denys cowan

Denys Cowan and Bill Sienkiewicz are legends in comics, known for their groundbreaking art in decades past, and both have been a powerful influence on artists who have come after. Cowan is best known for drawing The Question in the 1980s and Hardware in the '90s, while Sienkiewicz is known for his work on Moon Knight and New Mutants in the '80s. Now both these artists are coming together, with Cowan on pencils and Sienkiewicz on inks, to help writer Christopher Priest tell a very important story in Deathstroke #11.

It’s that blessed time of the year where we all try to take stock of what we’ve done with our lives and what other people have created that we enjoyed. That's right, it's time to start putting together our "Best of 2016" lists, and today we're going to take a look at the Best Marvel Covers of 2016.

What a week! I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to sit back and read some comics. The weekend is finally here, and the world can relax and rest once more --- but the comics industry has been busy too, and the last seven days have seen a flurry of comics-based news and announcements fly past at high speed. ComicsAlliance has got your back, though: when it comes to comics, we never slow down, so here’s a look back and just what’s been going on. New comics, new stories, new hirings, new podcasts, new art being made --- it’s all part of the ComicsAlliance Weekender!

It's the end of the year! We made it through 2015, a year that brought all kinds of new, weird and brilliant comics into our lives. It's been a huge year for the industry, with the arrival of several new publishers, multiple new digital publishing concepts, and a whole slew of creative talent pushing themselves into the spotlight. With so much going on during 2015, there's one question you might have not thought about yet: what's coming up in 2016? So much. There are new graphic novels, new publishing lines, new digital initiatives; it's all going on. And so, as we reach the Yearender, it's time to look ahead, to see what comics' future will bring.

Milestone Media, the publishing imprint at DC notable for creating characters like Static, Zombi and Icon and promoting the work of African-American comics-creators, has formally announced their publishing return today at SDCC. Original co-founders Denys Cowan, Derek Dingle, and Reginald Hudlin will partner with DC Comics to relaunch Milestone as a part of the DC Multiverse, designating their shared universe as "Earth M."

This week's rumors that Selma director Ava DuVernay had signed on to direct a Black Panther movie were a bit premature (though talks apparently continue), but the excitement that surrounded the news confirmed one thing: People really want to see Wakandan King T'Challa on the big screen, and they want to see him done right. Here's some of the best art featuring T'Challa from the past five decades, from Kirby, Denys Cowan and John Buscema, to Francesco Francavilla, Olivier Coipel, and the best fan art around.

Potentially huge news today, as Denys Cowan, Reginald Hudlin and Derek Dingle have announced that they'll be relaunching the legendary Milestone Media this year as 'Milestone Media 2.0'.

A more appropriate name for DC Comics' Convergence event, at least the miniseries that will accompany the main series for two months next spring, may be "Nostalgia Trip." DC has been rolling out titles and creative teams for the 40 planned series week by week. The first batch focused on the publisher's pre-New 52 continuity. The second focused on the 1990s (including WildStorm), and the third seemed to center on the 1980s. The fourth and final group of miniseries, which DC announced Tuesday, covers a much wider time period: All of DC's pre-Crisis On Infinite Earths continuity. And there's another twist: They all take place on defined and listed alternate Earths which existed before the company's last line-wide reboot in the 1980s.

Next month, the world's most famous fictional Private Dick / Sex Machine / Bad MotherSHUTYOURMOUTH will make his first-ever appearance on comic shop shelves, when Dynamite Entertainment releases the premiere issue of Shaft, by the creative team of David Walker and Bilquis Evely. And while John Shaft is a well known figure to moviegoers and soul music listeners worldwide, this title promises to focus on the rough-and-tumble version of the character that originated in Ernest Tidyman's series of novels. We spoke to series writer Walker about the character's long history in multiple media, and his plans for the comic incarnation.

There's a funny thing about superhero movies: Structurally speaking, they're fundamentally different from superhero comics, just by the very nature of how they're presented to the public. Or at least, they used to be. Until fairly recently, the appeal of comics had always been in the continuity, the ongoing sagas that built on each other and were designed to run indefinitely as a long-form narrative. The movies -- even when they were designed to kickstart a run of sequels -- were always meant to be self-contained stories. That's flipped around the other way over the past ten years or so, with comics often looking to provide low-continuity, self-contained stories to readers picking up paperbacks and hardcovers even as the movies build billion-dollar franchises by creating a shared universe that stretches across multiple forms of media. It's no surprise, then, that if you really want to see where that trend got its start, you can trace it back to Batman '89 and the influence that came to the comics when screenwriter Sam Hamm was tapped to craft a story for Detective Comics #600 and provided the blueprint for the modern Batman event in the process.