Comics for this (coming) week!

Graham Crackers has their list up, so here's mine!

Amazing Spider-Man #575
Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1
Avengers The Initiative #18
Avengers The Initiative #18 1 in 10 Zombie cvr
Daredevil #111 2nd printing
Deadpool #2 2nd printing - Again, best book I'm reading at the moment.
Immortal Iron Fist #19
Nova #18
Nova #18 1 in 10 Zombie var
Secret Invasion: Thor #3
Secret Invasion: X-Men #3
Thor #11
Ultimate Spider-Man Annual #3
Cthulhu Tales #7 cvr a
Cthulhu Tales #7 cvr b
Usagi Yojimbo #115
Zero G #2 drawn superbly by fellow Melbournian, and good mate Jason Badower (of Heroes fame). Check it out!
Ghost Omnibus Vol 1 TPB
Joker HC - This looked unreal when I saw some pages from it at SDCC last year!
Marvel Previews #63
Previews #11

Final "Hun" Cover Colours

by Paul Harmon and Steve Lavigne

Comics This Week

What I'm picking up this week:

Amazing Spider-Man #572 2nd print
Amazing Spider-Man #574
Daredevil #112
Daredevil #112 zombie cvr
Ghost Rider Danny Ketch #1
New Avengers #46
Secret Invasion #7
Secret Invasion #7 yu sketch
Secret Invasion #7 yu variant
Secret Invasion: Spider-Man Brand New Day #3
Thor: Truth of History
Thunderbolts #125
Batman Gotham After Midnight #6
GI Joe A New Beginning #0 atkins
GI Joe A New Beginning #0 meyers
GI Joe A New Beginning #0 sketch incentive
GI Joe A New Beginning #0 templesmith incentive
Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #51 (this should be the first issue to kick off the reviews I mentioned earlier)
Evil Dead TP
Indiana Jones Magazine #4

Michael Bay's Awesome Book of the Week

This was at the front desk when I went to pick up my Deadpool stuff at Comics R Us in Melbourne. This was cool because the dude behind the desk (not the usual dudes in there either) was saying that they'd had people start ordering the books recently because of my last couple of stories. Before this, the stores (there are two of them here in town) hadn't been stocking Turtles.

The Bad with the Good

Had a decent day out, scored a bunch of Deadpool books I'd been missing to fill the gaps, along with a couple of CD's and started work on some Care Bears stuff for Cereal:Geek Magazine. A while ago, I posted a sketch of the opening crawl from "The Real Ghostbusters" animated series. That has since been coloured by my brother and I and looks unreal. Very different to the Tobin's Spirit Guide stuff I've been working on! The unfortunate thing is, I can't show it. You'll just have to hang in there until the next issue hits!

Get this too: I arrived home from town to discover someone had stolen the fuel cap to my car! What kind of scumbag does that?! The panel had been snapped open and the fuel cap pinched!

It'll be funny later, but right now, I'm pissed about it.

That aside, something very cool happened in the city, which I'll post later.

Red Ring of Death

Take the title how you want, but fellow X-box owners know exactly what I'm talkin' about!

Three weeks ago, our X-box finally gave out. We picked up a 360 last Christmas simply because good games were going at good prices down here in Melbourne, and the deals on the machines at the time were ridiculous. Anyway, we couldn't start the bastard without four rounds of Red Ring of Death, but after that, we'd get the green and that bastard could plug on without trouble for however long you wanted.

Anyway, as I said, the son of a bitch gave us the finger and shouted "Red Ring of Death Forever!" followed by a high pitched "Alalalalalalalala--!" before blowing itself up into a million pieces (not really, but... y'know...).

So we gathered it's X-corpse 360 and sent it off to Microscum. It arrived back today. I love my rock music and have missed playing Rock Band and the other hilariously fun Guitar Peripheral titles. Why is there no Kings of Leon download pack for any of them yet?!

My brother and I are happy once again.

The End. By Tristan.

Up Yours OFLC!

HAHAHA! Thank you, shitty Australian Customs checks!

Sometimes They Come Back

That's the title for Tales of the TMNT #61. Next August. To be illustrated by Andres Ponce (who I actually worked with once before on the Titan UK Fast Forward comics).

Peace

Also...

Starting soon, TMNT comics will start appearing on Newsarama, CBR, EveryDayIsLikeWednesday, ComicNewsI and a few other websites as regularly reviewed titles. It'll be interesting to see how things go...

Interdum Gens Redeo

It's done!

I just sent off the script for Tales of the TMNT #61 (next August's issue)! Last week I decided to totally scrap the thing and start completely anew. I had worked a fair while on the first iteration, but when I sat down and reread it last week, it just wasn't on par with the others. I liked it, but not enough. If it had've been me buying it, I would've read it and probably not really touched it again until I had to. Not anymore. This is easily on par with the others in terms of tone, while the story might not be as deep thematically as the Hun story or Expose, this one more than makes up for that purely through action! Explosions, mistaken identity, an ambulance chase sequence, more explosions, more gangland violence and a lot of people in a LOT of trouble! And that's before the-- whoa-whoa-whoa... better stop myself before I reveal anything else! ;-) I will say one thing for the few of you who read this faithfully (and carefully)...

Look hard.

Peace!

What I'm Listening To Right Now

I'm a big music person. Love it. Can't get enough of what I love!

Here's what I'm listening to at the moment (and have been a fair bit recently). Click to enlarge.

Economic Final Crisis

Next week is a positive bonanza for me in terms of comics. I am excited verily. Good thing I scraped myself some petty cash by selling weed to those ki--

Before you ask, I'm a completist freak when it comes to certain titles and covers. Amazing Spiderman is very obviously one of them.

Amazing Spider-Man #571 2nd print
Amazing Spider-Man #573 colbert cover
Amazing Spider-Man #573 jrjr cover
Amazing Spider-Man #573 maguire cover
Amazing Spider-Man #573 zombie
Deadpool #1 2nd print
Ghost Rider #28 cover a
Ghost Rider #28 cover b
Guardians of the Galaxy #6
Iron Man #34
Mighty Avengers #19
Moon Knight #23
Secret Invasion: Front Line #4
X-Men #503
Batman and the Outsiders #12
Ghostbusters the Other Side #1
Ghostbusters the Other Side #1 GCC exclusive
Michelangelo The Third Kind #2
Street Fighter II Turbo #1 cruz
Street Fighter II Turbo #1 lee
Welcome To Hoxford #3
Ghostbusters GN

Rewrites

I just completely scrapped the script to Tales of the TMNT #62. Completely. I was writing it, and having fun writing it, but when I finished, I read through it and decided it wasn't good enough. I liked it, but if I picked it up in a comic shop it would've been a read-once-and-shelve book (for me anyway). I'm already halfway through the rewrite and it's EXACTLY the way I want it to be. It'll follow on perfectly from #36 and #56 (and #59 to an extent) and serve as a great follow up to #50. I'm excited about it (inspite of it being a year away)! Razorback is back in town baby, and New York is fucked!

Triceratutrom?

This was part of a pitch Paul and I started working on but I can't recall if we actually made it or not. Maybe next time the opportunity arises... It revolved around a character we created called Karnox Prime, who was basically an intergalactic pirate/bounty hunter and also the most wanted criminal in the galaxy. I did a quick concept sketch of the character and put it up on my Deviantart site, which I encourage people to check out (link at the right there). It also involved another Utrom design, which is also up on the Deviantart site.

GAK!

Small tease. This is only a small part of a bigger image.

Tales #56 Pin-Up

Mike Hawthorne, who illustrated Steve Murpy's Umbra along with #24 of Tales of the TMNT, has completed the pin-up for Tales #56. I just caught this over at his blog, and I gotta say, it looks pretty damn cool! Having seen the roughs for the first five pages of the book and the Hun and Casey designs, this book is going to be visually awesome (and if you like the story, that's something too!)!

Paul drew something into the roughs that I didn't notice until I looked over them a second time that made me stop and do one of those "CAW!" noises gore-hounds make in Friday the 13th movies or zombie movies when the kills get nasty. Forget the head on the table in #36...! If I can figure out a way of posting something without revealing anything I will!

TMNT 25

I know there's a lot of doom and gloom circulating around the TMNT brand in spite of the upcoming TMNT 25th Anniversary, but what I've been hearing from Publishing and what I've seen has me excited. I've never really made it a big secret that my main interest in the Turtles is and always has been the original Mirage comics. I've dug the recent cartoons (I seemed to be one of the few Fast Forward supporters for a while there), but for me the toys have been a thing of the past (in spite of how cool some of the 2k3 figures were, and the NECA figures being an exception) and the movie, while fun, wasn't my cup of tea (give me the first movie any day).

Unfortunately, the comics seem to be left behind in the general scheme of things when it comes to a considerably large chunk of the fandom and its focus, though there are number of great people out there who have been with the comics for a long time.

Anyway, back to my point... there are a couple of things in line to happen next year that I think people have been worried about to a certain extent, that should please a number of them AND give a huge number of casual Turtle fans who also happen to be hardcore comic fans something they've been asking for for a while now.

Still no definite plans for San Diego though, at least from Mirage. I just took the first steps for the trip next year though! Am excited verily!

Homecoming

Okay.

For those of you not in the know, Australia's classification board is fucked. Simple as that, and because of that horror gaming from this point onwards is pretty much fucked as well. What am I talking about? Silent Hill: Homecoming has been banned here. For disturbing gore and horror violence. Apparently there's a somewhat nasty sequence involving drills, so the game has been banned outright. Nice. Screaming Eastern Europeans are free to go about their grotesque chainsaw decapitations in Resident Evil 4, but this gets the game banned. And get this, previous disappointments thanks to the OFLC include Fallout having to remove all reference to actual drugs (what?!) and the most recent Leisure Suit Larry games were also banned. I don't care how good or bad these games are, I wanted to play them, and the reason for their banning simply isn't good enough in my mind. But the fact that the games were banned is only a part of what irritates me about this.

What really pisses me off is the fact that from here on out, we're going to be getting neutered versions of everything. I'm worried Resident Evil 5 and a lot of other promising horror titles are going to have their balls removed to get a greenlight here. Ultimately the horror genre is NOT for children. Horror games have never been geared towards anyone under the age of 15, and my big concern is that all the games geared towards adults are going to feel the pinch. Ultimately, horror is a genre that NEEDS to push boundaries. Yes it can go too far, but at the moment, I don't feel it has. There are FAR worse things floating around on cinema screens and readily accessible to ANYONE at their local video store. The one guy in the way of games getting an R rating here in Australia points to the fact that games have an interactive element films do not. Where was this arguement when a bloody chainsaw peripheral was introduced for all consoles capable of playing RE4? Or when the game was modified to be even more interactive for release on the WII? Gotta love that interactive stabbing and knife slashing!
Interactivity also means fuck all in my mind when you have films like Saw 39 hitting screens every Halloween. Films which thrive on simple gratuitious violence and gore in some of the most disturbing and off-putting ways should come before a game that doesn't recieve advertising on national television (I saw the syringe pit sequence on a TV Spot for God's sake!), and is far LESS accessible to inappropriately aged audiences.

Child gamers will not play games they don't understand or have trouble controlling. There's a level of complexity to the Silent Hill and Resident Evil titles that will go right over the audiences these people claim to be concerned about, and for these sequences in question to occur, the player has to reach a significant point in the game. Kids simply won't have the patience for it. The psychological complexity of the Silent Hill series alone is enough to put a young gamer off. They simply won't understand it, and because they won't understand it, they won't play far enough into it! This is why the Wii has been thriving amongst younger and more inexperienced gamers, they're easily accessible games that don't require a significant investment of time or understanding from a player. It's exactly the same with books and comics. Kids won't read anything they don't understand, because they can't!

The people who classify these games DON'T play them! They see or read about violent sequences totally out of context. The questionable content is shown to them without their prior knowledge of the games in particular series' and they pass judgement on that.

That said, I have just imported the game, so eat shit Michael Atkinson. Thank you PS3 region-free games.

Are you a god?

Scroll down a bit for my last post on this subject (not the Gozer one, the Hun tattoo one).

See the magic Paul works? Fucking amazing if you ask me!

The Traveler Has Come!

Hob Anagarok