The plan, coming together

A couple pieces of John K. Snyder III's final cover for the A-TEAM: SHOTGUN WEDDING TPB. B.A. to come...

Once more, into the Transforming fray

For some reason, whenever I post anything Transformers-related here, it seems to incite people, leading to some heated discussions. I'm not saying this like it's bad, because I welcome it, and I like that people care enough about what we're doing and about these characters to be so vehement in their opinions. But this time around, I'm here to run what seems like pretty universal praise for TRANSFORMERS #4, at least if these four threads speak for most readers. You're welcome to post dissenting opinions or anything else, but at least for this issue, we do seem to be winning some of you over. Always nice to see that.

TFormers.com

TFW2005.com

Seibertron.com

IDW Publishing forums

"Yes, wonderful things."

That quote from Howard Carter, uttered upon discovering King Tut's tomb and being asked if he could see anything, has always stuck with me. And feels very applicable here, when looking at Darwyn Cooke's wondrous cover for THE MURDER OF KING TUT #1, our adaptation of the James Patterson novel. The book weaves back and forth between Tut's life as a teenage ruler and Howard Carter's search for his tomb, and Darwyn did a masterful job of encapsulating all of that in a design-y and quite gorgeous first cover. He'll be doing covers for all five issues. Alexander Irvine is adapting the book, and Christopher Mitten and Ron Randall are splitting art chores on the boojk. They also co-illustrated a variant cover for issue one, which I featured here earlier this month.

Ashes to Ashes

Blog@Newsarama has a nice, long interview with Bob Fingerman about the collected edition of his FROM THE ASHES speculative memoir. Read the whole interview here. There's also a little bit of positive word therein about my WEEKLY WORLD NEWS comics from the interviewer, but go read the interview because Bob's produced a smart, funny book and is a smart, funny guy.

On the Prowl

Let's all officially welcome artist E.J. Su back to Transformers, in the form of the SPOTLIGHT: PROWL issue coming soon enough. The first of two new TF-related comics that the now-father-of-three Mr. Su is handling for us. Colors on the interior pages courtesy of Andrew Dalhouse, doing his first work for IDW here.

I was reading some of the online scuttlebutt about this coming Spotlight issue, and the number of erroneous assumptions about what it is, what it means, and why we're doing it was impressive even for the Transformers boards. The nice thing about that is knowing how many "pleasantly surprised" responses we'll see after people read this one.

Here there be Dragons

Somehow online, erroneous word is going around that our DRAGON AGE comic with EA Games is going to be delayed until April. It's not true at all--it's a March title, and will be in stores on March. Sure, it's the last day of the month, March 31, but it's not delayed or late at all. Just in case you see this elsewhere--ain't true.

Meanwhile, here're the original inks for Humberto Ramos' first cover, as well as a page of interior art from issue 1, too.

God of Thunder

Well, God of Lightning, anyway. The Sharp Brothers' cover for May's PANTHEON #2, the Michael Chiklis-Marc Andreyko series about modern-day Greek gods:

The Devil You Know

One of the new series you'll see in Previews this Wednesday is a new Spike miniseries called SPIKE: THE DEVIL YOU KNOW. It's written by Bill Williams, who's handling the "Eddie Hope" back-up strips in ANGEL now, with art by Chris Cross. I previously showed a couple of Cross' pages here, and below is another one, along with cover artist Franco Urru's first cover image for the series.

Bon Voyage, Demeter

One of the new books we're starting in May is a book called BRAM STOKER'S DEATH SHIP. It tells the tale of the Last Voyage of the Demeter and leads right into Stoker's novel. So, you know, a prequel hundreds of years after the fact. It's written by PUMPKINHEAD co-creator Gery Gerani, and has covers by Cliff Nielsen. Interiors are being handled by Stuart Sayger, an artist Bob Schreck brought to the project. I wasn't familiar with Sayger's work before this but check out these pages below -- looks perfectly suited to this kind of material. Colors by Dom Regan.

The Final Weekly

Since I have WEEKLY WORLD NEWS on my brain, having just finished recording audio commentary for the Sony PSP version of issue 2, here're the covers for issue 4. The B cover is by Comic Book Idol winner Jon Reed, paying beer-soaked homage to a classic SWAMP THING cover.