So That Was The Weekend That Was...
I've been to a lot of conventions over the years, and I have to say that the New York Comic Con, considering that at one point this was going to be one of the few cons this years that I was going to drop out of, was one of the busiest conventions that I have ever attended, with countless panels, interviews, parties and seven - that's right, seven announcements for 2011.
The one that everyone knew, and one of the worst kept comic secrets was that Doctor Who is returning for a new comic series in 2011. We'd announced this in January, we'd announced it again in July, but this time we had some solid facts for people. Firstly, we had an art team announced - Andrew Currie, Richard Piers Rayner and the awesome Matthew Dow Smith are all on board, and we have a special guest one shot by Mark Buckingham as well, which makes me very happy as we've been trying to do something Who-related together since 2008.
As for the stories, it's of course set with the Doctor, Amy and Rory and we have a lot of fun things planned with them - click HERE for an interview I did about this with Comic Book Resources, as well as a larger version of the new cover by Tommy Lee Edwards.
But this of course was only one of the many announcements - several of the others involved Dan Boultwood and included Danger Academy, a new original series from Kickstart Entertainment set in an Academy / boarding school (in the same way that Hogwarts, or the Xavier Academy are) in America... but it's a school with a difference. For a start, all the students are called 'Smith' and secondly, they're all sons and daughters of the world's greatest and best known spies. But when an evil organisation kidnaps these spies during parent / teacher evening, it's up to the kids to save the day. A little bit of Spy Kids, a little bit of X-Men, a slight touch of Harry Potter, this should be great fun and written by me, drawn by Dan Boultwood and coloured by fellow Manor Club Productions chum Ciaran Lucas - and is currently slated for May 2011.
In addition, Dan and I have two projects at MTV Comics, as announced on the Saturday of the convention at a star-studded panel that included comics legend Stan Lee. The first, and most personal to me of all the projects is that The Gloom, the comic that Dan and I first did together back in 2004 is returning as an ongoing series on the MTV site from November. Redrawn, relettered and very much rewritten, The Gloom 2.0 is going to appear weekly, finishing sometime in early October 2011, when it'll be collected. It'll also be packaged as monthly 'issues' every 22 pages and MTV will be putting these up as part of their 'MTV COMICS' range on Comixology. So as you can see, this is quite swanky and exciting. The crowd seemed to like it as well, and at the MTV party that evening, ours was the only poster to be stolen from the wall!
The other MTV project is Agent Mom, which I've spoken about before - written with Alaina Huffman of Smallville and Stargate Universe fame, Agent Mom is drawn by Dan Boultwood and coloured again by Ciaran Lucas. A five part miniseries exclusive to MTV, Agent Mom's first 22 pages will start on the site in January.
The other announcements were smaller, as they weren't 'at the convention' ones, but it was announced that Aranim Publishing, the largest Middle East Publisher going had brought myself, Dan Boultwood and Anthony Jones on board to work with them on a couple of projects - the first, Saladin 2100 is very much a Braveheart meets Mad Max story set ninety years in the future and is drawn by Puppeteer Lee and written by Anthony Jones and myself in conjunction with Suleiman Bakhit, the creator of all three books. The second is Element Zero, again by Suleiman, Anthony and myself and is a contemporary tale set around a Middle Eastern version of someone like James Bond. The third, Balloon Girl is a more personal, childrens story about a young girl with a terminal illness who, while in hospital retreats into a balloon world where the animals help her come to terms with her illness while helping her fight off the manifestation of the illness, stalking her through the world in the form of a giant skeleton creature. Based on stories that Suleiman told a terminally ill child he one knew, this is a thought provoking and very emotional story that I'm proud to be co-writing, and Dan Boultwood is equally proud to be drawing.
All three of these will be written and released in both English and Arabic, so I'm obviously quite excited about this.
So as you can see, quite a lot is going on, and that's not even scratching the surface, as two other projects were greenlit at New York that I can't talk about yet, and there were a couple of other possible things that I'm crossing my fingers on.
Watch this space...