Hey folks, Drew from our all-ages column, From Friendly Ghosts To Gamma Rays, here (and as per usual click on that link to go to all our back articles for the column) with your part 2 of your all-ages updates from SDCC. For part one, click here. And as previously noted in part one, this is just all-ages updates only, so don’t expect any cool updates about the new-52 or anything like that, if its not all-ages related its not here. That said, the last of the all-ages friendly announcements were short but sweet, so let’s get down to them:
-Remember the golden days of Fox Kids TV on Saturday mornings in the 1990s? Well Saban Entertainment is back and is kicking off a new program block of Saturday morning TV coolness but on all the CW networks this time, called Vortexx! The Vortexx block will feature the latest installment of Power Rangers (celebrating its 20th anniversary this year), the latest installment of Yu-Gi-Oh!, Dragon Ball Z Kai, Sonic X and more TBA.
-Eisner Awards came in and some all-ages stuff got attention. The Eisner for the “Up to 7” category was won by Top Shelf’s Dragon Puncher Island by James Kochalka. The “8 to 12” category was won by Snarked by Roger Langridge, published by KaBoom!. Winner of best “Cover Art” went to Francesco Francavilla, who did work on the “Archie Meets Kiss” covers for that story line which ran in Archie from last year into this year. Winner of best “Lettering” went to Stan Sakai for his work on the long running fan-favorite Usagi Yojimbo, published by Dark Horse Comics.
-Webcomic power house ShiftyLook.com had a ton of great announcements. The first of two big ones were that Hitoshi Ariga, who drew the Big-O and Megaman mangas, will be drawing an adaptation of Klonoa for the site. The second was that the site will begin to show two brand new animated web series by the end of the year! The first will be Mappy: The Beat, which will be accompanied by a web comic as well, and the second is Bravoman, which already has a great web comic running on the site. All titles are based off classic Namco video games, which the site turns into super cool web comics to read for free, updated daily.
-Finally Shonen Jump Alpha from Viz had some cool announcements. The first was now all series in SJA were only 2 weeks behind the original Japanese release dates, versus the original 4-5, so we are seeing everything a lot faster! New manga would be coming to SJA as well. On July 23 we will get the first installment of the new manga by Juzu Kawai called Takama-Ga-Hara (no news on what official English title will be if they do re-title). On July 30th, Blue Exorcist will come to our Jump, it will run 2 chapters a week until it catches up with the Japanese version, which at that point will then turn into a once-a-month installment. Blue Exorcist will start around collected volume 8, so the previous 7 volumes are available in digital and print for readers to catch up on the story if they don’t want to to just jump in.
That’s it for now! Please join From Friendly Ghosts To Gamma Rays every Friday here for all the latest reviews on all-ages comics!
Drew McCabe
drew@comicattack.net
