New York Comic Con Report

[August Yang]

  So, as some of you may know there was a comic convention in the New 
York and Disney publishing was there to promote some of their own books 
and comics.  Boom! Studios was also there to promote their books as well 
and I attended both panels.  So here are some tidbits and information 
that I gleaned from those.

First the Disney Comics panel:

The first talked about the various movie tie in comics that they were 
doing.  They mentioned the Tron Betrayal #1 that was just released last 
Wednesday and that the Graphic Novel would be out on Nov. 16.  Tron 
Betrayal tells the story of what happened between the last movie and the 
upcoming Tron Legacy movie.

The next subject was an upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean graphic novel 
called Six Sea Shanties.  Some of the stories will be prequels and 
others will tell stories between At World's End and On Stranger Tides.  
The artist for the cover will be Eric Powell who does the comic series 
"The Goon".  The stories are supposedly to be written by Rob Kidd, but I 
just found out that is a pseudonym for a team of writers who do PotC 
stories.  At least one story will feature the Zombie Monkey.

They also talked about Disney Digicomics.  One of the projects mentioned 
was upcoming Muppet Motion Comics.  They also mentioned an Epic Mickey 
digital comic project and were very proud of the fact that this is the 
first Disney comic project that was developed first as a digital comic.  
The prequel comics to the Epic Mickey game will be available, at least 
initially, through a free app on the iPad that will be released either 
on the 19th or the 20th.  They said "10 days", so I'm making a guess 
based on the date the statement was said.  The app will have the first 
comic for free and additional content will be uploaded as the weeks 
progress.  The prequel comics will be written by Peter David and cover 
the events in the Wasteland before Mickey messes everything up at the 
beginning of the game and thus will primarily feature Oswald the Lucky 
Rabbit.  It is unknown if the prequel comics will see print, but they 
would like that to happen.  They're just not sure if it will be as stand 
alone comics or be bundled with the Epic Mickey graphic novel.  And 
there will be an Epic Mickey graphic novel that "covers" the game, but 
they stressed that the game would have a lot more content.  They also 
mentioned that I think in 2011 there will be a book called "The Art of 
Epic Mickey" for those of you who would like that.

The Digicomics panelist also mentioned that they were trying to expand 
the digicomics line so that it would be web based so that more people 
could access, and obviously buy, Disney Digicomics beyond the PSP and 
iPhone/iPad users.

Further comics information was given about Phineas and Ferb where they 
had comic retellings of P&F episodes.

Of interest to mainly me was my question if Mickey Mouse Mystery 
Magazine would be released in Digicomics format, and I was told that it 
"was in the pipeline", but that could mean that it'll still never see a 
release in the US.  Still I remain hopeful as X-Mickey was released in 
as Digicomics.  Another question asked was about the Carl Barks and 
Floyd Gottfredson collections that will be released in 2011 with 
Fantagraphics and they said each volume should be under $100.  Of 
course, they didn't say how big the books would be so that may be an 
easy promise to make.

I believe that covers the Disney panel so I will go onto the Boom Kids 
panel and their Disney Comics offerings.

They are *very* happy with the sales of the Darkwing Duck comics and say 
that each subsequent comic seems to surpass the previous issue in 
sales.  The next Darkwing story arc will be "Crisis of Infinite 
Darkwings" and Negaduck will play an important role in the story.  Also, 
thanks to the success of Darkwing, in December they will be releasing a 
Rescue Rangers ongoing title.  Other series may be in the pipeline, but 
they don't want to put out too many comic at once as that could cause 
the whole line to suffer in terms of sales since people need to pick and 
choose if a lot of titles are out.

Boom! also announced that next year will the Walt Disney Comics & 
Stories 70th anniversary, so they're kicking it off with two special 
issues.  The January Issue of WDC&S will have 40 pages and contains a 
Don Rosa story he drew but did not write called "Forget-Me-Not".  The 
regular cover will have art by William Van Horn and I think the Deluxe 
cover will have art by Daan Jippes.  The Mickey Mouse and Friends comic 
will have a Floyd Gottfredson comic called "Pirates of Port Placid" (I 
think) that hasn't been reprinted in 40 years in its entirety and the 
Deluxe version of the cover will be a never before printed Floyd 
Gottfredson cover.  Don't remember who did the Regular cover.  Sorry.

All of these annoucements were part of the Boom! Kids 2.0 campaign that 
they were quite enthusiastic about and would answer questions about 
their Disney comic line with referrals to the website and the Boom! Kids 
2.0 campaign.

Finally, this is something I did not learn about in the panels, but it 
may be of interest to people here.  Apparently, they're collecting the 
Darkwing Duck stories from Disney Adventures and printing them as a TPB.

http://www.boom-kids.com/darkwing-duck-classics-vol-1-tpb.html

If anyone has any questions or comments, please let me know and I'll try 
to answer them to the best of my knowledge.

August Paul Yang