Two new digital versions of familiar publications about comic books debuted recently: Wizard World Digital and The Comics Journal. Let's take a quick look at each:

Wizard World Digital: This is basically a digital mashup in PDF format of Wizard Magazine and Toyfare that you can read for free on your computer or iPad-like device.

The Awesome: Focusing on a wide variety of different types of comics (Image's Who Is Jake Ellis? is featured on the cover), Wizard World Digital brings together some of the features of the old magazine I liked (I'm a fan of those wacky "Robot Chicken" type action figures with the word-balloons, I admit it) with a more broader focus on comics today (such as the aforementioned "Ellis," Top Shelf, a spotlight on digital comics, and an "In Memoriam" for Dwayne McDuffie) than the former print version. Read more...

Tags Fantagraphics, TCJ.com, The Comics Journal, Wizard World Digital

By Nick Nadel

Fans of anthropomorphic adventure rejoice: Fantagraphics will be releasing the complete Carl Barks Donald Duck stories in full color later this year. Long known as “The Good Duck Artist” by fans who were able to pick out his work from the other anonymous Disney artists of his day, Barks’ tales of Donald, Scrooge McDuck (whom he created), and the nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie have inspired everything from the DuckTales cartoon to Raiders of the Lost Ark. (Lucas and Spielberg have all but admitted that they stole the runaway boulder sequence from Barks’ Uncle Scrooge story “The Seven Cities of Cibola.”)

Fantagraphics hopes that the affordable reprints (recolored by Rich Tommaso) will expose Barks’ work to a wider audience in much the same way that their acclaimed Peanuts reprints introduced a new generation to the world of Charles Schultz. Indeed, Barks’ fast-paced tales operate in that timeless zone of great works of fiction (Bone, Harry Potter, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure) that grow richer and more rewarding with age. Read more...

Tags Carl Barks, Donald Duck, Duck Tales, Fantagraphics, Walt Disney

By David Paggi

After recently dropping the amazing Werewolves of Montpellier on American audiences via Fantagraphics, Norwegian cartoonist, Jason, has posted the cover and an interior page from his newest, Isle of 100,00 Graves, due out next year. On Isle Jason will be teaming up with writer Fabien Vehlmann (Who actually worked with Sean Phillips on 7 Psychopaths for BOOM! Studios recently).

For anybody not familiar with his work, Jason (Yup, just Jason) draws in a signature anthropomorphic, deadpan style that delivers both humor and pathos in ways most cartoonists only dream of. He has won Eisner awards for his comics The Left Bank Gang, which re-imagined the American literary expatriates in France as bank robbing cartoonists, and I Killed Adolf Hitler, a poignant tale of a time-traveling hit man. His quirky western, Low Moon, which replaced shootouts with chess games, ran in the New York Times Magazine and was collected with other original short work in a book of the same title from Fantagraphics. In addition to Isle, in the next year or so, Fantagraphics will be releasing another collection of shorter work as well as collection of older and out of print work called What I Did. Keep an eye on Jason’s blog, Cats Without Dogs for more news, art and incredibly entertaining movie reviews.

Check out the preview:

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Tags 7 Psychopaths, Boom!, Fantagraphics, Isle of 100, Jason, Werewolves of Montpellier