Our friend Mike Essl who is rolling with us, is designing a Watchmen book with Chip Kidd.

Lifesize Jabba the Hut. Not sure who that kid is.

Giant Sleestack at the Funko booth!

Sick thriller toy. I would have to google it to find out the deal. Also check out the Toy Tokyo X Residents Eyeball figure.

The back of fat skeletor. Skeletor back fat.

I spent like an hour in this booth. Jokes!

Luke (Lulubell)

Paul (Ultrapop)

Gargamel Tokoji Seijen. Thanks Koji!

Human Giant!

Went to StrangeCo/G4 party. Cos play in full effect! Cover girl from Russel Waterman’s newest book, “Wonder Women of America!”

Jim (StrangeCo), Katsu (Mad Barbarians). It was Katsu’s birthday at midnight. Shots!

Mishka x Lamour Supreme x Mad Barbarians x Tokidoki. I look sick, not as in slick..

Aliens. At first I thought someone was dressed as Joey the freaky midget.

Lamour with Sally and Snow.

Ron English and Lev (Toy Tokyo).

Chad Robot w/ friend. Gary Baseman too.

This summed up the end of the night. Lamour Supreme raging, Sucklord, and Tim Biskup in his lap…

Mikhail and I are in San Diego this week for Comic Con 2008! This is our first time for us both, even though we have been such comic book and toy nerds our entire lives! Yesterday was only preview day it was insane, I can only imagine the rest of the week.Toy Tokyo Booth #5237 where you can get the Mishka x Toy Tokyo x Lamour Supreme exclusive t-shirt!

Lamour Supreme x Super 7 “The Snakes of Infinity”

Gorilla Biscuits x Super 7…yup!

Monster from some new Robert England movie! So sick!

The X-men family. I think they got in trouble for trying to smuggle beer in the cooler.

Lamour Supreme x Ernie Chan. All he could keep saying was DUDE, SAVAGE SWORD!

Went to an Activision party last night!

Lamour met some dude named Stan Lee.

He had him sign his Greaser Field Jacket.

I don’t really get it…

Skull Brainers know how to party!

The (in)famous kaiju customizer Paul Kaiju with friend!

Friend in food…

We’re right in the the thick of tradeshow season and tomorrow morning we leave for the San Diego Comic-Con, which is running from July 24th - July 27th. Over the past couple of decades the convention has transformed itself from more than just the biggest comic dork gathering in the world to a major preview for Hollywood & the toy industry for anything and everything super-hero, sci-fi or even action related.

This year we’ve gotten together with Toy Tokyo, the east coasts preeminent one stop shop for Japanese toys, urban vinyl & kaiju to create a T-shirt exclusively for the Comic-Con. We’ll also be selling a card-stock print of a colored version of the Kaiju Invades Tee graphic from earlier this year. Print will be bagged and boarded comic book style bags with a button-pack and signed and numbered for SDCC.

Both are illustrated by the amazingly talented Lamour Supreme and printed in a small run and will only be available at San Diego Comic-Con at the Toy Tokyo booth. If any remain we’ll see about putting a few online after the convention!

I was sent this blast from my past by my mother this morning. While cleaning she found a slide of an old drawing I had made when I was about 11 years old. Believe it or not this grotesque assault on bodily proportions and beloved characters won me a drawing contest at my local comic shop (Fantasy HQ, RIP), within my age group (15 and under). I suppose that doesn’t really speak so well about my competition!

Anyway I found seeing this drawing beyond amusing and just assumed any evidence of it was lost forever! As you can see I was fully into generous helpings of Rob Leifeld’s & Arthur Adams’ style. Look at the biceps and chest on daredevil, wtf!?? I think I did a pretty good job on Ghost Rider’s head, but I may have just lifted that straight from when Arthur Adams’ did his short run on the Fantastic Four. I also still can’t for the life of me figure out why I had a crossed out bat symbol along with my various attempts at “Wild Style”on the wall… I loved Batman! And I’m not even sure if I knew what the Anarchy symbol even meant at that age, I just thought it looked cool. Also notice the signature by Darkhawk’s head… classic 90’s ripped up scroll style! That one was for you Mr. McFarlane!

Thankfully my skills have slightly improved over the last 18 years.

One of our all time favorite comic book artists, Johnny Ryan, will be in Brooklyn tomorrow signing copies of his newest Fantagraphics Books release of Angry Youth Comix #14! If you have ever read any previous issues of AYC, and you are a fan of Mishka, then you know why we like him so much!

WHO: JOHNNY RYAN

WHAT: ANGRY YOUTH COMIX #14 release party!

WHERE: Desert Island Comics
540 Metropolitan, Williamsburg, Brooklyn

WHEN: Friday, June 13, 6PM - 9PM

Most comic conventions are smelly, loud and expensive. You wander around a never ending maze of booths containing people who want to sell you Star Wars dolls for three times the ebay price. Then you run into Lou Ferrigno and you want to tell him that he was cheated in Pumping Iron but you don’t know the right way to put it without being annoying. The MoCCA Art Festival is pretty much the opposite of that.  MoCCA is held every year in the Puck Building, a place that is kinda like how I imagine Heaven, and it hardly smells at all. People wander around and trade mini-comics or sell hand-made objects from tables.

The best thing for sale at MoCCA this year was Neil Freibert’s Troggy.

It’s a hand silk-screened object that unfolds into a beautiful psychedelic print.

The second best thing for sale was Typhon, a full color anthology that I have an eight page comic in it.

Danny Hellman’s previous anthologies have contained the work of R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Tony Millionaire and Johnny Ryan.

About a year or two ago, popular author/nerd Jonathon Lethem and well-liked illustrator/comicker Farel Dalrymple teamed up to do a comic for Marvel called Omega the Unknown. Based on a series that reached ten issues before cancellation from 1977, Lethem and Dalrymple’s Omega is now on it’s seventh issue which features an amazing cover and some interior art by Gary Panter.

That is awesome to me. Three cheers for Marvel Comics for letting this happen. I probably don’t have to rattle off Gary’s resume but here goes anyway. He designed the sets and puppets for Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, did three Zappa album covers, was part of Art Spiegelman’s Raw Magazine, created many amazing comics and makes psychedelic music and light shows. A big expensive two volume book of his work was just published and he is fucking awesome.

I’m a total Ducktales fan boy, even though it’s been two decades since the show first aired. I suppose at this point that I really don’t have a choice about liking it since Uncle Scrooge indelibly spans the length of my forearm, but that’s not really the point of this post. Apparently someone constructed this scale model of Scrooge’s vault back in ‘02/’03, using blueprints created by Don Rosa and Dan Shane, and now you can see the fruits of his labors on Flickr. This model is really pretty fucking sick in my opinion, and I kind of wish we had it here at the office.

Check it out in detail here.

BTW, who else thinks the music on the moon stage from Ducktales (NES) is the fucking jam?

This dude plays Guitar Hero.

P.S. There are too many categories. Proceeds from this picture will go to all the charities and benefits found on the bloglin.

P.S.S. Feel free to protest. :D

Remember when you where a kid and you bought X-Men: Discord? That short story arc where Mystique plans to seduce all the X-Men individually but finds them cheating on each other with Wolverine fucking Jean Grey in the ass and Cyclops fucking Psylocke and Colossus making Rogue’s pussy bleed because his cock is made from living metal and Storm fucking Mystique with a strap-on and then making Mystique morph her vagina into a penis so she could return the favor which all eventually culminated into one huge mutant orgy? Remember that issue? No?

That’s cause it only just came out now.

Cop a feel son!

I just wanna say that Kevin Eastman gets my nomination for bad ass nerd and inspirational hero. Runner up goes to Rob Zombie. Total weirdos with hot wives and the skillz to pay the billz.

If you’ve never read it, Alan Moore’s Watchmen is to comics what Moby Dick is to American literature. And depsite my previous posts I’m not that hard of a critic on comic based movies as you’d expect. I didn’t know what to expect from the Watchmen film when it was announced. Actually I didn’t think it would ever really get made since there’s been some form a Watchmen movie in development for a long while now. Plus Alan Moore refuses to publicly back any attempt to film his masterpiece (what a curmudgeon!). But with the leak of some press photos today, well it’s definitly confirmed to really be happening in at least my mind.

Zack Snyder who directed 300 is manning this film. And while I didn’t think 300 was all that awesome, I will concede and say it was EXACTLY like the comic. But to be fair I didn’t think the comic was all that awesome. I find Frank Miller vastly overrated (Year One, Born Again, The Man Without Fear and The Dark Knight Returns the only exceptions). So Snyder (at least to me) has a great track record of accurately translating comics into film. Plus he directed the excellent remake of Dawn of the Dead. The photos of the actors in costume only confrim the above statement! Look at that press shot of The Comedian, he’s dead on ! I can’t wait for the Dr. Manhattan photo leak! I wonder if he’ll walk around the whole film with his penis exposed? Billy Crudup isn’t that big a star to refuse!

Speaking of Billy Crudup, he’s basically the biggest star appearing in this film… not exactly a household name. Which is also why I have such high hopes for this film. Not casting 7 huge stars as the Watchmen means this movie won’t be dominated by star notoriety but hopefully with good directing, acting, characters and story. This kind of thing worked for X-Men (Minus Halle berry), so I guess we’ll wait and see.

As promised from our front-page, here are some images from RezeonoMikon, a new zine from Rezeon Scum! Straight from Japan via hell and now available now at our Pop-Up Shop!

Packaging!

Front cover

Interior spread

Another interior spreading the disease!

The Mishka Pop-Up Shop
218 Bedford Avenue (entrance on N. 5 th)
Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Open daily from noon to 8 PM.
L Train to Bedford Ave.

I just noticed that our good friend and longtime illustrator Jon Vermilyea has a two page comic in the current Fiction issue of Vice Magazine. Congrats Jon!

I don’t read Dilbert, but my homeboy Shane at work sent me this and I couldn’t resist posting it.

A few comics worth mentioning though that I do actually read on the regular are Achewood, PBF & Penny Arcade. Enjoy.

Johnny Ryan is one of my favorite comic artists. My work area is littered with his prints and original comic pages. Thanks to Yevgeniy’s blog on Slam X Hype I see that Span of Sunset is making Loady McGee and Sinus O’Gynus vinyl figures! Exactly like the ones pictured on the cover of Angry Youth Comix #13 (pictured above)

Johnny Ryan writes and illustrates the funniest, dirtiest and most offensive comics around. He’s basically what you always wanted the comics in Mad Magazine to be, but never were. Check out his work in his sort of regularly put out Angry Youth Comix, or in the pages of Vice where he does regular illustrations as well as contributing the Blecky Yuckerella comic strip every month.