Attack on Titan

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!

Last year, McFarlane Toys reworked its strategy a bit. Instead of focusing on a few longrunning lines, the company switched to a primary series that encompassed all its licensed properties. Dubbed Color Tops, each wave mixes up comic, gaming, television and film characters into a larger collection. While the big guns like The Walking Dead still make up the primary focus, now things like Mass Effect, Attack on Titan, and even Spawn all fall under one banner. Add in building sets, and you have quite a bit of promising content coming from McFarlane in 2017.

Graphic novels are a great gift idea for the comics lovers in your life, but the last few years have also seen a huge rise in the number of comics anthologies being published, many of them centered on a particular theme, or showcasing work from marginalized creators, such as people of color, women, LGBTQ people. The next generation of comics stars are making their start right now, eight pages at a time, in these brilliant anthology projects --- so here's our guide to some of the best comics anthologies to pick up this holiday season.

The ultra-popular Attack on Titan anime series has finally made its way to the video game world, with the minds behind the Dynasty Warriors franchise --- Omega Force and Koei Tecmo --- charged with the transition. I was hesitant to truly get excited for this new game, as I didn’t think Attack on Titan fit well into Omega Force style of game, but I’m happy to say that playing the game has proven me wrong... for the most part.

I worried a bit about Koei Tecmo taking on Attack on Titan. The publisher’s previous foray into the anime realm, two games based on Fist of the North Star, really underwhelmed me with monotonous gameplay and rehashed ideas. I went into my hands-on demo for Titan expecting to write about more of the same things I’d played before, but I left the demo completely surprised. Attack on Titan is a bold new direction, and if it pans out it could be a new era of success for the company.

Kodansha Comics has been around for less than a decade, but in that time it has managed to put out some remarkable titles. Now, in the latest Humble Comics Bundle, you can get a bunch of those good books for under $20 to benefit the CBLDF, Worldreader and the Mental Health Foundation. The marquee title here is Attack On Titan --- one volume unlocks with each tier. The first tier can cost you absolutely nothing, and besides Titan volume 1, you also get the first volume of horror manga Parasyte and the drama Space Brothers.

Hajime Isayama’s Attack On Titan has been one of the biggest crossover hits in modern manga, with a successful anime series, movies, video games and more spinning off from the original manga. The series is set in a post-apocalyptic world where society lives behind giant walls to keep the monstrous Titans at bay, and follows members of the military who seek to keep their cities safe from the Titan threat. This October, Kodansha Comics USA will release an Attack On Titan Anthology, featuring some of the best creators from the worlds of manga and western comics, and we’ve got exclusive pages from the likes of Michael Avon Oeming, Evan Dorkin, and the Batgirl team of Brenden Fletcher, Cameron Stewart and Babs Tarr.

It's been a bit since we heard any updates on the western release of Koei Tecmo's Attack on Titan video game, but today the publisher officially announced the game would indeed come stateside. Based on the new trailer hyping the news, it certainly looks like Attack on Titan will focus almost entirely on the action of the manga-turned-anime, and will hopefully leave out all teen angst and ennui that made watching the show a challenge. Though the excruciating narrative looks to have been trimmed dramatically to focus more on actual attacking Titans, much of the anime's style and flair is still present in the footage. Koei's done a great job capturing the look and feel of the series, right down to the whipping speeds with which all the Survey Corps move about the city. Sticking to this cel shaded style works well, and it's a good choice over something more realistic. At least this way all the cartoon blood still looks stylish instead of gross.

The weekend is here! Put down your paperwork, throw your stationery out of the window, and do a victory spin in your office chair --- it's time to catch up on that greatest of all mediums: comics! What's been going on this week? NYCC has fallen upon us all like a giant comfy pillow filled with news, so Weekender is here to catch you up on some of the stories you may have missed, and some of the best writing about comics from the past few days.

Even at just a hair over two-minutes long, there's more action in this new trailer for the Attack on Titan game than there was in the majority of episodes from the first season of the anime. Sure, Eren and Mikasa and the Survey Corps get into it with some titans during a few episodes of the show, but for the most part, each episode is a competition between characters to see who can whine the most. Attack on Titan does have some nice design work though, so even I can't front on the visual appeal. Fortunately, those sweet uniforms, weapons and monsters take center stage in this trailer. Ahead of Tokyo Game Show, which kicks off later this week, Koei Tecmo teased the first gameplay footage of its upcoming PlayStation-exclusive Attack on Titan game. There's not a whole lot to see, but what is shown does give us at least an idea of what to expect from the upcoming action title. First and foremost, the cel-shaded graphics look fairly tight. It's not outside the norm for games based on an animated property to get that kind of presentation, but it looks to be working to AoT's advantage. Since Attack on Titan will be available on the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3 and PS Vita, that cel-shaded style also gives the engine some flexibility across the board. It's a similar idea of what Telltale's done with its cross-generational games like The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us.