next is J.P. Ahonen's "The Excitingly Mundane Life of Kenneth Shuri," the charmingly cartoony tale of a suburban ninja's search for a new job. That's a fairly representative example of Flight's tonal whiplash—when you turn the page, you never know what you're going to get, but it will probably be pretty.
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• Richard Stark's The Hunter
  DARWYN COOKE. IDW (Diamond, dist.), $24.99 (140p) ISBN 978-1-60010-493-0
  Cooke has transformed the first volume of the late Donald Westlake's long-running Parker series (written under the pseudonym Richard Stark), about an indomitable outlaw, into a smashing graphic novel, making its ferocious mood and retro aesthetics the stars of the show. Parker belongs to the bottom of the urban jungle's economic strata, but the top of its food chain—anyone who stands between him and his revenge is doomed, whether they're trying to resist him or just happen to be in the way. As the book begins, he's returning to New York City in the Kennedy era with murder in his eyes: double-crossed by his wife and partners, he's come back to kill whoever needs killing to get his money.
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Panel Mania

• Panel Mania: Stitches
  In David Small's autobiography, Stitches, he depicts his childhood with his disfunctional family, as he struggles with a botched surgery that rendered him mute. In this 16 page preview, David escapes through his imagination and his art. Stitches will be released by W.W. Norton on September 8th.
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Comics Briefly