Paul Rivoche

Two great sci-fi properties come together next week with Planet of the Apes/Green Lantern #1. Written by Justin Jordan from a story by Robbie Thompson, with art by Barnaby Bagenda, this is the beginning of a six-issue miniseries that connects character from the Planet of the Apes movies to DC's Green Lantern mythology.

Armor Wars was one of the first batch of titles teased by Marvel in the early days of its promotion for the upcoming Secret Wars summer event; with only a few spots left to reveal on the Battleworld map, Armor Wars is now one of the last titles to be formally announced, and ComicsAlliance can exclusively reveal that the creative team of writer James Robinson and artist Marcio Takara will be the readers' guides for this corner of Marvel's strange new universe. The original Armor Wars story in Iron Man #225-#231, by David Michelinie, Bob Layton, Mark D. Bright and Barry Windsor-Smith saw Tony Stark tracking down villains and rivals who had built armor based on stolen Stark designs. In this new Armor Wars there are two Starks --- Tony and Arno --- going head-to-head in a world where everyone has to wear armor, and one of the armored heroes has been murdered. It's a high-tech murder mystery, but Robinson promises "a big armor war in each issue." We spoke to Robinson and Takara to learn more about the Armor Wars world of Technopolis, and we cracked open Takara's sketchbook to see some of his awesome armor designs.

Conservative comics creators Chuck Dixon and Paul Rivoche have written a piece for the Wall Street Journal titled, “How Liberalism Became Kryptonite for Superman: A graphic tale of modern comic books’ descent into moral relativism.” While beating familiar conservative drums like jingoistic nostalgia and referencing a lot of incorrect information, these two experienced pros manage to paint a picture of an industry tottering on the edge of moral collapse to an audience that knows little about what’s actually going on. The goal here, of course, is to sell comics. By complaining to a conservative audience about how liberals have taken over the medium, Dixon and Rivoche attempt to persuade non-comics readers to buy their new book, an adaptation of Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man, as a bit of political activism. Like many conservative comics fans, Dixon and Rivoche bemoan the lack of conservative comics being published today, and a perceived liberal bent of the industry, while limiting their definition of comics primarily to super hero books published by Marvel and DC. The problem is not with their politics; it’s with their misrepresentation of the industry and its history to an outside audience.

We make a regular practice at ComicsAlliance of spotlighting particular artists or specific bodies of work, but because cartoonists, illustrators and their fans share countless numbers of great images on sites like Flickr, Tumblr, DeviantArt and seemingly infinite art blogs that we’ve created Best Art Ever (This Week), a weekly depository for just some of the pieces of especially compelling artwor