Dime-Store Detective is a comic series for fans of hardboiled detective mysteries and supernatural stories. Detective Donald Mackinder is short on friends and time as he attempts to connect the return of a supernatural being to his family's moonshiner war of 1981.
Sign up now on Kickstarter: tinyurl.com/Dimestoredetective1-3
I know superhero comic book movies are all the rage now, but with so many streaming services looking to develop original material, I figure there's no time like the present to mine the glory of Vertigo's primo series that defy the superhero tropes and gimmicks. So, here is my list of the top ten Vertigo series that should become TV series or movies.
This mind-warping series from Warren Ellis broke brains all over the reading public with its prophetic look at the role renegade journalism needs to play in standing up to the powers that be. Information as currency. Narratives as truth. Facts as malleable. It's scary how prescient Ellis was with this one.
What if scientists cloned Jesus Christ and created a reality show around the idea? What if the new Jesus wanted to be more than a patsy or symbol for his corporate owners? What if he really identified with the punk aesthetic?
Everything is a conspiracy. Grant Morrison perfectly captured the post-postmodern zeitgeist in this one.
A beautifully irreverent story of how belief can be a problem, a solution, and something that changes as humans grow into better people.
Cops and horror. A classic combination. Throw in some Gothic family secrets and this one could be the next season of Hill House or Bly Manor... easily.
This one totally deconstructs the idea of a costumed antihero by putting an actual armored knight in the urban blight and having him dish out Batman and Punisher style justice. But is he crazy?
There's really nothing more that can be said about this one. Death takes the day off to appreciate the joys of life. Neil Gaiman's magnum opus, this one.
Perhaps my favorite work by Steve Seagle. I love how this series updated the old horror anthology book by exploring the idea of secrets and how they affect the intrinsic sense of justice and our own ideas about justice. And can even the ultimate judges be biased? Plus it has one of the coolest art styles I've ever seen.
Black detective drama (both racially and tonally) that pretends to be hard-boiled but comes off far more noir than at first glance. Some of Gary Phillips finest work.
A former child star is disgraced over a sex tape. She becomes a cop, but her past won't stop following her. Then people start to die and it looks like it ties into the series she starred in all those years ago.
As the number and popularity of such streaming services as Netflix, and Disney+ continue to grow, many of these services have turned to adapting comics and graphic novels which have gone on to become some of their biggest hit shows.
Comics properties that have been adapted range from eccentric indie comics titles–for example, Charles Forsman’s The End of the F****** World on Netflix–to highly promoted superhero franchise series, among them WandaVision on Disney+ and The Boys on Amazon Prime. All of these shows have led to increased graphic novel sales, but along the way publishers have had to adapt and find new strategies to capitalize on their popularity on streaming media.
Among the challenges publishers face is the effort to link book releases to streaming TV shows: these services often don’t publicize broadcast dates until only a few months out. This means that publishers have to guess what the print demand will be, leaving them a narrow window to prepare. This can mean that books will be out of print for months just as demand spikes, unless publishers turn to more costly printers located in North America that can print and ship books to bookstores and comic shops more quickly.
One of the earliest (and most surprising) streaming successes based on a graphic novel was Forsman’s TEOTFW (as it’s called by many publications), the story of a teenage sociopath and a bratty thrill-seeker on a roadtrip, which was initially published as a series of mini-comics before being collected into a book by Fantagraphics. TEOTFW was published just as the streaming wars began heating up in 2017.
Read the full article: https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/comics/article/86120-streaming-tv-films-drive-surge-in-graphic-novel-sales.html
By Alex Mlynek
Until last year, Kevin Yu’s now 8-year-old daughter, Olive, wasn’t really into reading books for pleasure. But then, Olive discovered the graphic novel series Dog Man, and everything changed.
“We would catch her reading in bed at night by herself, and were like, ‘I’m proud of you, but go to bed!’”
“I used to look at graphic novels as the junk food of reading,” says Vicki Fraser, an elementary school teacher in Rosemère, Quebec. But that changed when she was introduced to a graphic novel biography of French-Canadian strongman Louis Cyr that she couldn’t put it down. “I was quickly pulled into the story, and the images helped to guide me, keep me focused, and make the story more clear,” she explains.
Now, graphic novels are an essential part of her grade 5 classroom and she highly encourages her own daughters, who are 12 and 14, to read them.
She says graphic novels actually help her students become more sophisticated readers, thanks to visual cues, like the font used, which helps to communicate a character’s emotion, for instance. This teaches them to pick up on a book’s tone, which is a skill they are able to use with non-graphic texts, too.
Read the full article: https://www.todaysparent.com/kids/school-age/graphic-novels-real-reading/
“With March, Congressman John Lewis takes us behind the scenes of some of the most pivotal moments of the Civil Rights Movement. In graphic novel form, his first-hand account makes these historic events both accessible and relevant to an entire new generation of Americans.” — LEVAR BURTON
"Essential reading... March is a moving and important achievement." — USA Today
"Riveting." — O, The Oprah Magazine
An astonishingly accomplished graphic memoir." — NPR
"Visually stunning… This insider’s view of the civil rights movement should be required reading for young and old; not to be missed."— School Library Journal (starred review)
