bad machinery

John Allison's teen detective/coming-of-age series Bad Machinery balances supernatural mysteries with the ever shifting landscape of teenage friendships, and is a hit both online as webcomic and in print as collections. Next year, Oni Press a reprinting the first Bad Machinery story "The Case of the Teen Spirit" in a new pocket edition, and ComicsAlliance caught up with Allison about mysteries, slang and very British stories.

The new blockbuster Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film is in cinemas now, and surprisingly it patches the flaws from its predecessor and ramps up the ridiculousness in a way that makes it an enjoyable family superhero film for the summer. The Turtles have been mainstays of film, TV and video games for decades, but their origins go way back to the black and white independent comics boom of the '80s. If you’re a fan of Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles, odds are you’re already keeping up with IDW’s excellent ground-up re-imagining of the franchise, but if you want more in that vein, we’ve selected five of the best independent, creator-owned, or alternative licensed comics that live up to the spirit of Turtle Power!

Over the course of seventeen real years and three webcomics set in the same locale, John Allison has taken his breakout character Shelley Winters through various incarnations. She’s a hot, saucy dame made up by some strange man on the internet, but is she really as naughty as all that? Join us as we track a lusty life in webcomics; the life of Shelley Winters.

By the end of 2014, it might be tough to name a comics publisher that hasn't offered up a Humble Bundle deal. Oni Press is the latest publisher to join the ranks of the Humble Bundle crowd (others include Top Shelf, Valiant Comics, and Boom Studios), though it's put a bit of a spin on its offering of 24 titles and more than 2,500 pages of comics. Buyers can choose to donate the proceeds from their purchase to the charity Direct Relief, an organization helping to treat and contain the Ebola outbreak in Africa, among other humanitarian causes.

It's that special time of year when we at CA are lucky enough to receive season's greetings from some of our favorite comic book publishers. The second card we received this year came from Oni Press, which called upon the talents of John Allison of Bad Machinery fame for a special Krampus-based card. See what St. Nicholas' monstrous sidekick is up to with Oni this holiday season, after the jump. R

John Allison's Bad Machinery is, head and shoulders, one of my favorite webcomics of the year. The successor to Allison's immensely popular Scary-Go-Round, Bad Machinery centers around two groups of grammar schoolers -- a trio of girls and a trio of boys -- who solve mysteries...