Friday, June 29, 2012

Marie Severin: The Mirthful Mistress of Comics

July 31, 2012
Marie Severin was born into a family of artists, and she made friendships in comics that have lasted a lifetime. She colored the horror, science fiction, and war comics of the legendary EC line, and spent thirty years working for Marvel Comics, doing everything from production and coloring to penciling, inking, and art direction, with work on characters including the Incredible Hulk, Sub-Mariner, Doctor Strange, and Kull the Conqueror, which she drew with her brother John. She is renowned for her sense of humor, reflected in the comic book Not Brand Echh, as well as the numerous caricatures she has produced over the years, earning her the nickname "Mirthful Marie" from Stan Lee. This loving tribute contains revealing and often amusing insights of her close friends and her brother John, as well as many of her co-workers, including Stan Lee, Al Feldstein, Roy Thomas, John Romita, Jack Davis, Jack Kamen, Tony Isabella, Gene Colan, Jim Mooney, Joe Sinnott, Mark Evanier, and David Anthony Kraft, plus an extensive commentary by Marie herself. Complementing the text is a wealth of photographs and artwork from throughout her career, including numerous rare and unpublished pieces, as well as a color gallery, showing her mastery with a painter's pallette. Marie Severin: The Mirthful Mistress of Comics is sure to bring back great memories (and a smile to your face), as you enjoy the remarkable story of "The First Lady of Comics."

The Hound of the Baskervilles: According to Spike Milligan

September 25, 2012
The classic and terrifying story of "The Hound of the Baskervilles" is hilariously rewritten according to Spike Milligan. Sherlock Holmes and his trusty companion, Dr. Watson, are working together once more to solve the mystery at Baskerville Hall. This time, however there's something fishy about the hound, a woman cries in the night, Guiness and Newcastle Brown are taken intravenously and the Berlin Philharmonic keep running out of things to play.

Classic Adventures interpreted by Spike Milligan

September 25, 2012
Spike Milligan wrote the book on today's sense of humour' 'But why keep me in the dark, Holmes?' 'It saves electicity, Watson.' 'What is a black spot? Is it an accident?' 'He gave a groan and he was alive! He spoke as he sat up, 'Have you got a fag, mate?' Welcome to the world of the classic adventure story, hilariously retold by legendary comic Spike Milligan. Relive Robin Hood, in which Little John becomes Big Dick and the Merry Men are joined by Groucho Marx. give yourself the willies with Frankenstein, whose monster comes to life craving a cigarette. join Sherlock Holmes for The Hound Of Baskervilles, where Guinness and Newcastle Brown are taken intravenously and a woman cries in the night. Thrill to Black Beauty as told by the horse himself. And the hunt for buried treasure with Long John Silver, Jim Hawkins and ...Groucho Marx in Treasure Island. Spike Milligan, the much-loved entertainer, broadcaster and writer, was widely regarded as the most influential British comedian since the Second World War. On his death in 2002, he was remembered as an 'irreverent and hysterical presence' by Prince Charles. Fellow comedian and writer Stephen Fry described Milligan's writing as 'abosutely immortal'.

Buz Sawyer: Sultry's Tiger (Vol. 2) (Roy Crane's Buz Sawyer)

September 19, 2012

WWII is over, but the adventures are just beginning.
World War II has ended, and with so many pilots mustered out at the end of the war, jobs for pilots are hard to find, and Buz’s record as a “hot-shot” pilot does not recommend him to commercial airlines. While looking for a job, Buz visits his old alma mater and spends time with glamorous Tot Winter and girl-next-door Christy Jameson. He finally finds the perfect job as a troubleshooter for International Airways, flying to trouble spots all over the world.

He encounters Sultry, the beautiful and dangerous woman he met on a Japanese-held island during the war, with fatal results for a major character in the strip. He travels to the arctic to stop the Mad Baron, an insane ex-Nazi trying to shoot down International Airways planes. And, in the only adventure to combine the daily and Sunday story lines, he teams up with his old pal Roscoe Sweeney to discover a fabulous ancient Mayan treasure. This book reprints the Sunday pages from this adventure in full color for the first time.

In the last adventure in our second volume, Buz is kidnapped and flown to Africa by mysterious assailants. His friend Chili Harrison bets International Airways chief Mr. Wright $200 that even in this desperate situation, Buz will manage to get involved with a pretty girl. Long-time readers of the strip will have no trouble guessing who wins that bet.

Comic strip historian Brian Walker wrote, “Buz Sawyer combined fast-paced adventure stories…with authentically illustrated military equipment and real locations, which Crane researched during trips around the world.”

Roy Crane’s drawing and storytelling skills just get better and better. With this volume’s Buz reprints from 1945 to 1947, Crane hit his stride. 48 full-color and 268 black-and-white pages of comics

Flash Gordon: The Tyrant of Mongo: The Complete Flash Gordon Library (Vol. 2)

September 25, 2012

Continuing the comprehensive library of the greatest science fiction hero of all time, this gorgeous collection of library editions feature all-new restorations that will preserve these legendary adventures for generations to come.

Featuring strips from world-famous writer-artist Alex Raymond, restored in their original format, complete and uncut! This volume continues the seminal adventures of pulp hero Flash Gordon, an ordinary man trapped on an alien world, and his ongoing battles with the deadly and heartless Ming the Merciless.

The Tyrant of Mongo offers readers a series of new, swashbuckling Flash Gordon adventures, including:
The Fall of Ming
Ice Kingdom of Mongo
Beast Men of Mongo

Flash Gordon: The Fall of Ming: The Complete Flash Gordon Library (Vol. 3)

September 25, 2012

Continuing the comprehensive library of the greatest science fiction hero of all time, this brand new collection of library editions feature all new restorations that will preserve these legendary adventures for generations to come.

Starting with revered writer-artist Alex Raymond, this volume continues the adventures of pulp hero Flash Gordon on the planet Mongo and his ongoing battles with the deadly and heartless Ming the Merciless.

Beetle Bailey: The Daily & Sunday Strips 1966

September 25, 2012

An entire year of Army antics from the recruits of Camp Swampy! Sgt. Snorkel chases Beetle, General Halftrack chases the women, Cosmo chases a fast buck, and Beetle Bailey chases the perfect nap! The gang's all here in the latest collection of award-winning zaniness!

A favorite in newspapers for over 60 years, these brilliantly restored strips feature the adventures of one of America's best-loved cartoon strip characters.

Adventures of Superman: Gil Kane

392 pages. Out Jan. 2, 2013.

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

LIFE 50 Years of James Bond: On the Run with 007, from Dr. No to Skyfall

Oct. 2, 2012

Fifty years (and five billion dollars in ticket sales) ago, the dashing Scottish actor Sean Connery declared suavely that he was "Bond, James Bond." Thus began a cinematic series unlike any other. LIFE was on the scene in the swinging '60s when James Bond became a cultural icon, and now LIFE tells the whole story in this commemorative book. Ian Fleming, a high-ranking officer in British Naval Intelligence during World War II, dreamt up his MI6 spy, code number 007, in 1953, and a decade later, with Dr. No, saw his creation take on a life entirely his own. All the fun of Bond is here: the movies; the reminiscences by the stars; the LIFE photo shoots; the knock-offs and spoofs; the artifacts; the trivia; and more!

Poster Art of the Disney Parks

September 4, 2012  

Anyone who has ever walked through the gates at a Disney Park knows that there is a magical experience waiting to be had on the other side. All of the telltale signs are there: the sound of joyful music pipes across the promenade; the smells of popcorn and cookies waft through the air; and the colorful attraction posters depict all the wonderful rides and shows created for Guests by the Imagineers. Poster Art of the Disney Parks is a tribute to those posters, which begin telling the story of each attraction even before Guests have entered the queue area.

     Disney attraction posters have been an important means of communication since Disneyland began displaying them in 1956. Not only are they eye-catching pieces of artwork that adorn the Parks with flair and style, they are also displayed to build excitement and disseminate information about the newest additions to the Disney landscape. When the first attraction posters made their debut at Disneyland, one such piece of art proclaimed that Guests could have a “true-life adventure” on the Jungle Cruise. And in 2012 at Disney California Adventure, a poster announced the grand opening of Cars Land—the newest thrill-filled destination at the Disneyland Resort. Both of those posters are reproduced within this book, along with posters from every decade in between.
 
  As evidenced by the evolution of the attraction posters, art styles and design techniques have certainly changed over the years. These characteristics also differ from continent to continent. Posters from Tokyo Disneyland, Disneyland Paris, and Hong Kong Disneyland exhibit the nuances in presentation that give each Park’s pantheon of posters its signature look. But while artistic interpretations and color palettes may vary from Park to Park and from year to year, the spirit of Disney storytelling is a constant that ties them all together.

Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

Out Oct. 9

“Sean Howe’s history of Marvel makes a compulsively readable, riotous and heartbreaking version of my favorite story, that of how a bunch of weirdos changed the world. That it’s all true is just frosting on the cake.” (Jonathan Lethem )

“A warts-and-all, nail-biting mini-epic about the low-paid, unsung ‘funnybook men’ who were unwittingly creating twenty-first century pop culture. If you thought the fisticuffs were bare and bloody on the four-color page, wait ‘til you hear about what went down in the Marvel bullpen.” (Patton Oswalt )

“Exhaustively researched and artfully assembled, Marvel Comics is a historical exploration, a labor of love, and a living illustration of how the weirdest corners of the counterculture can sometimes become the culture-at-large.” (Chuck Klosterman )

“Page after page, Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics manages to be enchantingly told, emotionally suspenseful and totally revelatory. If I knew more about superpowers, I’d be able to explain how he did it.” (Sloane Crosley )

 From a tiny office on Madison Avenue in the early 1960s, a struggling company named "Marvel Comics" introduced a series of bright-costumed superhero characters distinguished by smart banter and compellingly human flaws. "Spider-Man", "The Fantastic Four", "Captain America", "The Incredible Hulk"," The Avengers", "Iron Man", "Thor"," The X-Men", "Daredevil" - these superheroes quickly won children's hearts and sparked the imagination of pop artists, public intellectuals, and campus radicals. Over the course of half a century, Marvel's epic universe would become the most elaborate fictional narrative in history and serve as a modern American mythology for millions of readers. Interweaving history, anecdotes, and analysis, Sean Howe traces Marvel's decades - long rise to a multi-billion-dollar enterprise, revealing how it weathered "Wall Street" machinations, Hollywood failures, legal battles, and the collapse of the comic book market. He shows how Marvel's identity has continually shifted, careening between scrappy underdog and corporate behemoth. He also introduces the men behind the magic, including self-made publisher Martin Goodman, energetic editor Stan Lee, and Jack Kirby, the WWII veteran and co-creator of many of the company's marquee characters. A story of fertile imaginations, lifelong friendships, action-packed fistfights, reformed criminals, unlikely alliances, and third-act betrayals that incorporates more than one hundred original interviews with Marvel insiders then and now, "Marvel Comics: The Untold Story" is a gripping narrative of one of the most dominant pop cultural forces in contemporary America.

The Art of Betty & Veronica

November 13, 2012
Finally, a gorgeous full-color hardcover art book featuring the best Betty & Veronica artwork from their 70 year history as America's reigning cartoon high school icons. Features beautiful full-color artwork by fan favorite artists Dan DeCarlo, Harry Lucey, Bob Montana, Dan Parent and many more in a deluxe edition with an attractive cover featuring silver foil, silver ink, and spot-UV. Includes insightful cultural and historical commentary as well as expert commentary from inside the fashion industry on Betty & Veronica's fashions through the decades, and how they reflected the popular trends of the times and represented the evolution of style.

Thursday, June 7, 2012

Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dodged the FBI, and Transformed Children's Literature

Out Sept. 1, 2012.

Crockett Johnson (born David Johnson Leisk, 1906-1975) and Ruth Krauss (1901-1993) were a husband-and-wife team that created such popular children's books as The Carrot Seed and How to Make an Earthquake. Separately, Johnson created the enduring children's classic Harold and the Purple Crayon and the groundbreaking comic strip Barnaby. Krauss wrote over a dozen children's books illustrated by others, and pioneered the use of spontaneous, loose-tongued kids in children's literature. Together, Johnson and Krauss's style--whimsical writing, clear and minimalist drawing, and a child's point-of-view--is among the most revered and influential in children's literature and cartooning, inspiring the work of Maurice Sendak, Charles M. Schulz, Chris Van Allsburg, and Jon Scieszka.

This critical biography examines their lives and careers, including their separate achievements when not collaborating. Using correspondence, sketches, contemporary newspaper and magazine accounts, archived and personal interviews, author Philip Nel draws a compelling portrait of a couple whose output encompassed children's literature, comics, graphic design, and the fine arts. Their mentorship of now-famous illustrator Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are) is examined at length, as is the couple's appeal to adult contemporaries such as Duke Ellington and Dorothy Parker. Defiantly leftist in an era of McCarthyism and Cold War paranoia, Johnson and Krauss risked collaborations that often contained subtly rendered liberal themes. Indeed, they were under FBI surveillance for years. Their legacy of considerable success invites readers to dream and to imagine, drawing paths that take them anywhere they want to go.

Once Upon a Time: The Complete First Season

Out Aug. 28, 2012.

Relive the complete first season of ABC's Once Upon A Time, the hit series that boasts unforgettable characters and a tangled web of romance, action and enchantment. Immerse yourself in the magic and mystery of Storybrooke - a sleepy little town where every fairytale character you've ever known is frozen in time and trapped between two worlds, victims of an evil curse. On her 28th birthday, Emma Swan (Jennifer Morrison) meets Henry (Jared Gilmore), the son she gave up for adoption 10 years ago. Henry believes Emma is the daughter of Snow White (Ginnifer Goodwin) and Prince Charming (Josh Dallas), prophesied to break a powerful curse. Unconvinced, Emma returns Henry to Storybrooke, where she encounters the enigmatic Mr. Gold (Robert Carlyle) and clashes with mayor Regina Mills (Lana Parrilla) - the boy's adoptive mother - who Henry insists is none other than the Evil Queen! Start your epic collection with all 22 captivating episodes, including never-before-seen bonus features, in this spectacular 5-disc boxed set.

Muddy Waters & The Rolling Stones Live At The Checkerboard Lounge, Chicago 1981 DVD/CD

Out July 10, 2012.

On November 22nd, 1981, in the middle of their mammoth American tour, the Rolling Stones arrived in Chicago prior to playing 3 nights at the Rosemont Horizon. Long influenced by the Chicago blues, the band paid a visit to Muddy Waters club the Checkerboard Lounge to see the legendary bluesman perform. It didn t take long before Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood and Ian Stewart were joining in on stage and later Buddy Guy and Lefty Dizz also played their part. It was a unique occasion that was fortunately captured on camera. Now, restored from the original footage and with sound mixed and mastered by Bob Clearmountain, this amazing blues night is being made available in an official release for the first time. / Performers: Muddy Waters (vocals, guitar); Mick Jagger (vocals); Keith Richards (guitar); Ronnie Wood (guitar); Ian Stewart (piano); Buddy Guy (vocals, guitar); Lefty Dizz (vocals, guitar); Junior Wells (harmonica, vocals); George Mojo Buford (harmonica); Lovie Lee (piano); Earnest Johnson (bass); Ray Allison (drums); John Primer (guitar); Rick Kreher (guitar); Nick Charles (bass)

Track Listing:
1) Sweet Little Angel 2) Flip Flop And Fly 3) Muddy Waters Introduction 4) You Don t Have To Go 5) Country Boy 6) Baby Please Don't Go 7) Hoochie Coochie Man 8) Long Distance Call 9) Mannish Boy 10) Got My Mojo Working 11) Next Time You See Me 12) One Eyed Woman 13) Baby Please Don't Go (Instrumental) 14) Blow Wind Blow 15) Champagne & Reefer

Jimi Plays Berkeley

Out July 10, 2012.

In the aftermath of the Band Of Gypsys, Jimi Hendrix looked to refocus his career and meet the challenges of a new decade. The powerful impact that Jimi's appearances at both Monterey Pop and Woodstock had created had not been lost and Berkeley had developed as a flash point in the heated battle over the Vietnam War and other emerging social and political issues. Hendrix had filled the
spacious, nearby Oakland Coliseum the previous year and could have easily done so again, but elected for the more intimate theater setting as the venue. All of the available tickets for both shows were quickly snapped up and on the evening of the concerts, more than a thousand empty-handed fans were turned away. Tensions between patrons, venue security, local police, and those without tickets escalated. Ensconced safely backstage, Jimi was unaware of the turbulence that surrounded the building. The sold out house roared its approval as Jimi and the Experience took the stage. Jimi prefaced the concert with a request he often made of his audience, asking them to 'forget about yesterday or tomorrow. This is our own little world tonight.' The evening's second set is presented here in its entirety and original sequence.


Track Listings

1. Introduction (Live At Berkeley - 2nd Show, 10PM)
2. Pass It On (Straight Ahead) (Live At Berkeley - 2nd Show, 10PM)
3. Hey Baby (New Rising Sun) (Live At Berkeley - 2nd Show, 10PM)
4. Lover Man (Live At Berkeley - 2nd Show, 10PM)
5. Stone Free (Live At Berkeley - 2nd Show, 10PM)
6. Hey Joe (Live At Berkeley - 2nd Show, 10PM)
7. I Don't Live Today (Live At Berkeley - 2nd Show, 10PM)
8. Machine Gun (Live At Berkeley - 2nd Show, 10PM)
9. Foxey Lady (Live At Berkeley - 2nd Show, 10PM)
10. Star Spangled Banner (Live At Berkeley - 2nd Show, 10PM)
11. Purple Haze (Live At Berkeley - 2nd Show, 10PM)
12. Voodoo Child (Slight Return) (Live At Berkeley - 2nd Show, 10PM)

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

The Green Lantern Archives Vol. 7

Out Aug. 28, 2012.

Messages in a Bottle: Comic Book Stories by B. Krigstein

March 27, 2013
 
This compilation of “cartoonist’s cartoonist” Bernard Krigstein’s comics for EC and many other publishers spans many genres.

Bernard Krigstein began his career as an unremarkable journeyman cartoonist during the 1940s and finished it as a respected fine artist and illustrator — but comics historians know him for his explosively creative 1950s, during which he applied all the craft, intelligence and ambition of a burgeoning “serious” artist to his comics work, with results that remain stunning to this day.

Krigstein’s legend rests mostly on the 30 or so stories he created for the EC Comics, but dozens of stories drawn for other, lesser publishers such as Rae Herman, Hillman, and Atlas (which would become Marvel) showcase his skills and radical reinterpretation of the comics page, in particular his groundbreaking slicing and dicing of time lapses through a series of narrow, nearly animated panels.

Greg Sadowski, who has previously written and designed a Harvey Award-winning biography of Krigstein, has assembled the very best of Krigstein’s comics work, starting with his earliest creative rumblings, through his glory days at EC, to his final, even more brilliantly radical stories for Atlas Comics — running through every genre popular at the time, be it horror, science fiction, war, western, or romance (but no super-heroes).

Legendary EC colorist Marie Severin, in her last major assignment before her retirement, has recolored 15 stories for this edition. The remainder has been taken from printed comics, digitally restored with subtlety and restraint.

This edition reprints the out-of-print 2004 hardcover B. Krigstein Comics, with a number of stories re-tooled and improved in terms of reproduction, and several new stories added. It also contains an extensive set of historical and editorial notes by editor Greg Sadowski. Page stats from Krigstein’s personal archives and a comic book checklist of the artist’s entire body of work round out this substantial volume.