Tales of Syzpense #30
The Latest in Syzygy, The 30 Days of Christmas Spinner Rack, part 1, and a Dark Knight revisited
Zombies vs Aliens vs a Page Count Error
In January 2024, Syzygy/Image is releasing The Colonized, a 100-page one-shot story by me and artist Drew Moss (and colorist Jay Fotos, letterer Tom B. Long, and designer Shawn Lee), under a great Francesco Francavilla cover.
It’s a complete sci-fi B-movie of a comic, involving a vainglorious alien starship captain who mistakenly draws a dead human up via tractor beam, re-animating him as he does, and then kicking off an entire zombie riot that overruns a separatist community filled with two generations of off-the-grid types (the older militia folk and their eco-friendly, anti-gun offspring).
It’s a fun, wild ride of a comic, and it’s available for pre-order now in the Lunar catalog and elsewhere… only our plan to offer a nice bargain of a comic, 100 pages for $9.99, appears in the catalog like we’re only giving you 48 pages for your ten bucks. The lower page count is an error that we missed — this is indeed a 100-page comic with a spine — 88 pages of story and art plus a handful of pinups by John Byrne, Ryan Lee, Drew, and others.
So if you come across this in the catalog and the page count/price feels upside down, know that it’s incorrect and a shiny 100-page comic (in the same format as our previous releases of Onyx and The Hollows).
Here’s a 5-page preview of The Colonized . If you like really uniquely designed aliens, and zombified people and farm animals, plus a son trying to keep his already fractured community together in the wake of his father’s death, a rogue ATF agent, and a runaway train, among other things, well, we’ve got just the book for you.
Syzygy News Updates:
The penultimate chapter of A Haunted Girl, issue 3, is in stores on Wednesday, Dec. 6. Advance copies of all three covers arrived this week:
Retailer posters for our coming March release, The Cabinet, were sent to comic shops across the land, looking like this, so you should see some nice bits of vibrant color on the wall of your local shop very soon. They’re also now taking pre-orders for the first issue of the series, too.
Finally, it’s now December, that magical time best-of lists. It was a nice surprise and thrill to see that All Against All made Comic Book Herald’s The Best Comics of 2023! List. About the graphic novel by Alex Paknadel and Caspar Wijngaard, they said:
Alex Paknadel and Caspar Wijngaard’s Image Comics series is a masterclass in comics sci-fi, a lament to the fallacies of control from two creators completely in control of their craft. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, meets Arrival, somehow all meets a reverse Kamandi Last Boy on Earth in this gripping, cerebral gem. Paknadel comes from the Grant Morrison school of refusing to hold the readers hand, and trusting they’ll have the concentration and intellectual hunger to keep up. Meanwhile, fresh off incredible work on Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt and Home Sick Pilots, Wijngaard continues to prove himself as one of the best artist/colorist combos in all of comics, perfectly suited for the violence and alien designs of All Against All.
Spinner Rack Seasons Greetings #1 (of 4)
I had a whole other theme in mind for this one but now that we’re officially into December, I’ve outfitted both home spinner racks with a wide array of holiday-themed covers.
Last year at this time, I laid out all of ‘em so I could then pick which ones belonged in which rack. I tend to apply rough criteria to the pics, mostly opting out of the easy “Holiday Special” covers or anything too recent (while allowing myself plenty of space to break either rule for cool covers. Like, I’ve got a number of DC’s coming Christmas-themed covers on the way).
I’ve got more than enough to fill both racks entirely now, and yet I also keep grabbing them as I see them throughout the year. So this pic from December 2022 no longer tells the whole story (but it does include a cameo from our 16-year-old cat Pablo, who said goodbye to in March of this year):
This year, I thought I’d spend December focusing in on a particular side of my office spinner rack’s holiday-themed issues. Which leaves out a lot of other covers but there’s always next year to hit those. At least you can get a good sense of just how many holiday covers exist should you also want to play along at home.
So here’s side 1, to be followed by better scans of the 8 covers. These are some of my favorites, from the dark ridiculousness of The Witching Hour cover to the photo cover from the terrible/wonderful Santa Claus Conquers the Martians movie adaptation to Nick Cardy’s great Teen Titans cover, and Terry Austin’s Alien-riffing X-Men cover that represented the final issue of the classic Claremont/Byrne/Austin team.
Miscellani
Amidst too much talk of the problems facing the comic industry right now, this was an amusing “controversy” this past week, as comic fans’ minds were seemingly blown by the revelation that Frank Miller’s iconic cover for the first issue of his classic Batman: The Dark Knight Returns depicts a front-facing Batman, not back-facing, which is certainly how I’ve always seen it. This is the original cover:
And this is essentially how many of us viewed the figure:
But it turns out we’ve all been looking at it incorrectly, as Frank’s original pencil sketch for the cover reveals this was his intent:
All of which became comics’ equivalent of the “gold dress/blue dress.” Frank’s pencils (not exactly new to the world, as they were published in a collected edition a while back, but it all really blew up this past week) seem to settle the matter once and for all. Or do they? Cartoonist Louis Joyce offered up one other option:
Whatever the case, it was a fun way of reconsidering this decades-old piece of art.
Also, November 30 would have been recently deceased artist Keith Giffen’s 71st birthday. Giffen was a true artistic chameleon over his decades in comics, forever evolving in interesting ways. And while it would be impossible to present all the different styles Giffen played with over the years in 13 images, I did the best I could to represent a wide array of them in my tribute piece for 13th Dimension.
I totally forgot about that awesome Christmas X-Men issue. ah! So good.
And that Maguire piece?? Tearing, not tearing, here.....