The solicitations for DC Comics titles shipping in September have been released, and it includes one item in particular that’s near and dear to me.

iZOMBIE #5
Written by CHRIS ROBERSON
Art and cover by MICHAEL ALLRED
In the search for Dead Fred’s killer, Gwen Dylan has learned more than she bargained for and discovers that she’s been wrong about a great many things. Now she finds herself faced with a choice: risk losing all that she is, or become a real monster. As if that weren’t enough, a confrontation with one of the fearless monster hunters leads in unexpected directions. And what about Spot the were-terrier, Ellie the ghost-girl, and Claire the vampire? All this and more in the conclusion of iZOMBIE’s debut arc.
On sale SEPTEMBER 1 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US MATURE READERS

Chris Cannon is my oldest friend on the planet. Not in that he himself is the oldest, but in that he’s been my friend the longest. Sometime around 1981 we were both in the sixth grade, and we somehow became aware that we were both comics readers. He was a Marvel guy, and I was a DC guy, and we each hipped the other to what we were missing. We’ve been friends ever since.

We made comics together in the 8th grade, which will thankfully never see the light of day. Then in high school, as I continued scribbling away, Chris gradually lost interest in comics as he became more and more convinced that he was destined to be a musician. In college and after, I kept on writing stories and novels that no one would ever see, and Chris played with a succession of bands and solo gigs, and kept on recording fantastic music.

Now, nearly three decades after we met, we still keep in touch. Chris is living in Salt Lake City, somehow having bought the house across the street from the house where he spent his earliest years. He’s married with three kids, with a respectable job as a data base administrator, and yet he’s still churning out fantastic music on the side. His latest project, Vine Street, is now available for free download on his website.

Go check it out, won’t you?

HeroesCon may well be my new favorite comic convention of all time. Allison and I went this year for the first time, and had an absolute BLAST. We finally got back home late yesterday afternoon, and I’m slowly, slowly, slowly starting to wake up again.

The convention itself was fantastic, with a big ole dealer’s room and artist alley (a comic convention that’s all about people who sell comics and people who make comics? That’s crazy talk!), but I think my favorite thing about the show was the fact that just about everybody from pros to retailers to fans was staying in the same hotel, the Westin just across the street from the convention center. You could hang out in that lobby before the convention center opened or after the dealer’s room closed and see literally everybody walk by. I don’t think Allison and I got to bed before 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning every day, and it was due to the fact that after dinner every night we’d run into a raft of fascinating and friendly people to talk with into the small hours of the night.

Some of those friendly people were artists, who agreed to do sketches for us. Isn’t it nice to know people with actual talent?

The first sketch we got was of Gwen Dylan by the unsinkable Dean Trippe. How gorgeous is this?

Next up was the unflappable Colleen Coover, who did a sketch of Gwen in her “normal” mode, and then another of Gwen gone totally Romero after missing too many meals. Makes for a nice before-and-after, don’t you think?

And my pal Francesco Francavilla did this dandy sketch for me in the back of his Chiaroscuro .1 sketchbook.

And just when I thought I had gotten as much awesome as I could handle, Fables fan extraordinaire Cindy McShane swung by and dropped off three little gems of fan art, depicting the iZombie gang.

Fantastic art aside, the con was worth every penny, if only for the chance to meet so many creators I’ve admired for years, and to put faces to names that previously were only Facebook profiles or Twitter handles. And I’ll be buoyed up for weeks on all the nice things that readers who swung by the table said about Cinderella and iZombie. Thanks, everybody!

I will definitely be returning to HeroesCon next year!

The good folks over at Techland have a preview of the first few pages of iZOMBIE #2 up, if anyone’s interested to see them. And for this issue’s “Fix it in the trade” moment, pretend like the dates after the 21 on the calendar aren’t crossed out.

Hey, are you going to HeroesCon in Charlotte, North Carolina this weekend? Well, I am!

If you’re coming to the show, swing by and find me. I’ll be signing for a bit each day at the BOOM! Studios booth, and the rest of the time will be at table AA-625, right next to the unflappable Bill Willingham (and cover artist on Cinderella: From Fabletown With Love, Chrissie Zullo, will be on Bill’s other side). Come on by and say howdy, why don’t you?

Mike Norton is awesome, and he proves it by summing up my greatest hopes for a spin-off of the just wrapped Lost, as part of his series of “Found” strips.

(Though, clearly the “Number One” and “Number Two” nomenclature suggests that it might turn into a different island altogether…)

I have stayed away from internet discussion of Lost the last few months intentionally, and tried to avoid completely the back-and-forth over the finale. My $.02 is that the finale was clearly the ending to the story that Lindelof and Cuse had been telling all these years, and while it wasn’t the ending that I would have written, it represents the most satisfying conclusion to all of the character arcs in the series of any long form serial television to date. I will acept that the ending might not have been to everyone’s taste, and I think that “I didn’t like that story” is an acceptable objection, but all of the naysayers who insist that the ending is somehow proof that they were “making it up as they went along” were watching a different TV series than I was (or, in many cases, often weren’t watching it at all). As for the mysteries that weren’t solved? It was clear by midway through the last season that the things many of us in the audience thought were important to the larger story really weren’t, and that many of the Big Mysteries were just set dressing. That said, I think that the show-runners intentionally left them open to interpretation, while at the same time putting enough evidence on screen for viewers to work out the solutions themselves. And if you think that six seasons of fantastic character and relationship drama is spoiled because you aren’t told exactly where that pallet of food came from in season two, you’re probably better off watching something else. As Linda Holmes said on the NPR site last week, “There comes a point where you are asking for the midichlorians…”

I was so caught up yesterday playing with our new iPad that I completely forgot to mention the release of my new comic with BOOM! Studios, the authorized prequel to Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: Dust To Dust #1 (Cover A)
$3.99

Writer(s): Chris Roberson

Artist(s): Robert Adler

A science-fiction publishing event! Who hunted androids before Rick Deckard? Taking place immediately after World War Terminus ends, the problems with artificial life – androids – become apparent. The government decides they must become targets, hunted down, but who will do the dirty work? Two men are assigned: Malcolm Reed, a ‘special’ human with the power to feel others’ emotions, and Charlie Victor, who’s the perfect man for the job – or is he? Meanwhile Samantha Wu, a Stanford biologist, fights to save the last of the world’s animals.

I’ve raved before about the work of Kerry Callen, but I don’t think I knew before last night that he submits designs to Threadless as Angelrobot. Check out this beauty that Kerry posted on his blog last night.

I must have this on a t-shirt, so head over to Threadless immediately and vote for it!

Behold this little gem, which Dave Dell’oso posted to Mike Allred’s message boards.

Sweet, right?

Come on, internets. Let’s have some more iZombie fan art, already!

(via) Do you remember the “premake” trailer for Raiders of the Lost Ark, which imagined what the movie would have looked like had it been released in 1951, assembled from old film clips? Well, get ready for the premake of The Empire Strikes Back, circa 1950.