“Willow” & “Spike” first issues announced by Dark Horse

willowWe mentioned in our coverage of the Dark Horse panel at C2E2 that there’d be Willow and Spike comics coming from Dark Horse later this year. They got their official release dates today. You’ll be able to pick up the first issue of Spike on Wednesday, August 22, and Willow on Wednesday, November 21. The mini-series details are as follows:

Written by Jeff Parker (Thunderbolts, Agents of Atlas) and drawn by Brian Ching (Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Witchblade), Willow tells the story of the witch’s obsessive journey to recover her magic.

Willow is on a quest to bring magic back to the world, and she’ll do anything to make it happen, including forming some unhealthy alliances after cracking the code to travel to other dimensions—something thought impossible since the destruction of the Seed.
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Written by Victor Gischler (X-Men, Deadpool: Merc with a Mouth) and drawn by Paul Lee (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Devil’s Footprints), Spike promises to be the series all Joss Whedon fans will be talking about.

Spike ventures off world in his bug ship in order to get away from some personal frustration on terra firma, and winds up sucked into a demonic plot to take advantage of the absence of magic on earth.

“What I love about working with Dark Horse on Buffy-related material is that they take great care to capture the feel of the characters and stories from the television show, of which I was a huge fan. Getting my hands on the characters I’ve loved so much over the years is a dream come true,” said Gischler.

What I assume is the cover to the first issue of Willow can be seen to your left.

Tom Brazelton on Theater Hopper’s impending conclusion

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Iowa-based Tom Brazelton has been writing and drawing Theater Hopper for almost a decade now. In that time, he’s self-published three collections of the comic, made quite a few t-shirts, and grown a community around the adventures of a group of friends ever-so-loosely based on the people in his life. Sadly, now that Brazelton has two young children, he’s had to reduce Theater Hopper from thrice-weekly to weekly status, and even that’s been catch-as-catch-can in terms of what day it might appear. We took a moment at C2E2 to finally meet the man we’ve been harassing on various social media sites for the last five years, and ask him a few questions about the impending conclusion of the strip.

Listen to my interview with Tom Brazelton

C2E2, Day 1

c2e2-day-01-002The first day of the Chicago Comics and Entertainment Expo had a lot of firsts for me — first time randomly accosting strangers for interviews, first time at a big con, first time walking three miles round-trip for breakfast (although, really, Eleven City Diner is totally worth the time and shoe leather), and first time just generally seeing what you can do with a mouth, a recorder, and a camera.
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Panel picks for C2E2

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As stated earlier this week, the Chicago Comics and Entertainment Expo, aka C2E2, happens this weekend. There are scads of people from the world of film (John Cusack, Sean Astin, Val Kilmer), comics (Tony Moore, Jill Thompson, Eric Powell), wrestling (Jerry Lawler, Ted DiBiase), and books (Anne Rice, Charlaine Harris) appearing, in addition to a slew of other folks. I’m not here to give you the guestlist. That can be found at the event website. What I’m doing is offering a brief rundown of the panels to which I am most looking forward — bearing in mind that I won’t be there on Sunday. So, let’s look at what’s worth seeing, shall we?
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