It’s been an eventful spring for us here as we share long-awaited and exciting new titles being published right now --- our Spring Preview gives you a look at them --- as well as advance notice about what’s coming in the weeks ahead.

One of the biggest new titles of the year --- getting a first print run of 100,000 copies! --- is Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?, a continuation of the dramatic family saga that Alison began telling in Fun Home. This week on GNR we announced a contest where you can enter to win a free copy of the book. We’re giving away one copy each to 50 lucky winners who enter by May 14th. The book is mesmerizing…so much so that I felt almost dizzy when I finished it and wanted to start it over again. We all have mothers, of course, and we all have our relationships with them…great ones, mixed-up ones, hard-to-understand ones, trying ones, sometimes all of those and more all at once. Since the book encapsulates not only that, but its writer's search for mother figures in relationships and in therapists, it elicits a strong reaction and challenges how the reader relates to his or her own mother.

Writer J. Torres has been working in the industry for a while now, and he’s had an amazingly diverse career. You may have noticed him for his work on Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight, or on the Eisner-nominated Alison Dare, or in Days Like This or Lola: A Ghost Story. YALSA (Young Adult Library Services Association) librarians are fans of many of his works, and it’s fitting that he’s helming the re-launch of Archie’s Jinx series, in which Jinx and her pals are now teens starting high school. I talked to J. about where he plans to take the series, what it means to him, and the responsibility he feels for shepherding this beloved character into a new age.

Just as I was putting this newsletter together, the 2012 Eisner Award nominees were announced. That's always an exciting time, one of debate and cheering for beloved comics. I remember how excited I was the year I was a judge...people are really passionate about who does and does not get nominated. I'm sure this year will be no exception. But I'm thrilled to see several friends of the site get nominations, including Jimmy Gownley, Mark Waid, Joe Hill, Ben Hatke, Josh Neufeld, Matt Phelan, Craig Thompson, and more. Congratulations to all the nominees! See the full list of nominees on the official site.

Last summer, one of our regular contributing writers, Nathan Wilson, hosted a San Diego Comic Con panel devoted to artist and writer Cameron Stewart. Now we’re running Nathan’s extensive interview with Cameron. It's interesting to me not just to hear Cameron review his long career in comics and how he paid his dues, but also to hear how he’s up front and honest about how he does his work digitally. As he puts it, working digitally allows him to work fearlessly --- all it takes to correct a mistake is to hit “Alt-Z” and go back to the way everything was. That’s a nice way to approach work, of course, but it also helps him to make braver decisions, knowing they can always be corrected. It was an interesting and thought-provoking way to look at it, for me, and I thought it was a good way of looking at how comics are going to continue to evolve in the future.

I’m gearing up for a huge summer movie blockbuster season. I know comic book movies have become the norm the past few years, but this summer three absolutely enormous movies are coming out. In case you haven’t heard: First there’s The Avengers on May 4; then there’s The Amazing Spider-Man on July 3; and finally, The Dark Knight Rises on July 20. I know this may make me sound a little immature, but I’m feeling like a kid again…a little bit like how I felt in the summer of 1983, when Return of the Jedi came out. We’ve added the trailers for all three movies to our Books to Screen section.

Our semi-annual update to the GraphicNovelReporter.com Core List remains one of our most popular features on GNR. In it, we give booksellers, librarians and readers a hearty list of what’s new and what’s essential in the graphic world so that they can better serve their customers and clientele. If you spend a lot of time working in this industry, you know how fast it can change and how difficult it can be to keep your finger on the pulse of what’s hot and what people are reading. This list is a way to help manage that. It’s an ever-growing, ever-changing list of titles, and it morphs along with industry trends (or, for example, what people are buzzing about right now --- like those aforementioned summer superhero movies. When big movies come out, publishers put out a lot of books to tie into them, which is why you’ll see several Avengers, Spider-Man, and Batman books on our new list). You can also download the lists in Excel form, if that is easier or more convenient for you.

One of the reviews I just posted online is for X-Factor: Super Unnatural. Peter David has been writing that series for so long now that it’s almost easy to forget how effortlessly good he makes it. Sometimes we begin to take for granted some of the things that we enjoy month after month, without giving them too much thought. I was reminded of that when I was reading Super Unnatural. I had to stop myself and wonder how long Peter’s been doing this series and how really good it continues to be. It seems that the series doesn’t quite get the hype and acclaim it deserves, and so I thought it was time to speak up about it.

Late last month, Karen Green, a librarian at Columbia University --- and a good friend of the site --- organized the Comics New York symposium, along with Jeremy Dauber and Danny Fingeroth. The symposium featured a keynote discussion between writer Chris Claremont and editor Louise Simonson (X-Men), followed by two days’ worth of New York-centric comics talks, featuring creators like Paul Levitz, Ariel Schrag, Peter Kuper, Ben Katchor, and more. I asked Karen to share her thoughts on the symposium and to discuss some of the work that went into making it such a success, and she gracefully obliged. I’m happy to have that for you this week.

Speaking of comics events, two other long-time friends of the site, industry pro John Shableski and teacher John Weaver, are organizing the Wildcat Comic Con, which takes place on April 13-14 at the Pennsylvania College of Technology’s main campus in Williamsport, PA. It takes a lot of planning, effort, and sweat to make a two-day comics conference come off, especially the first time. These guys, and others, have been toiling behind the scenes for months to make this event possible. Here’s their first-person account from behind the scenes.

In other news, Kidsreads.com, one of our “sister sites” in TheBookReportNetwork.com, was re-launched last week with a whole new look and feel. Kidsreads features our children’s graphic novel reviews and interviews, giving comics another place to get attention on the Network. This is the fifth re-design or launch at TBRN since September --- Bookreporter.com, Teenreads.com and FaithfulReader.com were re-launched last fall, and 20SomethingReads.com launched in February --- and all will be featuring content from GNR, giving us a way to reach beyond a core audience of comics lovers to all readers.

Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook to keep up to date on all the GNR events and news!

Enjoy,

John Hogan (John@bookreporter.com)

MoCCA Fest 2012 Is Almost Here

The 2012 Eisner Nominees Are Out!

MoCCA Teams with Gahan Wilson

San Diego Comic-Con News

Dave Roman Is Making Some Waves

Flex Mentallo, Man of Muscle Mystery: The Deluxe Edition by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely

For 16 years, a mystique has surrounded the Morrison-Quitely collaboration on Flex Mentallo, due in large part to the four issue miniseries being unavailable and caught in legal wrangling over fair usage doctrine with the Charles Atlas Corporation. Now, in 2012, Morrison's strongman tale is back in a deluxe edition, but how has it held up over time? Reviewed by Nathan Wilson

Ichiro by Ryan Inzana
When Ichiro’s mother must make a business trip to Japan, she decides to bring her tween son along so that he can get to know his maternal grandfather. But Ichiro is soon pulled into a strange, mythical world of Japanese gods, where he is placed in the center of an epic battle. Reviewed by John Hogan