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Cats

Listen to the Cat With Wings

Another notable-for-furry-fans young adult fantasy adventure series from author Kevin Gerard: Conor and the Crossworlds. “A Boy, a Mystical Creature, and the Journey of a Lifetime . . . Conor: An innocent ten year-old boy, not unlike other boys anywhere . . . Purugama: Immense, powerful, magical, a towering champion of the crossworlds . . . A young boy subconsciously calls forth the power of the crossworlds creators. They send the mystical beast, Purugama, to accompany him on a fantastic journey. After revealing a number of possible futures to his young companion, Purugama prepares to return him to his home. His plans are interrupted when Drazian, Purugama’s mortal enemy, faces the immense cougar in a ferocious battle. The prize? Conor’s life, or death, depending on the ultimate outcome . . .” As with his other series Diego’s Dragon, the author has created a Conor home page that features video previews and lots of other bits of information. The series is published by Author House.

image c. 2014 Author House

image c. 2014 Author House

The Princess and the Beast

This October Viz Media will release Princess Mononoke: The First Story, “An oversized, lavishly illustrated storybook featuring original watercolor art by legendary filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki. This is the original  Princess  Mononoke  story created by Miyazaki in 1980 while he was first conceptualizing the landmark animated film that would later be released to universal acclaim seventeen years later. As an initial version of the tale, it offers a new and different perspective from the final version presented in the film: After a long, exhausting war, a samurai lost in a forest encounters a giant wildcat – a ‘mononoke’The beast saves his life, but at the price of his daughter’s hand in marriage… ” Read more about this new hardcover book over at Crunchyroll.

image c. 2014 Viz Media

image c. 2014 Viz Media

Daddy is Purring

Sometimes, you just gotta let the thing speak for itself: “Miri and Luey have a dilemma. Their dad’s been turned into a cat and their closet is a garden full of goblins. There is only one thing for them to do — grab their friend Phil the frog and dive headfirst into a wild, woolly and wacky adventure.” Cat Dad, King of the Goblins was written and illustrated by Canadian artist Britt Wilson. This full-color short graphic novel is available now from Koyama Press. Check out the preview over at Publishers Weekly.

image c. 2014 Koyama Press

image c. 2014 Koyama Press

Heroes on a Scratching Post

Action Lab Entertainment has a new full-color comic book series for young readers, Hero Cats. “Avengers and Justice League move over! The cutest heroes on the planet have arrived! Meet the Hero Cats of Stellar City in this spectacular first issue. Not your ordinary house cats, they’re a tactical action-packed covert team dealing with extraordinary threats to humanity in ways that will amaze.” Two issues out so far, all brought to you by writer Kyle Puttkammer and illustrator Marcus Williams. There’s an official web site of course, showing off several cover variations and tie-in posters available.

image c. 2014 Action Lab Entertainment

image c. 2014 Action Lab

What’s Black and Yellow, But Not A Bee?

Everyone’s favorite hard-boiled black cat detective has been busy lately — and those of us on this side of the pond are seeing more of his adventures thanks to the folks at Dark Horse Press. Now they’re bringing us Blacksad: Amarillo. “Hardboiled feline detective John Blacksad is back in the latest tour de force from the multiple-award winning duo of writer Juan Díaz Canales and artist Juanjo Guarnido. Taking a much-needed break after the events of A Silent Hell, Blacksad lands a side job driving a rich Texan’s prized yellow Cadillac Eldorado across 1950s America, hitting the back roads from New Orleans to Tulsa. But before long, the car is stolen and Blacksad finds himself mixed up in another murder, with roughneck bikers, a shifty lawyer, one down-and-out Beat generation writer, and some sinister circus folk. When John Blacksad goes on the road, trouble is dead ahead.” Find out more at Comics Beat, before it comes out in hardcover this October.

image c. 2014 Dark Horse Press

image c. 2014 Dark Horse Press

One Little Cat and a Whole Lotta Magic

We found this recently, over at Animation Scoop: “Shout Factory is mounting a theatrical release of Thunder and The House of Magic, directed by Ben Stassen (Fly Me to the Moon, Sammy’s Adventures: Escape from Paradise) and Jeremie Degruson (A Turtles Tale: Sammy’s Adventure), in select theaters in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Boston, Houston, Miami/Ft. Lauderdale, San Francisco and Washington, DC., beginning September 5th. The 85-minute film, budgeted at $34 million, was produced by Brussels (Belgium) based nWave Pictures in association with StudioCanal and media fund Anton Capital Entertainment. The story concerns Thunder, an abandoned young cat, who seeks shelter from a storm, stumbles into a house owned by an old magician and inhabited by a dazzling array of automatons and gizmos. But when the magician lands in the hospital and his scheming nephew puts the mansion up for sale, our young hero and his new friends join forces to save their magical home.” The Scoop article also has a first look at the film’s trailer.

image c. 2014 nWave

image c. 2014 nWave Pictures

Out of Roomies

Andrew Dickman is a professional storyboard artist in the field of animation. He is also, in his copious spare time, the creator of the on-line anthropomorphic comic called Roomies. Actually, of late he hasn’t had much spare time while he’s working multiple animation jobs, so it’s been a while since Roomies has been updated. Which means now might be a good time to catch up with Andy, Swain, and Mary, the anthropomorphic college-age room-mates who inhabit this fair comic. Visit Andrew’s web page to find out what we mean. Andrew has said that he hopes to bring this comic back to life some day, so make sure to keep checking back!

image c. 2014 Andrew Dickman

image c. 2014 Andrew Dickman

A Science Fiction Classic, Illustrated

If you’re not familiar with Larry Niven, you should be. For one thing he was Guest of Honor at Further Confusion once — largely for his creation of the brutal tiger-like aliens known as the Kzin. In 1970 his novel Ringworld received both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel. Now, many years later, Tor Books is creating a series of black & white manga-style graphic novel adaptations of the book. “Two-hundred-year-old human Louis Wu is recruited by a two-headed alien named Nessus to join him, a felinoid warrior alien named Speaker-to-Animals, and the infinitely lucky human Teela Brown to explore an alien artifact. They find a Ringworld, a ribbon millions of miles long built around a distant sun. The civilization has fallen into savagery, though, and after crashing into the Ringworld, Louis must come up with a clever plan to get back to known space, hundreds of light years away.” Adapted by Robert Mandell (script) and Sean Lam (illustration), Part 1 is available now in paperback at Amazon.

[And with that, we’ll see you after Comic Con!]

image c. 2014 by Rory McLeish

image c. 2014 by Rory McLeish

Nine Lives, Many Adventures

Sometimes it’s best to just let the thing speak for itself: “Allison Breaking is a talented journalist with her own blog and a lot of bills to pay, so when she receives an offer from a mysterious stranger named Burma to write his memoirs, it’s an offer she can’t refuse, not even with all the red flags popping up. But Burma is quite literally unlike any man Allison’s ever known – because he’s a cat. And this cat has stories to tell about how he (over the course of a few lifetimes) has shaped the world – and another, darker story that Allison must risk all to uncover… a story of what this particular cat has been doing with the last of his nine lives.” That’s the story of I Was The Cat, written by Paul Tobin and illustrated in full color by Benjamin Dewey. The hardcover graphic novel is coming this August from Oni Press.

Image c. 2014 Oni Press

Image c. 2014 Oni Press