Stalking Steve Ditko

Following in the footsteps of Jonathan Ross and Neil Gaiman, Steve Fuentes pays Mr. Ditko a visit.

Vinnie the Puh

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Ashely Wood Toys

Limited edition toys on sale at Bambaland.
More info on Ashley Wood here.

Discard

Check out Discard- the blog of Eric Canete, the artist on "Iron Man: Enter the Mandarin."

Ninja Turtles no longer teenage

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1, May 1984

TMNT celebrates 25 years one year early at Newsarama. Check out interviews with Mirage Studios' Peter Laird, Dan Berger and Stephen Murphy.

Official TMNT site here.

Storytelling Engines

What is a storytelling engine? John Seavy explains:

Specifically, it relates to some comments I made some time ago about the construction and maintenance of “status quos”....

The idea is that when creating an open-ended series, you include a variety of different elements that act to help the writer in generating ideas for stories; each of these elements can be seen as a component in a “storytelling engine”....

So what elements make up a storytelling engine? The basic concept of the series, for starters; Doctor Who, to use a series we won’t be looking at later on, has as its concept “a mysterious stranger has a time and space machine.” Then from there, you layer on the main character, with his motivations and backstory (”an endlessly curious not-quite-human trickster, on the run from his own people who see helping people as a crime”), the supporting cast (”a young woman with more curiousity and guts than common sense”), the setting (”the inside of the time machine”, “modern-day London”, “a variety of alien planets”, “various Earth historical locales”), the antagonists (”a variety of evil aliens who seek to enslave or destroy people”), and the tone (”light-hearted adventure, with occasional forays into horror.”) Each of these, ideally, does something to help the writer come up with a story or move it along, and each of them could be changed in ways that help or hinder the writer. (For example, if the Doctor was “a heavy reader with no interests beyond enlarging his vast library”, the series would probably have to work much harder to get him involved in events.)

Each series has these elements, and each series evolves over time as different writers take a hand at the character....

Check out Seavy's analysis of the storytelling engines that make up classic comic characters here.

More primate themed art from Gorillaz team

Jamie Hewlett and Damon Albarn designed characters based on a 16th-century Chinese tale for the opening sequence of BBC's Olympic coverage. More here. Larger images here.

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Cassanova/ Paper Planes

Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba ink Casanova to the sounds of MIA. Is anyone else surprised that they pencil their names in before signing their work?

The Muppets take "Manhattan"

Forget Jason Segel- the next Muppets movie should be done by Woody Allen.

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Elvis to barbers: "Shazam!"

James Robinson on the Elvis/Captain Marvel connection:

So Elvis Presley wanted a unique haircut. And at the time, in the fifties, especially in Memphis, he couldn’t get it because everything was short, back and sides. So he would go into ladies hair salons with copies of ‘Captain Marvel Jr.,’ show them Captain Marvel’s haircut and that’s the original look of Elvis. And when you think about Elvis later, Vegas Elvis, with the cape, think about it in your head, turn into red and gold or blue and gold and it’s a Captain Marvel costume.

Read the rest of Robinson's interview about assembling his new Justice League team and his upcoming run on Superman.