IRON MAN, EMPOWERED news and museum show

After staggering back from a harrowing brush with jury duty, thought I'd post a quick journal regarding current events...

First off, this week saw the release of a Marvel book featuring a full-length* story written by me: Iron Man: Titanium #1, a brawny, 64-page-strong anthology collection of IM material marvel.com/catalog/?id=16899 . My story, "Railguns, Power Ties And Titanium Men" (yeahp, they're plural), features art by the very cool Salvador Espin, who skillfully illustrates a very fast-paced, tech-slathered romp wherein Tony Stark and Pepper Potts attend a seemingly mundane corporate presentation that goes very, very wrong indeed. Thrill to dueling smartphone apps, geniuses with Sexy Librarian eyeglasses, crappy modern art sinisterly repurposed, and exciting new uses for both corporate lawyers and railguns! The ultratechiness, here, might not be quite as advanced as the riffs in my earlier project Iron Man: Hypervelocity, but this new story might be even faster-paced, believe it or not... Anyhoo, feel free to drop a comment after this journal entry if you've read this puppy.

On the Empowered front, a few new(ish) Emp-related interviews are now online, from a brand-new Newsarama piece www.newsarama.com/comics/empow… to this slightly older Comic Book Resources piece: www.comicbookresources.com/?pa… . Also, odds are good that another Emp one-shot will be rolling out next year, possibly along with another Emp-related product (ooh, mysterious!), to bridge the gap until vol. 7 "drops" sometime late in the year... or early 2012, worst case. Yay!

Now, time out for Emp-related floggery: Empowered vol. 6 can be found on the shelves of your Local Comics Retailer or bookstore*, or online at Dark Horse's retail website www.tfaw.com/Profile/Empowered… or on Amazon.com www.amazon.com/Empowered-6-Ada… . Note that links for ordering the previous five books (and the "floppy" comics-format one-shot, "The Wench with a Million Sighs,") can also be found at those sites... Hint, hint.



Finally, if'n you're in New England sometime during the next few months, you might check out the new show "SugiPOP!: Anime, Manga, Comics and Their Influence on Contemporary Art," running now through January 16, 2011 at the Portsmouth Museum of Art in lovely Portsmouth, New Hampshire www.portsmouthmfa.org/index.ht… . I have a few pieces of original Dirty Pair and Empowered artwork on display as part of said show; 'twas quite an honor to be asked to participate, needless to say.

                                                     -AW

_{* That's "full-length" as in 22 pages, as opposed to, I dunno, a mere 20 pages... But I kid, DC's new cost-cutting initiatives! Then again, for most of my early career I was rocking 24-page issues (if not much longer, on occasion), so even 22 pages has often felt rather anemic; at times, trying to cram multifarious story elements into such limited pagecount feels like I'm trying to shove my head into a storm grate. (Note: This is one reason that I don't entirely mind cranking out Empowered in 208-page installments...)}