WHEN HEROES WERE HEROES
Plus: Big ZCN news! And ... Stilt-Man?!
Okay, so the BIG NEWS this week is for ZCN:
In his greatest battle yet, Chip faces off against his work/life balance! Will he finally stop producing a free magazine by himself every month and pay some attention to his five beautiful sons, Chad (7), Charles (8), Chip Jr. (12), Chucky (15) and Champ (31)? The answer won’t surprise you! Plus, we talk to Charles Soule, I guess. FINAL ISSUE.
That’s right! Now that my dumb little magazine is old enough to vote (if issue numbers were years), I’m wrapping up ZDARSKY COMIC NEWS. It wasn’t an easy decision as I truly love making it, but boy oh boy there are only so many hours in the day and for some reason my editors don’t take “but I’m making my free magazine this week” as an excuse for missing deadlines?? Also, this is starting to get in the way of my new passion: making homage covers.
You know how comics these days are joyless, with characters always in distress or sad or angry? Remember the good old days of happy comic book characters?! Well I sure do! So, the first homage in my series WHEN HEROES WERE HEROES, pays tribute to this classic CAPTAIN AMERICA ANNUAL #8 cover:
And here is my faithful, 11x17 reproduction:
WHEN HEROES WERE HEROES!
Look forward to more of these in future months!! And if my editors ask, yes, I’m writing my scripts!
In “When Villains Were Dumb As Shit” news, good friend of The ‘Stack, Mr. David Harper, is doing the unthinkable and putting out a zine all about STILT-MAN:
He’ll be selling them at NYCC, a show which I will not be at because I don’t wanna
Somehow he roped me into participating in this monstrosity, despite the fact that I told him this in a recent interview when he went on about how the character’s been around for sixty years so that must mean something:
“When you say he’s been around for sixty years, a character can show up once sixty years ago and then show up last month and you can be like, ‘They’ve been around for sixty years,’” Zdarsky said. “That’s not evidence of popularity.”
So, yeah, there’s a STILT-MAN infographic by me in this thing. Here’s a sneak peek:
Terrible
You know what’s NOT terrible?? The FAILSAFE figure is now available for pre-order!
You can get it here!
It’s a little pricey tbh at $69(nice).66, but also…
I don’t want to tell you how to live your life, but if you’re doing installment payments on an action figure, you should probably reassess your priorities, sorry!!
I have nothing out this week (too busy re-drawing old covers), but this bad boy is finally out and you really should get it, but only if you like great comics!!!
Also, I did a nice interview with my ol’ pal John at WORD BALLOON, where we talk Cap, DD and Batman, if you’re interested!
And last but not least, my EUROTRIP is getting bigger!
That’s right! I’ll be signing at WALT’S COMIC SHOP in BERLIN on October 28! I’m kind of a big deal, so they made sure to spell my name wrong in the instagram video to keep me HUMBLE! Little do they know, I ALREADY hate myself!!
Bye!
UPCOMING BOOKS
CAPTAIN AMERICA #4 — Oct 15
ZDARSKY COMIC NEWS #16 — Oct 15
WHITE HOUSE ROBOT ROMANCE #2 — Nov 5
CAPTAIN AMERICA #5 — Nov 19
ZDARSKY COMIC NEWS #17 — Nov 19
CAPTAIN AMERICA #6 — Dec 17
THE WILL OF DOOM #1 — Dec 24
WHITE HOUSE ROBOT ROMANCE #3 — Jan 10
BATMAN BY CHIP ZDARSKY VOL 1 — April 28
UPCOMING SIGNINGS
MCM LONDON, London, duh — Oct 24-26
WALT’S COMIC SHOP, Berlin — Oct 28
LUCCA COMICS & GAMES, Lucca, Italy — Oct 29-Nov 2
I truly adore ZCN, as it was one of my favorite things to pick up whenever I visit my LCS, but I totally understand why it has to come to an end. Also, that Wolverine and Cap you drew for that "When Heroes Were Heroes" cover recreation is definitely going to haunt my dreams for the next few nights.
I subscribed to StegMan’s Health but they started sending me ZCN every month instead and I was too lazy to fix it. Now that the latter is going away entirely, do you know who I need to contact to get my original subscription reinstated?