Nick Pitarra

It's been nearly five years since IDW's ground-up reinvention of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the publisher's line of Turtle-based comics have stayed strong as one of the most innovative and exciting licensed properties on the shelves right now. One of the coolest things has been seeing a generation of creators who grew up on Turtles get their hands on the property and the new issue of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Universe sees Michelangelo getting involved in a missing person's case that leads to the discovery and debut of the semi-obscure villain Wyrm

In the latest of our galleries celebrating the best covers of the year, we're looking at the best covers from IDW. IDW maintained its impressive and diverse line of licensed properties in 2016, from Ninja Turtles to Little Ponies, as well as ambitiously expanding and collating its Hasbro properties under the "Revolution" banner, and reviving and reinventing the Micronauts, M.A.S.K., and Rom.

The Flash has been one of the most consistently enjoyable and downright fun comic book adaptations since it debuted, and more than most of its peers it is blisteringly unafraid to embrace its comic book origins. In the space of two seasons we've got multiverses, time travel, and an honest-to-gosh Gorilla City, and it paved the way for shows like Arrow and Gotham to lighten up and have more fun. With no new episodes of The Flash until later this year, you might be looking for something to fill that science-based superhero hole in your life, and we've got five great independent comics for you that, while they might not all feature a super-speedster punching a gorilla in the face, do live up to The Flash's absurdity and unrelenting inventiveness in one way or another!

If there's one thing that drives Bebop and Rocksteady more than anything else, it's that they are massive, unstoppable screwups. Those dudes can't even go into a building without bringing the whole thing down to its foundation and kicking off a gang war, so just imagine how much trouble they could get into if they had access to, say, the entire time stream. This June, that's exactly what's happening. Over at the AV Club, IDW has announced Bebop & Rocksteady Destroy Everything, in which the eternal misfits of the TMNT franchise find themselves bouncing around through time itself courtesy of writers Dustin Weaver and Ben Bates, with a cast of artists that includes Nick Pitarra, Sophie Campbell, Giannis Milonogiannis, and Ryan Browne. And if that wasn't enough, they're bringing a few old friends along for the ride, too!

If you had to guess what six comic book artists would do first on a trip to Tokyo, you might feel there were just too many choices to narrow it down. It's a big city with a lot of history and a huge number of tourist destinations, from the culture to the food. But then you'd probably remember that you're talking about people in comics, and then you'd realize that of course the first thing they're going to do is go shopping for manga. That, at least, is the impression that I got from watching a video from Felix Comic Art, a company dealing in original pages, that took six of its artists on a trip to Tokyo last month and documented the entire thing in a fun little ten-minute travelogue.

It seems that even super-science is bound to its limitations, no matter how bizarre they may be. As sharp-eyed readers may have noticed -- and as reported by Multiversity -- the latest issue of Jonathan Hickman and Nick Pitarra's Manhattan Projects revealed that the series will be taking a hiatus over the next few months while the creators tinker with the book's format, presumably with the goal of delivering even more horrifying and Earth-shattering mad science in the months to come.

Jack Kirby is very probably the single most influential figure in the history of American comics. He produced countless stories in a career that spanned seven decades, inventing and re-inventing genres and styles every step of the way. He inspired generations of artists and writers; created and co-created thousands of characters; defined the visual vocabulary of superheroes; and believed in the potential of comics to be both entertainment and art, long before most people imagined these stories would be remembered past the four weeks that they sat on newsstands. This week would have been Kirby’s 97th birthday, so to celebrate, we asked some of our favorite creators and other comic pros to contribute their impressions of his characters, life, and legacy – and the response has been overwhelming. Yesterday, we posted the first set of these all-star tributes, and here's the second, even more expansive selection!

In stores this week is The Manhattan Projects #13, the latest issue of the Image Comics title. Written by Jonathan Hickman with art from Nick Pitarra and Jordie Bellaire, the series features fictional (and slightly mad) versions of Einstein, Oppenheimer, Fermi, and other real life scientists from the World War II era, in an alternate history in which the Manhattan Project was actually a front for

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 artwork that we come across in our regular travels across the Web. Some of it's new, some of it's old, some of it's created by working professionals, some of it's created by future stars, some of it's created by talented fans, and some of it's endearingly silly. All of it's awesome.

We didn't realize when we set out to list our favorite comic books of 2012 that it had been such a fun year to be a fan of the medium that we all love so much. The last twelve months offered readers a wide variety of work ranging from the most crowd-pleasing superhero epics to the most idiosyncratic of indies; the return of much missed mangaka and the emergence of exciting new talent; a new crowd-