Thief of Thieves
Comics by committee!

It’s Preview Night and the ICv2 Conference at San Diego Comic-Con, and while the big announcements are still being held back for the convention proper, news has begun to come out of San Diego in a trickle that will soon become a torrent.

Archie’s popular and groundbreaking new gay character Kevin Keller is getting his own ongoing comic from Archie Comics! In an unusually complex twist, apparently he will be both popular and discriminated against.

As Heidi reported – for those of you who don’t like to scroll down – Marvel announced a new series of standalone original graphic novels called Marvel Season 1. They’ll be set in the usual Marvel universe, but earlier in the lives of the characters, so presumably before they all died and came back from the dead ten times.

DC announced its new Vertigo all-star comics anthology The Unexpected, coming out this October, with comics from Brian Wood, Jill Thompson and Dave Gibbons among others. Apparently, it’s supposed to be like Strange Adventures, only with horror and supernatural instead of science fiction.

Dark Horse had news too – they’ve announced The Strain, a 24-part comic series based on Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s sci fi vampire novel trilogy of the same title.

Bryan Lee O’Malley, indie hero creator of Scott Pilgrim, announced his new book will be called Seconds and is coming out in 2013 from Random House’s Villard imprint.

Robert Kirkman announced in USA Today that his new comic Thief of Thieves will be written using a “Writer’s Room” approach – in an experimental technique inspired by his experiences working on The Walking Dead tv series, he’ll hand off issues to different members of a six-person writing team to write. Now we know how he plans to have the time to keep a whole Image imprint going!

Boom! is bringing you a comic called Fanboys vs. Zombies from the people who brought you Ugly Betty and The Office.

Enjoy it while you have it easy today, comics publishers. Tomorrow you’re going to have to practically blow up a moon to get a decent headline through the crush of news coming out of San Diego.

Have a SDCC scoop or a comic or event that you think I should know about? Tell me at my new Twitter account geekiferouskate; I’ll be helping Heidi cover all four days of Comic-Con.

1 COMMENT

  1. Pictures, I like seeing pictures of the Convention, since I won’t be there. Pictures of the cool booths and people. Pictures.

  2. The news about The Strain comic and Kirkman’s new book sound interesting. Going to assume the Del Toro series won’t begin until after the third book in the trilogy is published later this year.