• Forbidden Planet International is running a competition to win a thousand pound shopping dash in its Belfast store – a three minutes to dash around grabbing up to a grand’s worth of goodies. It’s only open to residents of Northern Ireland but I’m sure comics and SF&F fans there will be quite happy with getting this chance...• The 20th annual Galaxy British Book Awards will take place at the Grosevnor House, Park Lane, London on the evening of Friday 3rd April 2009. Now is your chance to nominate your favourite graphic novels -- Gary Northfield's Derek the Sheep, anybody? (Got to be in with a chance!). Horrid Henry and the Abominable Snowman by Francesca Simon won the Childrens Book Award last year. For details, click here (PDF download) or visit the British Book Awards web site
• Richard Bruton has been posting a number of items on The DFC on the Forbidden Planet International blog. Instead of us boring old adults waffling on about it we get to hear what one of the kids who reads it thinks about it as he interviews his daughter Molly (with the help of milk shake and cake bribes). "From the latest interview it seems to me the best way the DFC can boost circulation is not to sell in Tesco or in comics shops and newsagents but to sell in cake shops!" says FPI's Joe Gordon.
"I like how there’s a good mix of comics inside," says Molly of the subscription-only title."And I like coming home on Friday after school and opening it up. It’s really exciting when you open it up and see who’s on cover. It’s nice that they give everybody a turn on the cover. That’s fair." (Read Richard's first psot on six months of The DFC here)
• If four decades ago you'd have walked down San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the epicentre of counter-culture, you might have bumped into 25-year-old artist Robert Crumb selling the first issue of the then recently-launched Zap Comix from a pram. Among the barefoot, beaded hordes, he would have been hard to miss in his "old man" clothes. The Guardian reports on his career here: www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/robertcrumb
• Also in the Guardian, Ben Child ponders the week in geek: Should big-screen superheroes camp it up or keep it real? The Dark Knight and Iron Man scored big this summer with 'realistic' storylines, so is there still a space for camp characters like Captain Marvel on the big screen? Read his feature here
• Over on his blog, Edie Campbell reports on how effort to bring one of his stories to screen are progressing. The setting was Campbell's supposed bedroom in a house rented for the day, and Campbell played himself in a two and a half minute demonstration film based on the Snooter story from Bacchus. "Being a novice in this situation, it was weird being in bed with seven or eight other people in the room, the director, photographer, sound guy and all the rest, with blacked out windows in daytime." Read More...
• Cartoonist Jeremy Dennis' web site (www.jeremydennis.co.uk) has had a makeover. Both a Comics Creator and Web Editor living in Oxford, England, she's a prolific small-press creator of minicomics, altered books and other curious publications. who also run comics workshops, and is a founding member of the UK's longest-running comics convention, Caption. She's also involved in the latest issue of the anthology title The Whores of Mensa anthology which also features ace cartooonists Mardou and Ellen Lindner.
• It seems that the planned remake of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe may not be dead after all. Web site Mania reports that a month after it was reported the project fell back to development hell, El Mayimbe from Latino Review speculates that John Stevenson (Kung-Fu Panda) is in talks to direct the feature film for Warner Bros.
The project was reported dead a month ago. If this latest bit from the rumor vine is true, Warner Bros. may have found a willing director on bringing Justin Marks' script to the big screen.
• If you're a Glasgow-based comics creator, check out this new group, the Glasgow Comics Collective, which has just set up shop over on community network Ning.
• Indie comics creator and Clown Press publisher Adam Grose has a new comic in development, a new 'newspaper style' weekly comic strip called An Eleanor Moreau Murder Mystery: The Dragonfly. "It's a murder mystery and it will commence from the 9th January 2009," he tells us.
• Wasteland #22 by Antony Johnson is on sale in all good comic shops. This is “Dog-Face Boy”, the second part of the new Dog Tribe story arc. Captured for ransom by the Red Fangs Dog Tribe, Michael and Abi are unarmed and helpless. But aid can come in the strangest of forms. Who is the mysterious cloaked man, so interested in their welfare? What does it all have to do with an impending marriage? And who will come from the city to save them?
Johnson also reports the third trade paperback collection, Book 03: Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos, is on track for release next week. Check his web site for updates.
(Compiled with thanks to Joe Gordon and Matthew Badham)
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