Avatar Press

• People I Want to Work With: Mike Wolfer – the prophet king governance – I don’t have characters I want to write, I have people I want to work with.

  Mike Wolfer, along with Los Bros. Hernandez and Eastman/ Laird, is a big part of what is wrong with me.

  Most of my early Wolfer stuff was tossed by The Mother. I keep meaning to hunt down replacements.

  I read his Daikazu shortly after it came out. I was seven. But it was mad fun. Giant monsters and Wolfer’s arguably deranged mind… it was awesome. Fucking forget Cloverleaf. Actually, don’t, it was pretty good. Just realize an American did an amazing take on giant monsters YEARS before.

  Then came Widow. Which is one of many reasons I can’t take Spiderman seriously.

• Crossed #1 by Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows – Within a few pages, you get a great feel for the charaters and where they fall within the heirarchy of the group and although there is mystery surrounding the cause of this disaster you understand the severity of it. The art is handled by Jacen Burrows in fantastic fashion and he really get's to show us what he's made of with possibly one of the most horrific splash pages I have ever seen.

I’m going out to look for the bastards who just shot us, yes. FreakAngels is a free webcomic by Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield, and we now have the first 216 pages of this saga online at freakangels.com.

There’s a rather amazing community of FreakAngels readers and people Warren Ellis knows (yes, that means… everyone) called Whitechapel. We talk about the latest episode there, draw things, make things, modify food, and so on.

We’re starting to put out a little FreakAngels merchandise. There are men’s t-shirts and women’s tanks (stylishly worn all over the world), and also this Woven Throw:

And of course, the first FreakAngels printed volume was released recently. People everywhere are reading it.

So that’s where we’re at with FreakAngels. Although I did notice while helping get today’s ep online that we should be halfway through Book 2 at this point.

Our direct sales agent Comic Cavalcade has their new store up and running. Quick links: November, December, January, and February Avatar Press releases.

• Whitechapel – FreakAngels Hand-Made – Do you have anything that you've painted the FreakAngels logo onto? I sure do.

• Whitechapel – Grinder Food Challenge – Holidays are coming closer. Which means Cooking, Baking and other Food-Related insanity. Which lead me to the idea of Grinder Cookies, and Cakes, and other foods made into grinder symbols, or other Doc-related wackiness involving food items. I think we can beat headless santa cookies, and pained-looking gingerbread men. Gingerbread Grinders? Sugar cookie Shrieky Girls? – I'm sure there's a thousand or so things we can come up with that are not only neat looking, but also yummy!

  So here's the challenge: Incorporate the grinder symbol or something related to Dok Sleepless into a food item, photograph and write about it here.

  Grinders need snacks, too!

• Atlantis Comics Online (FreakAngels Vol 1 review) – something nearly intangible makes this particular title stand out from his other current projects. There's an honest hunger behind this tale which opens the proverbial door to the reader and offers them entrance inside, seen in the calculated application behind every element of the story, from the flow of the plot to the in-depth explanations of the individual characters and their passions.

Our direct sales agent at comcav.com is doing a little housekeeping this week, but they plan to be back in action by this Wednesday. Check back soon for bigger, better ways to get your Avatar comics, trades, and merch.

• Warren Ellis » FRANKENSTEIN’S WOMB: The Monster – His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion, and straight black lips.

  – Mary Shelley

• Comic Book Resources > CBR News: CBR TV: Christos Gage – The writer of numerous Marvel Comics titles including “Avengers: The Initiative” and “X-Men/Spider-Man,” Christos Gage stopped by the CBR Boat Show at Comic-Con International to talk about his creator-owned Avatar Press series “Absolution.” Illustrated by newcomer Roberto Viacava with covers by Jacen Burrows, “Absolution” tells the story of Joe Dusk, a superhero in a police force full of superheroes, who’s developed over the years a very bad relationship with the rules.

  In this exclusive on-camera interview, Gage discusses with CBR Executive Producer Jonah Weiland the startling real-life inspiration for “Absolution” – a police officer who quit the Force when certain futilities became too great to ignore.

• This is Matt.: Aetheric Mechanics – Aetheric Mechanics is a Warren Ellis one-shot through Avatar Press (this pas summer, I believe), and it's damn near perfect. I'm not going to try and go too deep into the plot as any description will not do it justice. Suffice to say its 1906 in a sci-fi London with a Holmesian character working on a bizarre case.