sophie campbell

The weekend is here! Put down your paperwork, throw your stationery out of the window, and do a victory spin in your office chair, because it’s time to catch up on that greatest of all media: comics! What’s been going on this week? There's so much comics that there's no way anybody can keep up with all of it --- 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.

Let me put my cards on the table: Sophie Campbell is my favorite comic book artist. She has been at least since the Glory series she did with Joe Keatinge, although I was a fan of her work even before that. I was thrilled when her Jem and Holograms series with Kelly Thompson was announced, and it’s one of my very favorite things on the stands right now. But my favorite comics work she’s done is Wet Moon, a series of graphic novels from Oni Press, which has been ongoing for over a decade. In Wet Moon, Campbell weaves realism with subtle fantasy and horror elements, and follows a large cast of distinct characters. There are six books currently out, and Campbell has said there are at least two more to come.

Glamour takes a twisted turn and glitter goes Goth in the upcoming Jem And The Holograms story arc 'Dark Jem', launching in Jem and the Holograms #11 from the reunited launch team of writer Kelly Thompson and artist Sophie Campbell, with variant covers by Jen Bartel. The storyline, unveiled today at New York Comic-Con, features a dark mirror of super-computer Synergy called Silica (amazing) and corrupted takes on all our girls. The first issue of the story will launch with five variant covers that will also be available all together as a metallic foil box set. You can check out one of the covers above --- an awesome Dark Shana, dripping with shadows --- revealed exclusively here at ComicsAlliance.

The comics world is full of questions, from, “Who would win in a fight?” to, “Who came up with that weird idea?” Here at ComicsAlliance, we spend a lot of time thinking about all of it, from the big questions that matter a lot to the small ones that probably don’t matter at all but are still kinda fascinating. With The Question, we’re going to give our writers the opportunity to answer some of these brain-ticklers, because if we’re thinking about these things, you might be thinking about them too. This time we asked our writers; what's your favorite comic by women about women? This year's Ignatz and Eisner wins suggest that women in comics are beginning to get the recognition they deserve, both as creators and as an audience. But there have always been great comics by women and great comics about women, and some comics that are both, and they exist across genres, borders, and cultures.

Tokyopop is back. The manga publisher, known for its rapid rise and subsequent implosion in the early 2000s, announced a new push toward active business at Anime Expo on July 2. Tokyopop founder Stu Levy (also known as DJ Milky) led a panel that unveiled an ad-supported comics app called Pop Comics and unspecified plans to return to manga publishing in 2016. The response from creators who have been published by Tokyopop was… let’s call it “less than enthusiastic”:

IDW Limited is currently taking preorders for their Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Secret History of the Foot Clan Workprint in different levels identified by color --- Red, Black, and Blue. The higher level sets include a piece of original art by one of a bunch of different creators, including artist Sophie Campbell. IDW has posted a bunch of Campbell's drawings, so we gathered them for your enjoyment! Even if you can't afford to get the Black or Blue package, at least you can look at these gorgeous drawings of your favorite heroes in a half shell.

I think we can all agree that the best comics are cheap comics, which is why I always keep an eye on Comixology's sales page to see if there are any good deals to be had. This week, there's a massive Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sale, including all ten volumes of IDW's current TMNT series, plus the miniseries collections that go with it. It's a lot of comics, and that presents a problem of its own: With so much out there to get, which ones should you pick up? This time, the answer's simple: You should get all of it. Seriously. It's that good.

The question most often asked of the ComicsAlliance staff is a variation of, "Which comic books should I be reading?" or, "I'm new to comics, what's a good place to start?" The Wednesday deluge of new comic books, graphic novels and collected editions can be daunting even for the longtime reader, much less for those totally unfamiliar with creators, characters and publishers, and the dark mysteries of comic book shopping like variants, pre-ordering, and formats.

I've been excited about Kelly Thompson and Sophie Campbell's Jem and the Holograms comic since before IDW even announced that there was a Jem comic to be excited about, so getting an advance review copy was a pretty big deal. It's easily my most anticipated new series of the year, but at the same time, that means that I'm expecting an awful lot from it. Outside of our own Betty Felon, I'm the biggest Jem fan here, and there's nothing that'll disappoint me faster than a book that just doesn't get it quite right. Which is why I've decided that the first issue can only be judged on the objective criteria laid out in the theme song. With that in mind, I'm happy to announce that a) Jem is excitement, b) Jem is adventure, and, perhaps most importantly, c) Jem is truly outrageous, truly truly truly outrageous.

It's not unusual at all for the release of a new comic to be accompanied by interviews with the creative team --- as you may have noticed, we tend to do a few of those ourselves around here. What is unusual is when it's the characters within the comic conducting the interviews themselves. Which is exactly what's going on at IDW, where Rio Pacheco, erstwhile love interest of Jerrica Benton interviews Jem in a nifty little promotion for Kelly Thompson and Sophie Campbell's upcoming Jem and the Holograms comic. Not only does it drop a few interesting tidbits about how the new take on Jem is going to work, but we finally get our first look at the redesigned Rio.