Mybloodyvalntne

I was supposed to be taking the weekend off of social media, but I logged in tonight (of course) and saw the #YesAllWomen hashtag going crazy on Twitter. I added my own:

When a woman makes a video, most comments are about tearing apart her looks. Or if they’d “do” her. With a man, almost none. #YesAllWomen

— Felicia Day (@feliciaday) May 26, 2014

To which a lot of people responded supportively (including awesome YouTube creators like Freddie Wong and the Fine Brothers) and then I got a ton of “Unfollow”, and sarcastic “#menhateday” and “Oh yeah, all men are terrible”. Which makes me a) Who cares if they’re gonna unfollow me because of that, they are clearly people I don’t need to be appealing to anyway, and  b) and c) Oh gosh, do I even have to call out the ridiculous exaggeration? Or how sad it is that they missed the point, and the possibility to maybe see things from someone else’s point of view for a change?

So anyway, there are amazing comments around that hashtag, and you should check it out. At the very least, have some make you think differently, I certain had a few that did. But the one that got me the most was a recurring comment by a lot of women about how “it’s easier to tell a guy that you have a boyfriend so they’ll leave you alone. Because they respect a guy they’ve never met more than you.”

(Which is so sad and true, and every girl knows it in her bones as the way to deal with some horribly obnoxious person at a bar.)

But for me, the flip side is also true: How sad it is if you’re talking to a guy in a social situation, having a really fun conversation, and then somehow it comes up you have a boyfriend, and they drop you like a hot potato. Like, I’ve literally had a person say, “Boyfriend”? And WALK AWAY MID-SENTENCE.

Oh, and then I’ve had it happen that the guy acts like you were LYING to them by HAVING A FUN CONVERSATION AND BEING INTERESTING. HOW DARE I BE FUN IF IM NOT WILLING TO FALL IN LOVE/AND OR HAVE SEX WITH THEM?!?!  I mean…sigh.

I am a person who has always had a ton of guy friends, and the fact that there are many social situations where I’m not worth talking to as a person because I am not sexually available makes me so sad. For myself, and for the friendships that could be, but will never happen because to them, I’m only there for a possible hook up.

Once I came home from a party crying after such an incident, telling my boyfriend, “Men and women can’t be friends, I guess.” Which is totally not true, but when an incident happens like that a few times…it makes you less willing to even reach out and try to connect. Or worse, you strangely spurt out the word “BOYFRIEND!” in a reflexive way within the first two sentences of meeting someone, because you don’t want to be rejected later for “not being honest”. Which feels so wrong and is so messed up when you think about it, that it’s a girl’s “responsibility”. Might as well wear a stamp on your forehead, huh?

And that’s my long #YesAllWomen comment. I hope a few people can relate, because sometimes I think I’m just crazy haha.

And for the record, I am very happy to have many guy friends in my life who have NEVER done that. I love them dearly. Platonically, of course.

We’ve been reading about Walkmen singer Hamilton Leithauser’s solo album Black Hours forever. News broke almost a year ago, many months before that epic farewell portrait Ryan Leas wrote about the Walkmen last year. After lots of hype and at least one postponed release date, the album has finally arrived online for public consumption. You’ve heard “Alexandra,” “11 O’Clock Friday Night,” “I Retired,” and album outtake “In The Shallows.” Now hear Black Hours in full at NPR.

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“Heartache Fetish” is one of many fine specimens from recent Band To Watch Young & Sick’s self-titled debut. Now the silicon soul track has a video set in Southeast Asia that bathes vast nature scenes and intimate closeups alike in a faint reddish hue. It’s as pretty as the song, so watch it below.

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One of the central points of the Kathleen Hanna documentary The Punk Singer (besides Hanna’s seminal contributions to music history with Bikini Kill and Le Tigre) was the battle with Lyme Disease that delayed the progress of her new band the Julie Ruin for years. Hanna’s illness is flaring up again, so the Julie Ruin’s itinerary has been derailed again. A long string of spring and summer tour dates have been pushed back to September so Hanna can undergo what the band describes as a difficult three-month treatment regimen. The band issued a statement Tumblr:

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This morning, I took my dogs out into my backyard, and watched them run around. A warm, almost hot Santa Ana wind blew leaves off the trees, and the dogs kept stopping to smell whatever mysteries the wind brought with it.

About 18 hours ago, I walked to center ice at Staples Center with Bob Miller and Jim Fox, and threw a pie into Greg Wyshynski’s face.

I know that doesn’t mean much to most of you, but it was such a surreal experience for me, I have to write it down so I can know that it was real.

In about 30 hours, I’ll walk out in front of an audience and thank them for coming to the first ever taping of a show I helped develop, that I write, produce, and host. At the moment, I’m making twelve episodes of that show, but there’s a non-zero chance I will get to make more.

In about 48 hours, I’ll get on a plane and fly to New York, where I’ll spend three days doing one of the things I hate most in the world: talking to the press to promote something. I prefer to let the work speak for itself, but before I can do that, people have to know that the work exists. It’s a first world problem, to be sure, but not something I’m looking forward to doing.

I miss writing narrative stories on my blog, and I suppose I should be embracing the fact that I can’t, because I’m so busy working on creating things. I’m happy for those things, obviously, but I still miss the simple joy of sitting down in The Quiet of telling a story and writing it down.

Tabletop Season 3 is the most successful crowdfunded webseries in history. We finished last night at just over 1.4 million dollars.

Everything is really awesome and amazing, and I feel really weird right now.

Sharon Van Etten’s new album Are We There ends with “Every Time The Sun Comes Up,” a gorgeous soft-focus ballad that may be one of the best songs she’s ever written. The song’s brand-new video, from director David Scott Kessler, focuses on an old-school horror-movie TV host, one of the theatrical ghouls who used to hold down the UHF channels late at night. (Think Svengoolie in Chicago, one of the last of his breed to still be doing it.) We see the host contemplate his aging and his mortality while, at the same time, fulfilling the important work of scaring kids and waving around wiggly tarantulas. Van Etten appears as a stagehand. Watch it below.

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gunhippy:

effectiveresistance:

Good idea if it were to catch on.

Catch on again, more like it. This is basically Great Depression era hobo-code with some 21st c updates.

The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart have already debuted a bunch of songs from their forthcoming Days Of Abandon, including singles “Simple And Sure” and “Eurydice,” and now that the LP’s release is less than a week away, they’re streaming the whole thing in the form of an album-length lyric video. Check it out below, and read our interview with the band’s frontman, Kip Berman, here.

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Garbage released two songs for Record Store Day this year: “Girls Talk” with Distillers frontwoman Brody Dalle and “Time Will Destroy Everything.” The former now has a video to go along with it, which sees Shirley Manson and Dalle ferociously singing in-studio while the song aggressively builds to a climax where even the camera is shaking around. Watch below.

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New York indie-poppers the Pains Of Being Pure At Heart are back with their new album Days Of Abandon next month, and they just about knocked us dead with the LP’s first single “Simple And Sure.” They’ve now shared single number two, and it’s nearly as impressive. “Eurydice” sticks with the band’s early-’90s dream-pop aesthetic, but it’s got a big, glowing widescreen chorus, and it’s the sort of thing that some very smart director could use to soundtrack a romantic-comedy running-in-the-rain montage. Listen to it below.

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Last month we got word ’90s alt-rock vets Veruca Salt were reuniting their original lineup to release a new single for Record Store Day. It was surprising to hear that the legendarily drama-filled band was able to get together to record a new song or two, and now they’re going to be spending even more time together. The reunited VS will be going on tour soon, almost two decades since parting ways. Check out the dates below:

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Throwing Muses returned last year with the enormous 32-track album/art book, Purgatory/Paradise, in classic form on tracks like “sleepwalking-1” and “Sunray Venus.” Now they have a video for the track “Clark’s Nutcracker,” with animation by Jonathan Pound, which tells the abstract story of a man following a glowing ball of light. The animation moves with a surreal fluidity that grows more fascinating as the story eventually reaches its colorful climax. Watch it below.

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“Disco // Very” and “Keep It Healthy” — two of the best tracks from Warpaint’s stellar self-titled sophomore album — get a double video treatment, tied together by director Laban Pheidias and some LA street skateboarders. The video starts off with the Warpaint girls having a lot of fun dancing in the middle of the street before slickly transitioning to an LA skate park at night. Pheidias, who has also directed videos for Justin Timberlake and Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr., was a professional skateboarder before moving into directing. “These Warpaint videos are extra special to me for multiple reasons and not just because the girls are super rad and fun to work with,” he said. “Having been a professional skateboarder for many years I’ve really been wanting to incorporate skateboarding into a music video. So, when this project was presented to me with skateboarding already in the concept, I was of course psyched.” Watch below.

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Here's a great fashion idea for the next Banned Books Week: burned paper fingernails from Glitterfingersss. Basically, you soak newspaper in alcohol, transfer the ink to your nails atop a light nude polish, paint in the burned marks, and add a topcoat.

TUTORIAL | Burned Paper Nails (via Crazy Abalone)

Dave Brockie, frontman of the theatrical joke-metal institution Gwar, has died, as Blabbermouth has confirmed. Brockie co-founded Gwar in 1984, and he was the only constant member in the band’s 30-year history. Performing as Oderus Urungus, Brockie was something of an underground icon, a proudly ridiculous and obscene figure who built a huge cult audience from the ground up. Richmond, Virginia police found him dead in his home yesterday. He was 50.

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In their brief time as a unit, the Nina Gordon/Louise Post iteration of Veruca Salt was both a target of scenester derision and highly, highly dysfunctional, but most importantly, they wrote some great songs. They released two very good albums and one very good EP between 1994 – 1997, and in 1998 Gordon quit the band amid Fleetwood Mac-level drama, the details of which remain totally unclear to this day. Gordon went on to make a couple albums of Aimee Mann-lite songwriter pop, while Post carried on with an altered version of Veruca Salt, releasing two EPs and two LPs of sub-Hole angst rock. But last year, the original Veruca Salt lineup reunited — Gordon, Post, Steve Lack, and Jim Shapiro — and they’re now set to release their first new material since 1998′s Eight Arms To Hold You.

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Allow Us to Explain

300: Rise of An Empire came out on Friday, and its release should give Queen Artemisia of Caria some well-deserved public recognition. Played by Eva Green in the film, Artemisia was a real-life naval commander for Xerxes the Great‘s fearsome Persian military in the 5th century BCE. According to the writings of war historian Polyaenus, Xerxes declared that she was the finest officer in his fleet. But she’s far from the only amazing female military commander in history. Here are ten others, most (though not all) of whom have never had movies made about them… but definitely should someday soon.

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In interviews leading up to 300: Rise of an Empire (review here), Lena Headey—who, with Eva Green, was the best, or maybe only truly good, part of that movie—had some things to say about how TV’s provided something of a renaissance for strong female characters. One of those, of course, is Cersei Lannister, and Headey also spoke about a certain pivotal scene for her Game of Thrones character. Spoiler-free hint for book readers: Take a walk.

(The bottom of this post has unmarked spoilers for Game of Thrones–I’ll warn you when to skedaddle if you’re avoiding them.)

“I think there’s a sort of renaissance for women right now,” said Headey to Blastr,

“and you’re not shelved anymore because you’re of a certain age. It’s like women are now being allowed to be written as interesting characters… I think the TV world is kind of leading it as well, you know. All these great shows with incredibly fascinating female characters who were in positions of strength and leading storylines and holding stories. I feel like people are ‘Oh, women are interesting and can be f–king nuts and can be crazy and ugly and mean and all the things that men have been celebrated as being.’ It’s now becoming allowed for us, which is a f–king relief, because who wants to be the pretty lady sitting on a sofa, you know what I mean? It’s awesome.”

“Who wants to be the pretty lady sitting on a sofa” is a sentiment echoed, albeit in a less optimistic way, by Olivia Wilde when she talked about how a genderswapped table read made all the male actors bored by their underdeveloped, supporting female parts. Headey certainly plays her share of well-developed female characters, oftentimes in genre film and TV, though that’s by no means intentional. “I didn’t have a great plan or anything like that” when it comes to becoming a reigning Queen of sci-fi/fantasy, she says. “It’s just that he characters have interested me more. And I don’t necessarily think of them sitting in a genre, because I think then that would dictate how you play them. I just think they’re human beings, and they’re contemporary beings, no matter if it’s 700 years ago. We still have the same emotions, so it’s just part of what you do. I’m kind of led by what I’m interested by and what I think would be exciting to take part in.”

Headey’s most well-known character, at least currently, is of course Game of Thrones‘ Cersei Lannister. Love her, hate her, or something in between, she’s absolutely a an interesting, well-developed character. And we’ve yet to see one of her most pivotal scenes.

MAJOR SPOILERS FOR A DANCE WITH DRAGONS AND (PROBABLY) SEASON FIVE OF GAME OF THRONES BELOW. SCROLL PAST THE LINE OF JUDGEY CERSEIS TO SEE.

That would be “Penance Walk,” which takes place after her various political schemes and sexual affairs (pretty much the same thing, when it’s Cersei) are discovered. It involves her being shaved, stripped, and forced to walk across King’s Landing as penance for her sins. (Or “sins,” in the case of the sex, because men can do the do with all manner of women in Westeros without it being a big deal.) Given the show’s love of sexposition, I’ve been a bit worried about how the show might handle the scene, because while it’s nudity, it’s absolutely not sexualized in any way. It’s Cersei at her lowest point.

Here’s what Headey had to say about the scene, which she speculates will take place in season five, to Blastr:

”We [Headey and showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss] talk about it a lot because I love her… I think, you know, it’s interesting, that part for me. I’ve been very adamant about keeping her kind of clothed because I think that’s part of her power. And she can still be sort of sexual and weird and female, but she doesn’t have to be naked. And I think it makes for a more shocking disempowering moment when this happens. So, we’ll see. I’m a little scared.”

Me too. Don’t screw it up, Dan and David…

(via: Blastr, Blastr)

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Last night Carnegie Hall hosted the 24th annual benefit concert for Tibet House US, a non-profit organization geared toward preserving Tibetan culture. Patti Smith (covering Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day”), members of the National with Sufjan Stevens, Nico Muhly, and Tibetan folk singer Techung performed, and the headliner was Bernard Sumner’s latest version of New Order joined by Iggy Pop, who played the Joy Division classic “Love Will Tear Us Apart” together. Pop and New Order also gave the first ever live performance of New Order rarity “Californian Grass.” Watch video of both songs below.

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Dark Horse Comics, the home of Buffy, Star Wars comics, and a boy from Hell, is known for characters with strong personalities and big names to back them up. This year will be no different. Editor in Chief, Scott Allie, joined us for an extensive discussion on their titles, women on the comics pages, women writing and drawing the comics themselves, and the women buying them (Hey, that’s us!). They’ve also given us a ton of exclusive cover reveals! Here’s Part 1 of our chat, Part 2 will be up tomorrow. 

The Mary Sue: Something I know I’m personally invested in from Dark Horse is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Season 10 is about to premiere, what can you tell us about the upcoming story and creative teams? I am particularly ecstatic about this preview image (Check out our exclusive color version of the cover in our gallery below, the result of a Twitter poll for who was who in this Odd Couple homage, and the result was #FelixIsXander!), and of course, Nicholas Brendon.

Scott Allie: Since you ask about Nicky—yeah, Season 10 will see Xander much more front and center. In Season 9, we made the choice to keep him on the periphery a lot, with the idea of building to the reveal of his anger problem and what he did to Angel at the end of Season 8. It was not a strategy that Xander fans enjoyed, and we learned our lesson. There’s nothing cute about keeping the core four away from the core of the story. So I think we’ve done a better deal about building a story that revolves solidly around those characters.

At the end of Season 9, you saw a hint that vampires have evolved yet again. In both titles, our heroes discover that on their own, to their great displeasure. In order to do something about it, they’ll have to team up with Dracula, which is just one of the ways that Xander takes center stage. When Nicky and I talked about him coming to the writers summit, which was nearly a year ago now, we knew we wanted to have Xander play a bigger part in Season 10, but it was having him there, Nicky, that really shined a light on the great ways in which we could make Xander very central, and make the story very funny.

TMS: It’s funny you mention how the fans reacted to the Xander plotline. How important are the fan reactions to the story overall?

Allie: They’re important, but the thing is, the fans aren’t all in agreement … If pleasing the fans were a prerequisite, we would publish nothing. They’re divided, which is natural. [Mike] Mignola says that as long as a story is one person’s favorite, he knows he’s done well. With Buffy, you hope anything you do is only hated by a small group. Kind of the same thing …

Often when we’ll hear complaints from some corner of the Buffy fandom, we may understand where they’re coming from, but we know we can’t please everyone. But other times, we realize we agree. Marginalizing Xander—it worked for the Season 9 story, but we don’t want to do it again. The question is, why do we love these stories? And a big part of it is the friendship between the core four. So if they’re not together, are we really getting what we love out of the comics? So fan response has often helped us identify what we want out of the books, but we can’t spin into a panic every time the internet flares up in outrage over some detail or another.

TMS: And Angel & Faith, the unlikely but entertaining team-up, is also returning soon.

Allie: This was tough. We loved the work that Christos [Gage] and Rebekah [Isaacs] did on Season 9 of Angel & Faith so much, we were torn about how to handle Season 10. We knew that the Buffy Season 10 team was moving on to other things—Andrew [Chambliss] focusing full time on Once Upon a Time, and Georges [Jeanty] shifting over to Serenity. Rebekah and Chris had done such great work, so consistently well reviewed, and much loved by Joss [Whedon], me, the whole crew—we told them they could do whatever they wanted. Rebekah said either book, as long as she could work with Christos and Dan Jackson, the colorist. And Chris said he’d do either, as long as he could stay with Rebekah. Sometimes a team just works, makes a book ten times better than it would be with either of the creators paired with someone else. We knew these two had to stay together, and after the writers summit, Chris and I both felt like they needed to be on Buffy. That just left the challenge of finding an Angel & Faith team worthy of filling their shoes, and we found that in Victor [Gischler] and Will [Conrad]—a team that had also worked together before, as well as both working on Whedon stuff. They’re doing their best work together on this title, for sure.

TMS: When I heard Gail Simone would be writing Tomb Raider, I thought I’d just about died and gone to heaven. I know from following her on Twitter she’s a video game lover, how did Dark Horse and her team up for this huge project?

Allie: We’d been talking to her about various things. We talked to her about Buffy clear back before Season 9, but it didn’t come together. We talked to her about Conan a long time ago, I think, and it came together with the Sonja/Conan crossover. By then, though, Dave Marshall had reached out to her for Tomb Raider. He happens to edit both TR and Conan/Sonja. Dave is the leader of our video game initiative. I give Dave the credit for establishing us as the go-to place for great video game comics and video game art books. It’s something he had a lot of commitment to, quite some time ago, and had to push the company on. He’s personally done a lot to change the perception, to show that it’s worth it to put top talent on these game books—although it was another editor, Rachel Edidin, who put Faith Erin Hicks on Last of Us.

These books broke the mold—and sometimes I admit they’ve had to break the mold over my head—about what video game comics are. So as we’ve improved our efforts, so to speak, we knew Tomb Raider was a uniquely great opportunity for us, that the game would receive intense interest, and we wanted to rise to that, rather than rest on it—which is why Dave suggested Gail. I understand it took some persuading, but she was here in town the other day. My wife runs marketing for our sister company, Things from Another World, and she set up a big Tomb Raider signing with Gail. We all had lunch, and I think I can say that she’s pretty happy with her decision to do the book, and the response from the readers.

TMS: I think outside superheroes, Lara Croft is one of the most famous and popular female pop-culture characters. The head writer of the recent Tomb Raider video game, Rhianna Pratchett, has certainly spoken about what the character means to her and what working on the character has meant to her, but what have you heard from Lara fans about the comic project?

Allie: I’ve worked with Rhianna a little on another thing, a Thief comic that we did with Square Enix, and I know she loves the character of Lara. Oh, and she also wrote the custom Tomb Raider book we did for a retailer exclusive—a hardcover that you got with the game. She’s definitely a writer who comes from a different field who gets comics, and I’m lucky to have worked with a bunch of those … perhaps a bit of a career understatement, I guess.

Talking about fans of Lara is an interesting thing, because she’s a whole new woman now, you know? She was an icon that was really useful for women to own in the nineties and later, even though she was very heavily geared toward a male audience at the time. But the audience evolves, the business evolves, and she’s a new person now. Fans of the game are invested in her heroics, they appreciate that she’s not hypersexualized, that she’s more sophisticated and human. And maybe you lose some of the dudes who didn’t want that, but I believe Square Enix made that choice to make a better character.

You know, also with Buffy, things evolve. The version of feminism that’s presented through a fantasy character is different now than it was in 1998, when we first started doing the comics. There’ve been a couple things in the comics that I’ve had to steer the writers and artists away from, to which they’ve very legitimately responded, “But wasn’t that in the show?” And it was, but things change. This is the Buffy of 2014 (or whatever year it is in the comic itself, shhhh), and this is the Lara of 2014, and I’m proud of that. I like presenting these images of heroines, as opposed to some of the other ones in our industry.

TMS: You mentioned The Last of Us, that game has also been a boon for positive representations of women in video games. Hicks actually helped introduced a character who recently became pretty important in the DLC. Do you think representation started in comics has an affect on other mediums and vice versa?

Allie: Yes, and I fear that overall comics hasn’t been great in terms of its popular impact. God bless the Hernandez Brothers, because I think they helped evolve the portrayal of a lot of kinds of characters in popular arts, but to a certain extent, when people look at comics, and see how women are portrayed, what they take away doesn’t evolve the genre landscape. Buffy has meant so much to me, but she came from TV. At the time that she came from TV, comics weren’t putting out a ton of awesome female archetypes. I would love it if the world at large thought of Cliff Chiang’s portrayal when they think of Wonder Woman, but I don’t think that’s the case. But comics have the potential to build up characters who will evolve the portrayal of female characters in genre fiction, and I hope that what we do contributes to that.

TMS: You also brought up something I think about often, men being turned off from a title if things are less sexualized. In my opinion, the readers the comic medium could gain by toning down the sexualization of the female characters far outweighs the readers who would stop reading a title because the character’s chest wasn’t large enough. I know it’s not something you can give a factual answer on but do you agree?

Allie: Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, we’re pursuing that very thing. With Buffy, I’ve often had to push my most well-intentioned artists to play down the cheesecake. I remember once Georges (male) complaining to me that Jo Chen (female) had made Buffy’s breasts too large on a cover, and I had to ask her to tone it down. One of my artists recently kept putting midriff-baring shirts on female characters in scenes unsuited for that. I wrote a long, annoying screed to one of my creative teams about how we’re gonna portray women in comics. And we redesigned Ghost’s costume for the relaunch to make it less about her cleavage.

So I do agree, but I also think that even if you and I are wrong—about the market—I’m happy that we’re doing what we’re doing. Not that I want to suck all the sexiness away from comics. I love Empowered—where Adam Warren has fun with the whole thing, the whole issue of sexualization. I like Jeff Campbell. And I’m not above the genuinely low-brow stuff, that falls into the cliches Adam is lampooning. But I’m really, really happy that most of my work is on material that doesn’t talk down to, or scare off, female readers.

TMS: It’s also refreshing to hear Dark Horse has proverbially put their foot down in instances where they felt, like with Buffy, a creator was veering into territory fans might not appreciate. I wish more publishers would say “no” when they see something come across their desk that they know would turn off a potential readership.

Allie: But those are our sensibilities. We’re actually not changing anything because it might offend someone—we’re changing it because we don’t like it. I mean, we have those sensibilities. I may be wrong, but I sort of doubt that someone at DC looked at that one guy’s Catwoman cover and said, “This may offend people, but I’m gonna go for it.” I sort of imagine a lot of high fiving over that picture, followed by surprise that it got the reaction it did. I’ve been guilty of not predicting a negative response, or not expecting the particular negative response. I bet that’s a big part of it, although I can’t say. But … thank you.

TMS: You also managed to snag Kelly Sue DeConnick for Ghost, working with Chris Sebela and Ryan Sook. From what we’ve seen, DeConnick has done, and continues to do, a lot for comics as a medium and fandom through her writings, whether it be with female characters or otherwise. What has her addition meant to Dark Horse?

Allie: It has been great, and it’s meant a lot to me. She’s as outspoken and passionate on a personal level as she is online, and she’s one more person that I know who I get to sort of check myself against. So there’s that. But what she’s meant to Dark Horse is another strong voice, another unique vision. She’s actually leaving Ghost. She co-wrote Ghost #1-3 with Sebela, her cowriter on Captain Marvel, and then she wrote Ghost #4 as a solo issue, her send off. I think it’s an appropriate departure for her. Then Sebela takes the reins, with a new artist …

A lot of people have been wondering what’s gonna happen with all the great creators we have on our Star Wars books. Very happily, Jan Duursema is taking over Ghost. She was someone Joss and I looked at getting for Fray, but she was too in love with Star Wars to move off those books. So now I’m just really glad she’s staying with us, even if her little Jedi friends aren’t …

Kelly’s someone I admire, and I’m glad to know. We have some other stuff cooking. Her departure from Ghost is amicable, and because of her partnership with Chris, we count on a real smooth transition, storywise. And Jan is gonna be awesome. Jan hasn’t drawn superheroes in ages, and she’s perfect for it. And man, does she know how to draw someone in a cloak!

Take a look at the fantastic art Dark Horse has provided us (exclusives marked as such) and make sure to check back in tomorrow for Part 2 of our discussion with Allie. We talk Greg Rucka, Hellboy, turning away and drawing in new comic readers, Misfits of Avalon and more!

Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow.

1. 1.Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Season 10) #7 Variant Art by Rebekah Issacs with Dan Jackson
2. 2.Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Season 10) #5 Art by Steve Morris
3. 3.Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Season 10) #5 Variant Art by Rebekah Issacs
4. 4.Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Season 10) #6 Art by Steve Morris
5. 5.Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Season 10) #6 Variant Art by Rebekah Isaacs with Dan Jackson
6. 6.Angel & Faith (Season 10) #3 Art by Scott Fischer
7. 7.Angel & Faith (Season 10) #3 Variant Art by Chris Samnee with Jordie Bellaire
8. 8.Angel & Faith (Season 10) #4 Art by Scott Fischer
9. 9.Angel & Faith (Season 10) #4 Variant Art by Chris Samnee
10. 10.Veil #4 Art by Toni Fejzula
11. 11.BPRD Hell on Earth #117 Art by Rafael Albuquerque
12. 12.Ghost #6 Art by Jenny Frison
13. 13.Tomb Raider #6 Art by Dan Scott
14. 14.Tomb Raider Art by Brian Horton

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