In celebration of his birthday tomorrow, let’s join rapper ILLUS and his adorable son in a visit to the world’s coolest comic store… it’s not just a great music video, it’s a great tour of the shop too!
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The Isotope Communique
Daily news and updates by Personality James Sime and the Isotope Staff
Join us is sending Storm off with all our love to his new home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. We’ll miss you!
UPDATE: Thanks to all who came out, and to the lovely staff of Marlena’s. Some really great photos from this!
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Check out this awesome Isotope reference in the first issue of Image Comics’ new San Francisco based noir series SNAPSHOT by Andy Diggle & Jock, this also ran in issue 322 of the wonderful JUDGE DREDD THE MEGAZINE for our overseas readers. Fell street at Gough… we could not be more honored!
More about SNAPSHOT here on CBR.
UPDATE: Go check out this fun contest we’re holding for SNAPSHOT. “Kill yourself” and win original art!
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Ed Luce drawing the next issue of WUVABLE OAF on the Isotope drafting table as we speak.
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Thanks to all for a fantastic 2012!
We’d like to give a special thanks to all the truly inspirational creators who joined us for this year’s semesters of Isotope Comics University sessions, all our Isotope in-store special guest comic creators who helped make the whole year exciting (Jeffrey Brown, Viktor Kalvachev, Katie Longua, Ted Naifeh, Adrianne Ambrose, Tom Neely, Ed Luce, Jamaica Dyer), our featured guests and celebrity surprises from tour very own fresh new take on comic conventions MorrisonCon (Gerard Way, Robert Kirkman, Jonathan Hickman, Frank Quitely, Jim Lee, JH Williams III, Jason Aaron, Darick Robertson, Jenn O Cide, Akira The Don, James Gunn, Max Landis, Jimmy Urine, Ryan Keely & of course MorrisonCon’s co-creator Ron Richards, & our co-curator Grant Morrison), the extended Isotope family who helped us behind the scenes to create all those amazing moments, and most importantly, all of you wonderful folks. Sincerely, thank you all from the bottom of my heart for making our 2012 a truly magical time to be alive!
The Isotope will be closed New Year’s Day, Tuesday January 1st. You’ll be able to find us shaking our backsides at the “party of the year” Breakfast of Champions, see you then. And we’ll be open again on Wednesday, January 2nd… with new comic arrivals!
Awesome NYE party art for this post by the always fab Chris Giarrusso.
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We’re open some extended hours to ensure we’re doing our part to help make your holidays happy and filled with great comics and graphic novels. We will be open the next two Mondays (shocking!) and also an hour later than usual on the next two Saturdays and Sundays… and despite the holidays, we will have new comics available for you at the regular time of Wednesday morning. Yes, new comics still do come out on Wednesdays! It’s a true Christmas miracle!
xoxox
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Two of the most anticipated reprints of the month here at the Isotope (and everywhere else) are the new printings of Darwyn Cooke’s PARKER: THE HUNTER and THE COURIERS by Brian Wood and Rob G.
We’re thrilled to get to finally help put these gorgeous new softcovers in your hands… and it’s extra fun that both of these fantastic books feature special comic appearances by members of the Isotope staff!
PARKER: THE HUNTER by Darwyn Cooke
Yes, it’s finally here in softcover, the first volume in the best series of crime noir comics ever made! The hardcover version of this was without a doubt all our favorite book of 2009 and if you haven’t read it already I can’t recommend it more highly. I was lucky enough to be staying with Dar and Marsha on a short vacation while he was drawing this book and got to show the first sneak peek of it anywhere… and was surprised many months later to find out Dar not only added a tiki bar for me but also drew myself and (ex-cigarette girl) Kirsten into the book! I got a pretty hilarious call from Darwyn the week this came out, he gave me a bunch of crap for “not even looking at page 71.”
THE COURIERS by Brian Wood and Rob G
This one’s been out of print for too long and it always bums me out when enjoyable books are lost in the sands of time, so it’s pretty nice to finally have another one of these long lost books back on the Isotope shelves. Brian Wood was living in SF just up the block from the shop when these comics originally came out and we did all sorts of crazy promotions to help Bri promote the series. My favorite promotion was something we called “Couriers Adrenaline Rush” an annual series of high-flying daredevil stunt photos featuring crazy aerial acrobatics. Like this photo of yours truly. You can check out more of those here. For special appearance fun, artist Rob G drew me into a few scenes like the one below, and there are plenty of Isotope t-shirts all over this book!
Two great books and they are now back on comic store shelves everywhere as we speak. Your bookshelf will be happy to have these additions if you don’t already own them. Thanks to Darwyn, Brian and Mister Rob G for honoring us in the artworks of these!
Hey, waitaminute… page 71 in PARKER and page 72 in COURIERS? Now that’s pretty crazy!
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In honor of the holiday season, score yourself one of these great Free Judge Dredd badges… we’re giving them away to everyone who buys awesome 2000ad comics in December. Only at the Isotope!
#happyholidays
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If you’re a Spidey fan, by now you’ll probably already have read AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #698. It’s a great issue, isn’t it? Congrats to author Dan Slott for serving up one of the most fun twists in recent memory! If you haven’t read it already, I don’t want to ruin the fun for you. And man, the spoilers are all over the internet! So go quick, grab yourself a copy on the Isotope’s Digital Store right away, read it, and then come back here and we’ll talk the Future of Spidey Comics.
Done? Ok now that we’re all on the same page here…
That Peter’s in quite the jam, isn’t he? And with all this building up to issue #700 which Marvel is billing as “the last issue of Amazing Spider-Man!” and the new Dan Slott written SUPERIOR SPIDER-MAN series that is to follow, it sounds like things are going to get worse for ol’ Pete before they get better. And just who the heck is this not Peter Parker that’s going to be starring in that new series that Dan Slott keeps talking about?
The internet is rife with crackpot theories and I have one of my own. I hinted at it earlier this week (and confused a few folks) on my Facebook and my Twitter with a simple little mathematical equation…
SS = (PP+OO) x power of MTLV
Let’s figure out this algebraic spoiler together, shall we? As you probably all know I’m a sweetheart who wants you folks to have the enjoyment of reading your comics so I’m going to do my level best to make this article as spoiler-free as possible. But for Aunt May’s sake, if you don’t want the future of Spidey comics spoiled for you stop reading now and whatever you do, do not click on any of the following links.
It’s algebra time! We’re going to be solving for the quantity of SS, or perhaps we could call it SSM. That one’s pretty easy to figure out, I think, it’s in the title of this post and also the title of this here comic book. As per basic algebraic rules in order to solve for SS we’re going to first start out by adding the next two quantities together, PP and OO. For those struggling at this juncture to figure out those duo of double letters, you need only apply this simple code-breaking concept, which I like to call Stan Lee’s First Law of Secret Identities. Am I still being too oblique here? How about this PP + OO.
MTLV has confounded a large number of folks. You would seriously not believe the number of hardcore Spidey fans who have struggled with those initials, it is quite shocking! But maybe in my effort to make the equation simpler to solve I perhaps made it more difficult by breaking the internal logic of the formula. Admittedly, SS = (PP+OO) x power of MM is actually the more accurate equation. So I’ve decided to break it all down and solve this for you folks. Here’s some simple clues to help you ferret out the secret to MTLV: It refers to something or someone that I think is “Spidey classics.” Hmm, not helping yet? This something or someone has been a serious and ongoing concern in Slott’s run. Still no? Okay, let’s try something different…
Take a look at Marvel’s Superior Spider-Man design document. Interesting stuff! Just what is up with this new black-costume-bits Spider-Man? Especially the strange things like this and this that make you suspect that at the very least SS won’t have the traditional powers that PP usually has. Hmmm… an “angley-rigid physique” that’s interesting too, does that fit anyone who we’ve seen in Slott’s run over the past year? And why is this new Spidey guy “more aggressive” and why does he have this little design detail on his costume, do you think? Looking at this gives me a couple ideas, can you think of any reason he’d need those?
Not yet?
What if there was an ongoing character in Dan Slott’s Spidey series who has made some pretty significant scientific discoveries, the kind that can cure people who are very sick, and who works with PP on a daily basis? Could those discoveries result in very telling things in our design document like this? And I don’t mind telling you, that looks like an awfully familiar profile to me as a long-time Spider-Man reader. But most telling of all is this new Spider-Man doesn’t have the traditional Steve Ditko designed mask… instead it looks like this. (cough)……(cough)!
And by now I know you folks have all figured out the formula!
Got it? If you comment below, please do keep it spoiler free for folks still trying to solve this algebraic equation. Hey, I like it, nice one Dan Slott!
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We’re still recovering from a multitude of insane Vegas weekends… it’s been a crazy six weeks!
It all started off with the congromeration/convention/conference we held with our good friend Grant Morrison known as MorrisonCon (yep, that crazy con was put on by your very own Isotope amigos)! It was a tremendous amount of work to pull it off but it was all worth it. A truly huge personal success for Kirsten, myself, Ron Richards and the Morrisons, especially creatively and culturally. Of course when you do something truly innovative there’s always going to be folks who come out of the woodwork to disparage your efforts but I’m happy to report it was *such* a success that after the fact pretty much everyone has universally accepted the life-changing convention paradigm shift we hoped it would be. That makes me smile!
It was only two weekends later that Kirsten and I were rushing straight back to Sin City for a truly lovely renewing of the vows ceremony for JH Williams III and his wife Wendy Williams. The wedding was held in one of the most adorable and un-Vegas like places I’ve ever seen, in the beautiful chapel at the Artisan Boutique Hotel. It was simply filled with love and sweetness. Jim and Wendy clearly felt the same. I had the honor of walking the bride down the isle and I have to tell you I’ve never cried so much at a wedding in my entire life. I’m truly blessed to have such wonderful people in my life.
Last but certainly not least was a third weekend in Las Vegas for Darwyn Cooke’s wedding to the always lovely Ms. Marsha Cooke. For those of you who love Dar’s art as much as I do you’ll probably be thrilled to see that they made some very sexy Darwyn Cooke Custom Wedding Celebration Card Decks in honor of the day for the guests (pictured at left). The wedding ceremony, held under the waterfalls at Mandalay Bay on the Strip, was absolutely lovely. And Darwyn and Marsha’s vows definitely got my crying like a baby all over again. We’d been quickly becoming Vegas experts over the previous visits but even so we knew this would be potentially one of the craziest trips of all, filled with all sorts of fun events the Cooke’s had planned for their multitudes of guests and also more than a few evenings that didn’t end until the crack-of-dawn. One of those events was a “Joker’s Wild Bar Crawl” held by myself and Kirsten that Dar asked us to do to entertain the Cooke’s many guests. Kirsten contacted our brilliant circus goddess friend (and Vegas local) Jenn-O-Cide to get some bar crawling advice and really put together something special for the Cooke’s. The Joker’s Wild Bar Crawl took place on a swanky party bus named “Big Daddy” (see it in all it’s flashing disco lights and hot-pink-stripper-pole glory here), we filled it to the brim with an assortment of adult beverages, and took the crew of comics industry who’s whos out on an off-the-Strip tour of some of Las Vegas’ best watering holes!
While we were having too much fun (particularly with the world class bartenders at Frankie’s) and didn’t quite get to all the stops, I thought it would be nice to share the itinerary we put together with you folks. Just in case any of you were ever planning to host a Las Vegas tour with a similar group, or needed an excuse to do some off the Strip exploring of that city. Enjoy!
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Have fun and please do always remember to call ahead and warn the bars before you bring 40 people on a bus to visit them. They’ll thank you for it!
Congrats again to Darwyn & Marsha for a beautiful wedding! And thanks to all who attended and helped make our part of of it special for Darwyn and Marsha… we had a blast!
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