Beautiful multi-color silkscreen prints by John David Deardourff.  I always appreciate works that apply the comic book vocabulary to fields of fine art other than illustration and cartooning. It’s amazing how narratives can emerge through the panel format even when the subject matter is non-figurative. You can see more on his Cargo Collective site.

Theory: Uno Moralez is the best comics artist working right now, despite the fact that he’s not really working in comics or even considered a comics artist. Click the image for the full strip, or check out some amazing animated gifs at his website.

Brace yourself, this may be hard to hear.  According to iFanboy, DC Comics is doing something innovative.  Shocking, right?  A company that I’ve often labeled as the poster child of old media has a pretty awesome new digital distribution scheme.  Let me break it down with bullet points:

• Two new books set in the Batman Beyond universe, Batman Beyond and Justice League Beyond, are being launched as digital products.  None of this “buy it in the store for $3, get it on your iPad for $2″ nonsense.
• The stories will be released in weekly chapters, not issues.  I’m not really sure what that means, but I’m envisioning micro-stories of sort, amounting to six pages or so.  Which is perfect for a digital product.
• At the end of every month the chapters from both Batman Beyond and Justice League Beyond will be collected into a 48 page print product called Batman Beyond Unlimited.

This is really interesting to me because it’s basically taking the trade paperback model and giving it a monthly turnover.  It’s still a somewhat broken system, in that DC is trying to funnel people from digital products into print products, instead of the other way around (FYI, DC! Less overhead on digital products means you make more money on those sales if you’re doing it right), but it’s a really exciting prospect nonetheless.  People who buy monthly comics will still be able to do that without issue, but the emerging market of people who have an iPad and are willing to pay for weekly stories now actually have something available to them.

In ten years I could see this being the norm… cheap digital stories every week with only the “big” comics (Batman, Action Comics, Barack the Barbarian) getting monthly trades.  I think I’d like that.

I’d just like to point out that the above page isn’t a piece of creepy fan art… this is the last page of Catwoman #1.  Apparently the new DC Universe is all about on-panel, partially costumed superhero coitus.  The entire issue was pretty awful, but this awkward fap-baiting has convinced me that I don’t need to buy any more issues of Catwoman. At least not with its current creative team.