§ Nice Art: Three time Eisner Award winner Bandette from Paul Tobin (Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, Plants vs. Zombies) and Colleen Coover (Heart Acres, Banana Sunday) is coming back from Dark Horse in Bandette Volume 5: The Wedding of B.D. Belgique. The world’s greatest teen thief, Bandette has been pulling off capers in a long running digital comic from Tobin and Coover, and this volume collects episodes 19-22 in July 2025. Bandette started out from the groundbreaking digital comics company Monkeybrain, went over to Comixology, and was most recently put out by the creators, with print editions coming out from Dark Horse along the way. Basically this is a charming and adorable series, and it’s great that it continues on!
Bandette has taken her city by storm, breaking hearts and stealing masterpieces with an oddball group of associates and enemies. When a mysterious new villain known only as the Voice makes their debut, Bandette sets her sights on stopping them! But the Voice always seems to be one step ahead, so Bandette decides it’s time to bring in reinforcements. Calling on friends and enemies alike, Bandette and crew discover that the key to taking down the Voice is locked on the other side of the altar, and it’s time to get ready for the wedding of B.D. Belgique.
§ This will most likely be the last Kibbles of the year, and we’re doing it just to get those Best of lists in. Just in case you missed it, the Beat team weighed in with their 50 comics of the year yesterday, but other outlets have been reading hard as well.
Slash Film
Bonus: Publishers Weekly Top Ten Comics Stories of 2024
The list of lists is a little short this year. In years past I think Jamie Coville did a compilation to make a superbest list; and the indefatigable Clark Burscough at TCJ promises an even longer Best Of listings. But I’m struck by the fact there are only 3 1/2 (Newsarama is only 1/2 a comics site) lists from COMICS outlets. Surely there are more, but Google’s awful search didn’t show them? Or is that all there is? I didn’t include YouTube or TikTok rankings. I think Final Cut by Charles Burns has been on the most lists. Some people HATE the book but I think it’s Charles Burns and he is the best at what he does – unsettling teen horror.
Anyway, all these lists have lots of great books on them – the SlashFilm list even includes the indie wonder The King’s Warrior by Huahua Zhu which I forgot to put on The Beat’s list, so consider that #51.
§ A frequent choice on best ofs is Olivier Schrawen’s SUNDAY, and if you’re wondering what this Joycean portrait of one man’s idle musings looks like, The New Yorker has an excerpt:
§ BONUS BONUS: the San Jose Public Library’s Top Checkouts of 2024 list is topped by DOG MAN, with more Dog Man and Wimpy Kid below. The new Dog Man has sold 234,478 units in its first week; the most recent Wimpy Kid (Hot Mess) has sold 559,035 copies.
§ Speaking of Wimpy Kid, Jeff Kinney did an interview with Boston.com as he tours around and sells thousands of books. And I know Wimpy Kid isn’t a comic, but Kinney is a cartoonist at heart and we embrace him!
Jeff Kinney: Well, being a cartoonist, having a comic strip was my aspiration, and I failed to achieve it. I know, play me the world’s smallest violin. [laughs] But that was what I wanted to do. When I grew up I read the Washington Post. Every day there were a few comics that I liked to read, and I could see for sure that that’s where I wanted to be, and I thought I had the comedic chops to do it. I felt like my joke writing was strong, but I knew that I was not a fine artist. If you look at Schulz and Watterson, and many others, they are also fine artists — like, you know, Burke Breathed and Garry Trudeau. I don’t think Gary Larson really was a fine artist, but his art style really worked for his humor style.
So I’ll cut to the chase. I wanted to be a newspaper cartoonist. It didn’t work out for me. I tried for about three years. Then I had this idea of embedding my comics into a journal format. I worked on it for eight years. I really took my time. I wrote ideas for four years, and I wrote the first draft of the manuscript for four more years, and then I was finally ready to show it to someone. So it took me a really long time to develop it. I knew it was going to be my opus, you know, win or lose, that this was going to be the best that I could do. And I feel really lucky that it worked out
§ D&Q put out a handsome 30th Anniversary compilation of the 90s/00s magazine Giant Robot, a highly influential journal of Asian culture, and co-founder Eric Nakamura did an interview about it:
In 1994, Nakamura founded Giant Robot as a zine, a DIY effort made with the help of friends who contributed articles and helped staple together the initial run of issues. “I was looking at other magazines out there and thinking, Wow, I don’t have the budget for that, but I can make a zine as thick as a magazine,” he recalls. “That was kind of the idea, making something as bold and thick. I think the first Giant Robot was 68 pages. It was actually pretty substantial.” As the popularity of these homemade magazines grew in the middle of the 1990s, so did Giant Robot’s profile. Early on, copies landed in the racks at Tower Records. “They could take you international because there were Towers overseas,” Nakamura recalls, surmising that Tower might have been the only place where one could find Giant Robot in Japan. And the magazine itself grew in both production value — from photocopied, black and white pages to slick full-color — and scope of content. With a focus on Asian and Asian American pop culture and a punk rock attitude, Giant Robot was unique, even amongst the slew of independent publications that emerged from the same era.
I wish the kids knew what it was like to pick up a cool magazine at a cool record store and read about cool things. It was cool! I know the kids have cool things now like webtoons and cucumber salad, though, and someday they will be my age and wish that the kids of then had cool things like webtoons. Such is life.
§ Well, speaking of things that are popular, Matt Alt unwraps the looming Sony/Kadokawa deal, and it is no less than a very huge thing that speaks to the immense value of anime IP:
Sony’s sleek consumer electronics redefined technology as a form of fashion in the 20th century, before the firm pivoted into global content distribution in the 21st. And Kadokawa is a Japanese entertainment empire that produces bestselling novels, manga, and anime series. They pioneered the now-ubiquitous “media mix” marketing strategy to create blockbuster franchises, using books to hook moviegoers and vice versa. Read it first and watch it later? Or watch it first and read it later? went a famed Seventies Kadokawa tagline. We’re at a similar crossroads with the (still potential) merger, reading about it now, and watching to see what happens later. But one thing is absolutely clear: this is the most interesting thing to happen to the Japanese content industry in a long time — particularly given the sustained hunger for Japanese content abroad. So let me set the stage as to why this is important, and what the implications of these two companies joining forces might be.
§ Will there ever be a Goon movie? Well, Deadpool director Tim Miller was asked about it at CCXP. He’s long been attached to the project. And like many directors who have dream projects they didn’t get to make, when asked about it, he expressed a vague hope that maybe he will get to do it someday:
Miller, in particular, offered insight into a comic book adaptation that has routinely been delayed for years: The Goon. The first inklings of an adaptation came in 2008, which eventually evolved into a successful $400,000 Kickstarter campaign in 2012. Miller became attached to the project in 2017, but it has since received few updates. The filmmaker, however, remained optimistic at the panel: “I will never give up on the Goon movie… I will make it.”
And thus, headlines on movie news sites were given a new topic. A Goon movie would be super cool though.
§ You know what is not as cool as everything we’ve been talking about? I am sad to say it is Kraven The Hunter, starring Aaron Taylor Johnson’s ripped abs. The movie opens today, but has already been tagged as a ‘horrible bomb that will sink Sony’s Spider-Verse plans forever.’
“Kraven the Hunter” may be headed for an opening weekend gross between $13 million and $15 million in domestic theaters, Variety reported, a dismal result for the film produced on a $110 million budget and a strikingly low figure for a comic book film adaptation. The opening may even be lower than that of “Madame Web,” another film in the Sony Spider-Man Universe that bombed spectacularly in February with a $15.3 million debut and uniformly negative reviews, some of whom dubbed it the worst-ever comic book film. The Wrap reported, citing anonymous sources it says are insiders at Sony and top talent agents, that the studio is turning its focus away from the Spider-Man spinoff universe and instead focusing on the upcoming “Spider-Man” film starring Tom Holland as the titular superhero.
Another report put it even more bluntly with a devastating on the scene report that will stir pity from anyone who has ever been on a panel:
At Brazil’s prestigious Comic Con Experience (CCXP) on Sunday, Sony Pictures’ surprise panel for “Kraven the Hunter” — the studio’s latest non-Spider-Man Marvel movie — played to rows of empty seats, according to an individual in attendance. There were no stars, and not that many fans. Just silence where superhero hype should have been. The half-empty panel presentation of a $110 million budgeted antihero movie at one of the world’s largest pop culture events reflected the Sony Marvel franchise’s diminishing profile outside the mainline “Spider-Man” movies starring Tom Holland. While “Venom: The Last Dance” launched on more than 4,000 movie screens in October, “Kraven the Hunter” will debut this Friday in just 3,000 — a stark 25% reduction that signals waning confidence in Sony’s failed Marvel experiment.
Failed experiment. I tolja, you should have made that Vulture movie.
§ And yet comic book movies – even those based on more obscure comics – continue to find an audience. Case in point: 2 Guns, starring Mark Wahlberg and Denzel Washington, based on the comic by Steven Grant and Mateus Santolouco. The movie will be leaving Netflix at the end of the month but after a surprising hit run.
Back in October, Netflix subscribers helped turn a flop around when they welcomed Mark Wahlberg and Denzel Washington’s buddy cop action feature, 2 Guns, with open arms. The movie quickly climbed the streamer’s Top 10 list, putting it back in the public eye after more than a decade since it was released in cinemas. But, if you still need to check out the comic adaptation, you’ll want to run over to the platform as fast as your little feet will carry you, because December 31 will be your final day to stream 2 Guns on Netflix. If you’re a fan of the original comic book series from Boom! Studios, you’ll definitely want to see how filmmaker Baltasar Kormákur took the story from page to screen in this explosive feature.
Despite my contention that the comics to movie pipeline isn’t all that, sometimes very engaging movies do get made and the comic continues to sell. Good job everyone.
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