I’m going to be at the inaugural Portsmouth Comic Con on Saturday 5th May to chair a couple of panels. One of them will be about the art of Star Wars, from the perspective of both the designers behind the films and the artists who create painted fantasy art and book covers and other graphic designs once the films are out in the culture. The other will be a chat with Dirk Wood about his new imprint from IDW Publishing, and its recent hardback volume of cultural essays and strips called Full Bleed.
Another new print publication about comics and cartoons has started up in the UK, and the launch issue of Comic Scene includes a piece by me about the animated film Batman Mask of the Phantasm which is now 25 years old. Full-length Batman animated films have chugged on as a cottage industry ever since and wandered far and wide, but the only thing about Phantasm that really shows its age is the flat 2D animation and the lack of colour gradients. Everything else is a story Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams would have been very happy with, and a solid look at Bruce Wayne’s troubled character, including the part of it that gets a kick when Gotham citizens turn the lights on and Batman turns out to have been standing six inches away all the time.