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David Hine’s Strange Embrace has quietly become a classic horror comic. The eerie tale of a delivery whose weekly trip to a house full of dysfunctional shut ins reveals secret after secret and descends into madness, sexual obssession and death, it’s been published in various editions from Tundra, Image, Active Images and more since it first came out in 1993. And now you can get the ULTIMATE version of the story via Sequential, the graphic novel app for iPads. This version is in the original black and white (at one point it was colored and though it looked great B&W fits the mood better). It also includes an intro by Paul Gravett, back matter and even AN AUDIO COMMENTARY FOR EACH PAGE. YOU heard that right. Sequential is aiming to make the “criterion collection” of digital graphic novels and they are doing a fine job of it. Extras include:

Sequential is making 666 copies of the book available for free this Halloween. Just head over to the store and get ready to download. .

Cartoonists doing thing, blabbing about it.

§ Reminder — we’re doing our 31 Days of Halloween countdown of spooky art, comics and animation. Send us your links!

§ Congratulations to Noelle Stevenson on finishing Nimona, her webcomic which will be published by Harper Collins in May of 2015. Reminder: the link is a spoiler so beware!

§ Simon Hanselmann continues his press tour with a revealing interview in The A.V. Club.

§ I wanted to do a more in depth analysis of this piece enumerating the Top 100 Events in the United States 2014; Comic-Con in San Diego is listed as the top entertainment event, beating out Sundance. The Academy Awards are the #1 awards event and SXSW is the #1 music festival. (Does CMJ even exist any more?) But then I ran out of time.

§ Steve Morris reprints an excellent list of how to submit writing samples to comics publishers—in many cases you can’t. Breaking in as a writer is still an uphill battle.

§ David Hine writes for the Huffington Post on his comics adaptation of Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs.:

The Man Who Laughs is not an easy read. It was written late in Victor Hugo’s career when he was living in exile on Guernsey, and his contemporaries dismissed it as an inferior work. It’s certainly a pretty turgid read, crammed with long-winded exposition and with a non-linear timeline that annoyingly gives away all the best plot twists too soon. I felt like scrawling “Spoiler Alert!” in the margins when I wasn’t skipping the endless inventories of titles, ranks and possessions of the English aristocracy. But while I was often infuriated by the book’s structure I found myself gripped by the underlying story. Here was a truly enthralling tale of love and humanity, of ordinary people struggling to survive in an unjust and unequal society. At it’s core is the story of a young man who is kidnapped, mutilated and sold to travelling entertainers, yet who retains his integrity and his dignity through the love of his adoptive ‘family’, the eccentric philosopher Ursus, his pet wolf Homo and the beautiful blind girl, Dea.

§ The Boston Globe reviews Michael Cho’s Shoplifter:

In order for a graphic novel to be memorable, it must fulfill both parts of its genre label: The graphics must be arresting enough to justify their presence on the page, and the words must be well-composed. Michael Cho’s “Shoplifter’’ is that rare thing, a graphic novel debut in which text and illustrations fit together like two halves of the same mind; as a result, the taut story told here makes an impact and manages to show distinctiveness while doing so.

§ Also in Boston, a cartoonist claimed making a watermelon joke in a comic strip about President Obama wasn’t racist; many disagreed.  Eyeroll. SMH.

§ Gilbert Hernandez has a wide ranging chat with CBR about his two graphic novels out this fall, Bumperhead and Loverboys.

This year you’ve made “Bumperhead” and “Loverboys” plus a new “Love and Rockets” plus a reprint of “Fatima.” Is this your new normal pace?

It’s something that I can do. It’s work and it’s tiring. I don’t plan on doing so many graphic novels at once, let’s put it that way. It’s just the way that things are scheduled with the publishers. After I finish a book, I can’t just go back to the same publisher and do another one. I jump to another and start a new project. I have to be ahead all the time, producing material. That’s why it ended up coming out at the same time. “Loverboys” might be the quickest long story that I’ve ever done. The time that I put into it was pretty brief, just a couple months. None of it’s rushed. I put the same care into it that I put into everything. But I can imagine a day when I go, “Hey, I can’t put out two new graphic novels a year anymore.” [Laughs]

Disclosure: Gilbert Hernandez is tied as my favorite cartoonist ever, so I’m just gonna keep plugging his stuff until they make me stop. Bumperhead is easily one of his best works ever and serves as a perfect entre to his work without having to plunge into the deep end of Palomar’s tangled generations. I have no idea what Loverboys is about but the cover looks like primo Beto, and what more would you ask for?

§ Is Stan Lee The Watcher?

§ And NOW a Beat VIDEO FILM FESTIVAL!

Cartoonist Cat Staggs and her partner are featured in the Target video about building a nursery for a new baby.

This ad for a bankish thing features a woman who hangs out in a comics shop. The Mary Sue was excited by this example of normalization.

Ed Piskor (Hip Hop Family tree) returns to his family home, which is in tatters, after 19 years in this video for Pittsburgh Magazine. Sorry about the game last night, Pittsburghers. You can’t go home again and here’s more proof.

Beat Pal Christopher Moonlight made this half hour film at the San Diego Comic Con in 2012 about Hollywood encroachment. Among those seen, David Mack, Camilla d’Errico and Batton Lash. Learn more about this film at the FB page.

Professor X';s habit of grasping his temples in pain could give the impression of being a whiny wimp, as this supercut displays.

Did you like our film festival? Send more video links and we’ll do it again! 

SelfMadeHero, an imprint at ABRAMS, has released The Man Who Laughs. Writer David Hine and artist Mark Stafford teamed up for this graphic novel adaptation of Victor Hugo’s L’Homme qui rit.

The original book was first published in France back in 1869. Follow this link to access a free digital copy of Hugo’s novel (English language edition).

Since its publication, Hugo’s story has been well regarded within the comics community. It has sparked other graphic novel adaptations and also served as the inspiration for Batman’s infamous nemesis, The Joker.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

by Steve Morris

There were only a few new announcements from the major publishers at this weekend’s Kapow Comics Convention in London, but Image publisher Eric Stephenson was on hand to offer us yet another new title to bolster the company’s increasingly spectacular 2012 line-up. Coming in October, writer David Hine will be collaborating with artist Doug Braithwaite for a new sci-fi detective story called Storm Dogs, and he kindly sat down to explain about what readers can expect from the series.

The initial story sees a team of futuristic space police (yay) called in to investigate a series of murders on a rural, backwards planet. But because the people there have decided to protect themselves from technology, and the growth of science, they ask that each member of the team hand in all their equipment before they hit the surface. So what we’ll be seeing is a group of four highly advanced, technology-reliant officers having to fall back on their wits, common sense and reasoning in order to investigate the case.

I describe the series as science fiction noir. It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for ages – one of those things which sat around for years. It’s got all the elements I like in comics – genres being mixed together, a focus on characterisation. We worked very hard on developing the world, the society, the perspective of the characters. Doug spent a lot of time agonising over getting everything right, from the costumes to the landscape and characters.

Another interesting twist to this already interestingly twisted story is that the majority of the team are female, giving Hine and Braithwaite the opportunity to write things from a different perspective to the usual noir tone. Rather than the laconic, chain-smoking, alcoholic lone hero, here we have a team of four, and three of them are women – and as you can see from the images scattered here, Braithwaite has really let his imagination run. These aren’t the characters you usually see in this style of story.

We’re in this for the long haul. We’ve put so much thought into developing this world that we don’t want to see this end after six issues. We’re really going for a European look to it — the pacing, the visuals, we’ve both been really inspired by French, Belgian comics while creating this book.

Storm Dogs, while having elements of science fiction and crime, will also have a lot in common with the classic-style western (a genre which always did have a lot in common with the noir style). So what we’ll be getting here, at least initially, is a western sci fi noir detective thriller set in a remote rural futuristic planet somewhere in the heart of deep space.

It’s good to know that David Hine is nev

Former Marvel Comics editor Andy Schmidt moderated a New York Comic Con panel on writing and story structure earlier this month.

The group of panelists included writers Jimmy Palmiotti, Daniel Way and David Hine. Based on the discussion, we created a list of do’s and don’ts for story structure.

Do create an outline for your story.

Don’t treat your outline as a strict, controlling template. These tools are meant to enhance, not stifle, creativity.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.