Thursday, January 08, 2009

WWC: 15 Creators to Watch in 2009

In this week's "When Words Collide," I take a peek at the upcoming year of comics and spotlight fifteen creators that I think deserve your attention.

Some of these creators are super-famous mega-stars (at least in the comic book world) and some you may not know quite so much about, but all fifteen (well, sixteen really, because I cheated and doubled up on Ba and Moon) are worth reading anytime, anywhere.

So check out my preview of things to come and my babbling about why these guys and gals are so damned good: "15 Creators to Watch in 2009."

And don't forget to join in on the discussion at my CBR Forum!
Ah, bring on the stabbin'!

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

This lack of Who-love just won't do.

Not given how much of what interests you about Mozza partly comes from him having been infused by that steady drip-feed of rabble rousing Text Travelling.

You just need sitting down with some Callahan-appropriate Doctor Who. Kinda, Ghostlight and The Scarlet Empress should sort you out.

Timothy Callahan said...

I have good intentions about liking Dr. Who, but I have never made it through an entire episode from the Tom Baker years through the Eccleston and Tennant of today.

But the right prescription might do the trick.

andy khouri said...

Ahem, DOCTOR Who, Tim. Not DR.

Jonah sent all the writers an email about this so it must be important to the scary mutant Who fans.

David Uzumeri said...

If the first Wolverine: Weapon X arc isn't called that at this point I'm going to be so, so, so disappointed.

Anonymous said...

Scary Mutant Who fans get *livid* about the 'Dr' thing. National newspapers over here have very stern warnings about this in their style guides in order to avoid a lot of very tedious letters of complaint.

I reckon Tim's path into Doctor Who, so that he too may join this exciting world of angsting about common abbreviations, is twofold.

First he should take on board the idea of (ace novelist, lecturer and general literary bod) Paul Magrs that the TARDIS isn't a time machine but a sort of intertextuality engine... shunting its passengers around from genre to genre and from parody to plagarism.

Then he wants to pick an story full of fiddly interpretable symbolism, like the couple I mentioned or maybe 'Warrior's Gate'. That way those overdeveloped hermeneutic bits of the Callahan-brain will be kept busy until the rest of it gives up and starts enjoying too.

(Or he could just read some of Cornell's novels. That might also do the trick)

Timothy Callahan said...

My problem with DOCTOR Who has always been the look and pacing of the various tv series, not the concepts themselves. So perhaps the novels are the way to go indeed.

Anonymous said...

Nowdays the books are fairly standard tie-in tween-friendly fare, but back in the nineties when they had no real audience and nothing to loose then they went crazy, thrashing around to try and find a way of reinventing the series.

I'll send you some recomendations if you like...but so I'm not totally hijacking this comments section with Whovangelism, I should probably say I liked your list of watchable creators.

I'm certainly going to be book-stalking Gates, Fraction, Cornell and the BaMoons and I was especially glad to see Fred Van Lente on the list; Anyone who could deliver a concept like 'X-Men Noir' as an actual story about actual *things* rather than as a dip in the Elseworld dressing-up box is someone who wants keeping an eye on.

Guys I'd add myself would be Gillen and McKelvie And Brendan McCarthy (Three years on I'm still reeling from his 'Solo' issue, so I fear the Doctor Strange/Spider-Man thing he's doing in 2009 may be something from which I never recover)

Timothy Callahan said...

Definitely e-mail me some Who recs.

McCarthy is one of my all-time faves, and I didn't know his Marvel project was due in 2009! (I knew he was working on it, but I didn't realize it was scheduled for this year.)

And Gillen and McKelvie are great, but I haven't really liked any non-Phonogram Gillen projects yet.

Anonymous said...

Tim: Any chance of a round up on Morrison's Batman run? (Not assuming it's over, but it's at least "resting after a particularly loud squawk.")

Timothy Callahan said...

I was planning a look back at Morrison's Batman for "When Words Collide," but with his run bleeding into Final Crisis, I'm going to have to wait until that finishes (or at least until FC #6). Then maybe I'll do something.