Ron Wimberly

The weekend is here! Take a look back at what’s happened in the past seven days. New comics, new stories, new podcasts, new art being made — it’s all part of the ComicsAlliance Weekender!

San Diego Comic Con is without a doubt the biggest event on the industry’s calendar, and people will be flying from around the world to attend panels, watch trailers, meet creators, and make friends. This year’s event is bigger than ever, with so much going on every single day that it can be difficult to sift through all that information and decide how to spend your time. Yesterday we gave a rundown on what to expect on Thursday and Friday, but things heat up as the weekend kicks in and the major studios make their presence known. Expect big reveals from Marvel Studios, DC's TV offerings and more, plus great panels featuring your favorite creators in comics.

Comics coloring is one of the most unappreciated aspects of the medium, despite enhancing the thematic subtext of a work and just making it look better. In this series I'm going to shine a spotlight on some of the best and most interesting colorists in comics. Rico Renzi is one of the most recognizable colorists in the business. Whether he's working on Marvel comics like Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, She-Hulk, and Howard the Duck, or a Vertigo title like FBP, it's easy to spot a Renzi-colored comic. Renzi always employs a striking color palette. His backgrounds and spot colors take advantage of the fact that comics don't always need to be realistic. While Marvel and DC comics are often colored in a more orthodox style, Renzi employs bold contrasts even there.

Ron Wimberly has been working in mainstream comics for more than ten years, on projects like Metal Hurlant, Lucifer, and the Hellblazer Special: Papa Midnite; but it wasn't until his 2012 graphic novel Prince of Cats that he really exploded. Since then, he's worked on the interiors of books including She-Hulk and Prophet, and produced some exceptional cover work and character redesigns. More recently he announced two new creator-owned books with Image. ComicsAlliance spoke to Wimberly to hear more about his plans for the near future, including his collaboration with Saul Williams, and the imminent return of Gratuitous Ninja.

It seems like Prince of Cats creator Ron Wimberly has been on a tear of producing pretty awesome superhero redesigns lately. It was just a couple of weeks ago that we took a look at his take on Cloak and Dagger and Blade, which involved the vampire hunter swinging around a bokken possessed with the spirit of a legendary Japanese hero that started to glow when the situation got real, and if that wasn't awesome enough, now we have his take on Wonder Woman.

One of the things I've never been able to understand about comics is why Blade has never been able to hold down an ongoing series. I mean, he the character who provided Marvel with its first-ever big-screen success, but he's a badass who chops up draculas with katanas, and really, that should be the easiest formula to sell to anyone. And yet, it hasn't happened, despite multiple attempts since the first Blade movie became a hit in 1998. Maybe it's because they haven't given Ron Wimberly a shot yet.

Were it not for the 3D -- a concept I am yet to be sold on in any medium -- it would appear that Study Group head honcho Zack Soto gazed into the musty abyss that is my head-space and fashioned the new Study Group anthology accordingly. At 96 pages, it contains comics by some of the artists I'm most excited by right now: Connor Willumsen, Sophie Franz, Mia Schwarz, Benjamin Urkowitz, Pete Toms, David King, Julia Gfrorer & Sean T. Collins, and more.

A great comic book cover has a lot of work to do. It’s both an advertisement and a work of art; both a statement and an invitation. Sometimes they convey character, sometimes mood, sometimes moment. Sometimes they pastiche the classics or pay tribute to the past; sometimes they strive to show us something entirely new. Always they show us a glimpse of somewhere else through a canvas no bigger than a window pane. In Best Comic Book Covers Ever (This Month), we look back over some of the most eye-catching, original and exceptional covers of the month that was. Bloodbaths, glowing hands, and sinister animal silhouettes; these are a few of comics' favorite things, judging by the comic book covers from June 2014. Read on for great covers from Riley Rossmo, Christian Ward, Russell Dauterman, Jerome Opeña, and more.

Publisher Locus Moon press has been working on the new anthology book, Little Nemo: Dream Another Dream, for about two years now, and it's asking for fans to help make the long journey come to fruition. The book,which tasks creators including Paul Pope, John Cassaday, Jill Thompson, Cliff Chiang, J.H. Williams III, Craig Thompson, Carla Speed McNeil, Mike Allred and Roger Langridge, with drawing new, full-page Little Nemo strips in the style of series creator Winsor McCay, will come out in the fall if Locus Moon can raise $50,000 via Kickstarter. The project launched Monday morning, and by mid-afternoon, it was at around $13,000. Not a bad start.

We make a regular practice at ComicsAlliance of spotlighting particular artists or specific bodies of work, as well as the special qualities of comic book storytelling, but because cartoonists, illustrators and their fans share countless numbers of great pinups, fan art and other illustrations on sites like Flickr, Tumblr, DeviantArt and seemingly infinite art blogs that we’ve created Best Art Eve