Comics Festival 2009 Announced

Every second year, those lovely and talented men-about-town Chris Butcher and Chip Zdarsky put together a free anthology of Canadian comics talent called Comics Festival, which serves as a tie-in to both the bi-annual Toronto Comic Arts Festival, as well as the Free Comic Book Day event across North America.

I've always been invited to participate in past editions, but have never been able to thanks to some deadline or another. The theme of this year's anthology, though, is comics for kids--so it seemed the perfect year to contribute by using the characters from next year's Three Thieves. As an added bonus, it's being printed in colour for the first time.

This is an original one-page story, not simply an excerpt from the book. So you'll want to snap up a copy or two when it goes on sale at comic shops everywhere on May 2nd (which is Free Comic Book Day, of course). If not, there will certainly be plenty of copies floating around at TCAF the following weekend. Again, it's FREE, so there's really no excuse not to, dammit.

Still not convinced? The book also contains a 10-page story by French cartoonist Emmanuel Guibert, as well as more one-pagers by Kate Beaton, Willow Dawson, Ray Fawkes, Faith Erin-Hicks, Eric Kim, Steven Charles Manale, Ryan North, Steve Rolston, Kean Soo, Tara Tallan, and more. Go get one for your kids, your neices and nephews, the paperboy, the kid down the street...and yourself.

From the Vault: The Crimson Avenger!

I don't spend much time trying to hit up Marvel and DC Comics for work. Not only is the current state of superhero comics so depressing that I'd rather not be part of it, but at heart I'm an indie guy. Given the choice (which, thankfully, I do have) I'd rather be doing my own stuff.

A few years back, though, my buddy and former collaborator J. Torres began working together on a pitch for DC reviving the Golden Age character The Crimson Avenger. They didn't bite--in fact, once J. told them the concept, they immediately told us, "no revamps of classic characters, no 'cartoony' art." So that was about that. But I still like these sketches that I did of the character, both in costume and out, and came across them recently while digging through some old files. So here they are, a brief glimpse of what might have been if DC Comics wasn't so rabidly anti-cartooning.