Whoop- preview pages! Marvel Adventures Avengers- get 'em while they're hot. See how kickbutt Manuel Garcia and Scott Koblish are! Coming up pretty soon.

If you've been in the comics shop today and leafed through the latest Wizard Magazine (#176), you may have uncovered the mysterious Golden Age project I mentioned a while back. It's a miniseries called AGENTS OF ATLAS, being drawn by Leonard Kirk and with covers by Tomm Coker. A mega no-prize goes to Zack, who in the comments then, somehow with no freaking clues guessed THE YELLOW CLAW was involved! And of course, where there's the Yellow Claw, there's JIMMY WOO. With his teammates GORILLA MAN! MARVEL BOY! THE HUMAN ROBOT! And a Johnny Bacardi favorite, VENUS!

Okay astute Marvel historians, who am I leaving out of this lineup-- and why?

Reposted from the Mercury Blog, so I have A BLOG ENTRY. Sorry, we were out of town at a wedding, seeing how much little kids like staying in a car for hours on end...

It's not all just blood and police tape around here at Mercury Studio. Why, if you go over to Newsarama, you can read about other things Mercury members are up to. Like say, an interview with Terry Dodson and what all he's doing at DC. And sometimes our members work together on things, like Karl Kesel and David Hahn over at Marvel. It's so much more than stepping over gunshot drug dealers, it really is.

I tried to post last night, but Blogger was runnin' block on me. Here's a new review of Marvel Adventures Fantastic Four #11 over at Silver Bullet Comicbooks. And since I haven't posted any pictures in a while, here's one I found while checking through folders looking for the list of ISBN's I'll need to print that Toth book. It's a piece I did in someone's sketchbooks, I forget who but they were nice enough to send me a jpeg like I always ask for (and sometimes receive).

Okay, it's true. Though I've mentioned incessantly that I'm in no big hurry to publish a book for a while (and thus have to fill orders), I am going to crank up the OCTOPUS PRESS machine to publish a collection of Alex Toth work. How could I not? This is twenty years worth of doodles and sketches that Alex would send to friend John Hitchcock (owner of the comics shop PARTS UNKNOWN), and it's just fascinating to look through. So far, probably only a few dozen people have ever seen this, so it's time to change that. In a few weeks I'll squeeze in time to make a web page for it, and then ask you kind people to spread that link around. If there's any money after printing costs are covered, most of it will be going to Toth, so I don't really have any ad budget to speak of. But I think word of mouth will actually do a lot, as that's how his reputation has spread over the decades- he's an "artist's artist". Anyway, since people keep writing and asking me, I feel I can step up and proclaim now that I've sent off the solicitation to run in Diamond's June Previews. Much more information coming!

That's POWELL'S BOOKS on Burnside, Thursday night at 7:30 until- featuring Colleen Coover and Paul Tobin of Banana Sunday, James Lucas Jones of Oni Press, and my studiomate and oft-collaborator Steve Lieber. It's GRAPHIC NOVEL NIGHT, and the guests will be talking about how comics are made and fielding questions from the room. Heck, I might even go and heckle like Statler and Waldorf all rolled into one.

...as the story progresses, the pair gets to know each other better and the humor gets more interesting. "I can't believe I'm talking to a fine lady from an alternate universe. This is the most rad thing that's happened to me all week."

Silver Bullet Comics reviews Untold Tales: Starbrand!

Now see, with my trained eye, I could have told you that the Rockwell piece was a fake. Thanks to The Spurge for finding another fun story oddly related to cartooning.

And thanks to Chris Rangel and the organizers of the Emerald City Comicon this past weekend, who made space for me and my studiomates despite our acting like chumps and assuming one of us was lining up table space. Wait, let me back up...

THANKS to Armando Gutierrez for picking up my full portfolio that I left leaning up against a parking meter on Stark Street the day before. I went downtown to the studio to load up art and comics to take Sunday, and brought both kids with me. But after putting them both back in the car, I had that sense of completion and got in myself, driving off without the thing I went there for. Four hours later I suddenly had the clear mental image of said portfolio leaning against the meter and no memory of having put it in the car. I raced back downtown expecting to find scraps of art and books scattered everywhere with junkies eating it. Instead I get a call from Armando telling me he's at his office with it in my very building!Good thing I had some business cards inside, though why someone cool like Armando found it instead of the usual streetfolk like Showbiz and Pineapple St. John leads me to think I'm living in a fictional construct.

Thanks to Karl Kesel for coming over the next day at the new 7AM (formerly 6AM) and picking me up to go to the show. Driving to Seattle from Portland is always a nice ride, and a good backdrop to discuss the entire comics industry through. Karl is hard at work on the Kirby Estate's GALACTIC BOUNTY HUNTERS and he caught me up on that, and I made him sit through the whole telling of my groundbreaking miniseries for Marvel coming this Summer that I never say more about. Once at the show I saw its creator and now Image executive Jim Demonakis, who apparently has been forced to eat healthy since moving to Berkeley because he's all lean and mean now.

I'm not going to do a con report for something I was only around one day for, and besides, you can thank Laura Gjovaag, who already did, and made us all hold a troll for some reason. Her undying faith in Aquaman has been rewarded with Kurt Busiek, Jackson Guice, and a tv show. I will say that I saw some great Blue Beetle art by Cully Hamner, and found out about two great artists I didn't know of, Chris Turnham and Kevin Dart. I bought a print from Chris, and hope to get more art from both of them. My regrets are that I couldn't be at the show both days, and that I didn't know Dan Brereton was there- I didn't see him and I'm sure I walked around the room enough. Oh yeah, thanks to Leonard Wang for beverages (oh you Canadians!) and Andy from Cosmic Monkey Comics for pizza. Thanks!